First, the “liberal-lites.” Then, the moderate conservatives. Then, RINOs compromisers, pragmatists, intellectuals, pundits, those with Ivy League educations, GOP governors who expand Medicaid, senators who flip-flop on gay marriage, those who don’t hate Obama enough, and anyone named Romney.
Did I miss anyone the conservative base has purged in recent months? The list is long and getting longer all the time. Pretty soon, the Republicans will be able to hold their convention in a conference room at the Holiday Inn.
Casting about desperately for someone else to kick to the curb, the right wing has targeted GOP political “consultants” as objects of their rage.
Yeah, I’m down with that. Political consultants are kind of like lawyers, and you know what Shakespeare said we should do with lawyers: tar and feathering is too good for them. After all, if it weren’t for the consultants, the 2012 election would have been in the bag.
Well, what else are we going to blame defeat on? It couldn’t have been the 1980s era platform that Romney ran on. It couldn’t have been Todd Akin and his magical mystery womb. It couldn’t have been all those right wingers screaming about half the country getting a free ride at their expense. It couldn’t have been the half dozen cockamamie conspiracy theories invented about Obama.
By simple process of elimination, it had to be the consultants’ fault.
A bemused Katrina Trinko at NRO:
Here at CPAC, it’s evident that in the aftermath of the devastating November election conservatives are turning not on the losing candidates — Mitt Romney, for one, was warmly received – but on the people who ran their campaigns. With an eye to 2014 elections, some conservatives and tea partiers are pushing a new solution: Down with the consultants.
In an interview with NRO, Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, blasted the professional political class, decrying “any consultant who thinks that they can come into a state and say, ‘this is who you need to have as your representative and we’re going to make sure that person is elected.’”
“That is the antithesis of what we’ve been talking about in this whole entire movement,” she said. “We want limited government. That means we don’t want Washington, D.C., making laws that limit how we live our lives, and we sure don’t want people from Washington, D.C. — consultants — telling us who is going to represent us.”
The rage reached its height during a panel on Thursday entitled “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” During the discussion, Democratic pollster Pat Caddell ranted against campaign consultants, saying, “they’re in the business in the lining of their pockets and preserving their power.”
“Any presidential candidate who allows consultant to run his campaign for president is a fool,” Caddell said, referring to Mitt Romney’s choice of campaign consultant Stuart Stevens as senior strategist. “And the worse executive I’ve ever seen is Mitt Romney.”
Caddell slammed Stevens by name, saying he was no more qualified to run a presidential campaign than Caddell was to fly. “The subtext of Stu Stevens running around the last several weeks has been a simple message: ‘Look, I threw the election for you, why don’t you like me?’” he joked.
Thus spake a man who was a top advisor to an incumbent candidate who lost by the biggest Electoral College margin of any sitting president in history.
We can still purge YOU.
Where do you get off lumping together all of those disparate beliefs into one, big "conservative base" that YOU'RE now blaming everything on, rather than the ineffectual leadership of McLindsay, Boehner, Priebus, and every other "Republican" that gets trotted onto the MSM news shows to squish into whatever shape irritates the reporter the least?
Come off it.
Are you telling me that I should continue to tolerate this ineptitude and outright refusal to reject Progressive politics and the social welfare state?
Exactly why should I even feel bad if some home the tea parters manage to revoke my gop ness since I dont care if 2 gay people want to be married.
Its been 20 years. time for a new party. I could pretend to support Ron Paul.
But heres the problem with the GOP of more recent times. They vacillate from special interest to special interest and circumstance to circumstance and catch pharse to catch phrase:
2012
■Restoring the American Dream
■We The People: A Restoration of Constitutional Government
■America’s Natural Resources: Energy, Agriculture and the Environment
■Reforming Government to Serve the People
■Renewing American Values to Build Healthy Families, Great Schools and Safe Neighborhoods
■American Exceptionalism
2008
Defending Our Nation, Supporting Our Heroes, Securing the Peace
Reforming Government to Serve the People
Expanding Opportunity to Promote Prosperity
Energy Independence and Security
Environmental Protection
Health Care Reform: Putting Patients First
Education Means a More Competitive America
Protecting Our Families
Preserving Our Values
Then take a look at the democratic platforms for 2008 ans 2012. The deomocrats are always connecting their detailed platforms too the common people and in the best interest of the common peoples higher priorities. The GOP on the other hand, has long lost their connections to the 'common' people in their platforms. Then when they do atttempt to address an issue of interest too the common people, the rhetoric is always superficial and void of details. For example, without looking, can you recall the GOPs 2008 platform for healthcare refrorm? Can you remember the democrats 2008 platform for healthcare reform? Again, without looking, go through the GOP 2008 and 2012 platforms listed and see how much you can precisely remember the 'details' as presented in the candidates campaigns of the primary and general. Do the same thing with the democrats platforms.
Most everybody will remember the details of the democrats healthcare reform, ending the wars, education reforms, energy independence, investing in America, investment banking and Wall Street reforms, etc.
Messaging to things in common language to what the common people are connected to means everthing!
They didn't do anything like that. Which was no surprise, but it should have been.
It says everybody knows we have a problem and no one wants to face it. How much lasting good did the GOP do when it had both the senate, the house and the presidency.
All the GOP knows is tax rates. If we had a tax rate of zero and the economy still consisted of people mowing each others lawns would we really be prosperous?
Abandon all principles, ye who enter here.
Rick Moran is a sock puppet for the Republlican establishment wing of the Ruling Class. The NRO is the lamestream media outlet of the same Ruling Class wing.
Art Chance, who follows Moran like Grahamnesty follows McCain, is a former Republican Ruling Class bureaucrat who could work for either wing of the establishment or be "non-partisan" - a moderate's moderate!
The rest of us who want leadership that will work for a smaller Federal government, fiscal responsibility and constitutional integrity, are unAmerican trolls who don't understand the incredible rightness of the REAL Republicans, who "know what it takes to win elections" (even though they are unable to actually accomplish it!)
Is that about it? We could have saved a lot of space!
OK. La Touret expects to build up the GOP with bigotry like that? Talk about a lack of knowledge of history as well since the South had been a Democrat stronghold until the Dems went too far left when sentiments changed to the Republicans. But I can understand his sentiments though. We Southerners get fed up with his fellow Yankees moving south to get away from high taxes and cost of living, who then get active in politics in order to create the same big government, high tax, low freedom and morals society they fled.