By Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times –
Republicans set aside many differences — over immigration, gay rights and climate change among other things — in their fervor to win the White House.
But after losing a second straight presidential campaign and squandering a prime opportunity to win control of the Senate, those combustible issues are now fueling a fight over the direction of the GOP and what Republicans, as a national party, should represent.
Mitt Romney had barely conceded defeat and walked off the stage in Boston when the rupture emerged, between those calling for drastic change and others who said the problem was not the Republican Party but its nominee.
Romney and his campaign team shoulder a generous share of the blame for Tuesday’s loss. He committed any number of blunders that, fairly or not, reinforced the image of the former Massachusetts governor as an uncaring and out-of-touch aristocrat.
His strategists erred by ceding the television waves for much of the early contest, leaving the Obama campaign and its allies to eagerly fill the void with depictions of Romney as a soulless corporate raider. The Republicans’ much-touted turnout effort was vastly overmatched by President Barack Obama’s state-of-the-art operation.
But the party’s problems go deeper than the failings of any individual or a single team of tacticians. For many voters in broad swaths of the country — throughout California and elsewhere along the Pacific Coast, across the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic states — the Republican brand is poison.
The party’s need to change that — and disagreement over the best way to do it — is likely to make the four years before the 2016 election highly contentious.
“You have to have a come-to-Jesus meeting at all levels, both state and national,” said Stuart Spencer, chief campaign strategist for Ronald Reagan, who has worked in and around Republican politics for more than half a century. In the late 1990s, he began publicly urging the party to reconsider its hard-line stance on illegal immigration, warning — presciently, it turned out — of the damage it would do among Latino voters.
To win, a party has to reflect the nation it seeks to lead, Spencer said, and increasingly the GOP seemed out of step with an electorate that every four years seemed to grow more ethnically varied and culturally broad-minded.
John Weaver, another veteran party strategist, was even more blunt.
“If we’re going to be anything but a regional, middle-aged white-man party, we have to do the obvious thing, which is, first, accept the reality that America is a diverse nation and we need to start selling to those people,” Weaver said. “There is climate change. Accept that. There are gay people in our midst, marrying one another. Get over it. … The government isn’t going to deport 15 million (illegal immigrants), and they’re not going to deport themselves.”
Of course, what some see as pragmatism others consider a fire sale of party principles. And while it is one thing to compromise on, say, which tax breaks are fair game for deficit reduction, it is another to shed principle on issues with a moral cast like abortion.
Some argue that Romney lost not because he was too extreme, as Democrats portrayed him, but because he was never at his core a true conservative.
“We wanted someone who would fight for us,” Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of the anti-Washington “tea party’’ movement, said at a morning-after news conference. “What we got was a weak moderate candidate, handpicked by the Beltway elites and country club establishment wing of the Republican Party. The presidential loss is unequivocally on them.”
A few suggested there was really no problem at all.
Grover Norquist, keeper of an anti-tax pledge signed by most congressional Republicans, suggested that Tuesday actually brought victory to the conservative cause by affirming the GOP’s 2010 takeover of the House and delivering a number of new Republican governors. Yes, he said, it would have been nice to win the White House and take over the Senate. But the conservative tenets of lower taxes and limited government were hardly repudiated.
“Our strength is state by state,” Norquist said, adding that it is there that Republicans would enact the policies — ending teacher tenure, reining in public employee pensions, promoting school choice — that would invigorate the national party from the bottom up.
The Republicans are the reason they lost. They say smaller government but they don’t deliver. They want big government when it comes to marriage or birth control or peoples sex lives. They controlled house senate under Bush and said social security needs to be fixed and how did they fix it. They start the prescription drug entitlement program which was nothing but a gift for drug companies. The program should be shut down and all that money should be put into social security. Then let people get cheaper drugs from Canada to help people that struggle with paying for medicine. They said that the drugs there aren’t as safe was a bunch of lies so drug companies can keep screwing over the American Public. I have never heard of a problem with safe drugs in Canada.
@anonymous-you are correct. There is nothing wrong with Canadian drugs. As a matter of fact they have access to a lot of European drugs that we can’t get that are very good. I lived in Canada for over two years and their drugs are excellent. Their overall health care is somewhat lacking in that you can get decent care for the minor stuff but have long wait times for the more serious stuff. The east coats of the U.S. is getting to be like that as well. We are still somewhat spoiled here in the midwest. There are just to many patients for the number of doctors and it is starting to show.
@Ed-I certainly agree with you. They are not going to bite the hand that feeds them. The Dems did a good job of getting these people and the illegals solidly behind them. The Republicans stuck to what they had been saying for years and they lost. The people have spoken like it or not.
When you have all most half the voters living off the tax payers , what party do you think they are going to vote for? The Dems don’t even care if the people voting are legal to be here or vote. They just want their vote.Anyone that doesn’t agree with this is just being blind.
Ed…If you call people getting SS as living off the government then yes maybe 50% do. But if you are talking about real so called entitlements then you are so wrong. The biggest takers of government money are without a doubt the “red” states. They are less educated and poorer. The 10 least educated states went for Romney and 9 out of the 10 most educated states went for Obama. Reading your post I think you should move to La, Al, or one of the other least educated states.