After Action Report…

By jen

Please forgive my rambling if this gets to be all over the place. I am still medicated and haven’t had real food in two days.  God I hate a stomach flu.  Anyway…

So why did we lose and what can we do to get our shit together?  The first part of that question is easiest to answer I think.

We lost because:

1. We had a candidate, though a good man, not well loved or even respected politically by his own party and outright disdained by the base.  He is the poster child for how far the Republicans have strayed from the party’s core values.

2. Low turn out at the polls by conservatives.

John McCain and the GOP didn’t get their turnout in this race.  They lost almost seven million voters from 2004, a rather stunning number.  We’ll be chewing on this for a while, but that’s more than 10% of the Bush vote that got lost in this election.  Did they stay home, or did significant numbers of them defect to Obama?  I’m guessing the former.  The GOP demoralized their base by acting like Democrats for too many years, and the winds of “change” proved too dispiriting this time around. via Ed Morrisey at Hot Air.

This was not an “Obama Republicans” win.  This was 7 million conservative voters staying home.  To many conservatives it is better to have a Democrat president than a fake Republican in office.

3. John McCain lost what chance he had to win this election when he signed the bailout instead of saying “I am going to make sure all these criminals who did this to our economy are going to be brought to justice.”  Hell, no one has said that.  Nancy Pelosi made it quite clear they will never be brought to justice.

4. John McCain wouldn’t play hardball and you have to in order to win.  Politics are not civilized and you failed to point out your candidate was completely unqualified and a raging radical leftist.  Seriously, if our party could not defeat this guy then we have problems much bigger than a single election.

5. With nearly a billion dollar war chest and a media ready to slaughter their first born to get Obama elected, we would have had to have Reagan to win.

What can we do to get our shit together?

1. We need to show the country how to lose gracefully.  There hasn’t been a graceful loser in this country in recent memory.  Gore and his inability to face reality changed the way we view elections in this country.  Kerry, well, he is still out there bitching about Bush.  We cannot afford to subscribe to Obama Derangement Syndrome.  Our leaders in congress and the senate need to find their sack and remember who they are.

2. We need to get away from the idea that we are the party of God.  All you evangelicals out there, God love ya, we respect you and want your vote, but the entire party is not made up of evangelicals nor can it be ruled by them.  We didn’t get a Candidate Romney because of the evangelicals and I wonder how he would have done against the Senator from Illinois.  I am not trying to piss folks off with this, honestly.  I am just tired of the label that goes with being a Republican.  I am not a member of the Christian Right.  Hell most of the Christian Right thinks I am a heathen Catholic.  UPDATE after Phone call with Bruce: I understand that it is the evangelicals that have kept this party alive for the last 20 years, I do not mean any disrespect to that.  In fact I share pretty much every belief with the evangelicals, barring that whole I am Catholic and going to hell thing.  What I mean is we cannot allow the media/left whatever to paint us into the corner of being open as a party to only evangelical and like minded people.  The ruling issues of our party cannot be defining gay marriage or ending the practice of Abortion.  The ruling issue of the party should be limiting government and our party has failed miserably at that in the last 8 years.  The evangelicals came out and voted yesterday, it is the other conservatives who didn’t.

3. We were the party of limiting government and we have spent spent spent. Wtf is up with that?  Earmarks have finally been made a point by McCain and may be his true legacy.  Jeff Flake wrote a piece today, as Ed Morrissey puts it “A well deserved round of I told You So.”

The temptation for Republican members of Congress today will be to assume the role of the post-Watergate Republicans of 1974 and accept minority status as a permanent condition. Indeed, the terrain is more difficult for us now than it was in 1992. Then, Republicanism was still largely defined by the Reagan years. Today the party is defined in the public mind by the Bush presidency. We’ve got a steep hill to climb.

Much of the backroom maneuvering and media speculation in the coming weeks will focus on identifying new standard-bearers for the party. This is important, and after a second straight drubbing, the House Republican leadership should be replaced. But the far more critical task is determining what standard these new leaders will bear.

I suggest that we return to first principles. At the top of that list has to be a recommitment to limited government. After eight years of profligate spending and soaring deficits, voters can be forgiven for not knowing that limited government has long been the first article of faith for Republicans.

Of course, it’s not the level of spending that gets the most attention; it’s the manner in which the spending is allocated. The proliferation of earmarks is largely a product of the Gingrich-DeLay years, and it’s no surprise that some of the most ardent practitioners were earmarked by the voters for retirement yesterday. Few Americans will take seriously Republican speeches on limited government if we Republicans can’t wean ourselves from this insidious practice. But if we can go clean, it will offer a stark contrast to the Democrats, who, after two years in training, already have their own earmark favor factory running at full tilt.  Read the rest…

Every single earmark by every single Democrat in the legislative branch should be pointed out and our own guys need to knock that shit off.  He points out a few good things at the end of his piece as well.

There are, of course, other pillars of the Republican standard—strong national defense, support for traditional values and the Second Amendment—but these are not areas where voters question Republican bona fides. In any event, as we have seen over the past several months, economic woes tend to subsume other concerns. We shouldn’t complain. We can now play our strongest hand.

In some respects, raising a new standard was made easier by yesterday’s rout. The Republican Party is not bound by election-year promises made by its presidential nominee. More important, the party is finally untethered from the ill-fitting and unworkable big-government conservatism that defined the Bush administration.

This is not to say that it will be an easy transition. Congressional Republicans picked up some unattractive habits over the years in an effort to hold on to power. Whether it was relying on the redistricting process to help us choose our constituents, using the appropriations process as an ATM or passing legislation—such as a generous prescription drug benefit and a bloated farm bill—to pacify individual constituencies, these habits and voting patterns will be hard to break.

But there is reason for Republicans to feel optimism. Politically, America remains a center-right country, and America loves a chastened and repentant sinner. As surely as the sun rises in the east, the Democrats will overreach.

As long as we Republicans are willing to admit our folly, get back to first principles and work like there’s no tomorrow, we’ve got ‘em just where we want ‘em.

4. We need to realize the days of Old White Guys winning the presidency are over. The party needs new faces in leadership at every front.  We need to stop trying to be Democrats Light.

5. We need to figure out a way to get the Hispanic vote and that is going to mean giving on immigration.  It is going to happen anyway so why give the Left another minority to entitled into poverty?

6. To run anything other than a woman or a minority against Obama in 2012 is stupidity so get to looking for a few of each.

Beyond that I am not sure what happens to my party.  I just know the answer does not lie with playing the game on their terms.  I believe we are still a nation Right of Center and this election doesn’t change that fact. We observers of politics will have much to go on about over the next few years as our leftist counterparts try to find the balls to actually lead.  They have no choice now.  They control everything.  No more Bush to blame.  No more GOP control to blame.  Who will they blame? Ultimately, Obama.

Stephen DeBeste has a good piece up about what the future holds.

And now they’re bound to be disappointed. Not even Jesus could satisfy all the expectations of Obama’s most vocal supporters, or fulfill all the promises Obama has made.

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn’t respond to benign behavior benignly.

But there’s another reason why: Obama has been hiding his light under a basket. A lot of people bought a pig in a poke today, and now they’re going to find out what they bought. Obama isn’t what most of them think he is. The intoxication of the cult will wear off, leaving a monumental hangover.

And four years from now they’ll be older and much wiser.

A lot of bad things are going to happen during this term. But I don’t think that this is an irreversible catastrophe for the union. I’ve lived long enough to absorb this basic truth: the US is too large and too strong to destroy in just 4 years. Or even in 8. We survived 6 years of Nixon. We survived 4 years of Carter. We even survived 8 years of Clinton, God alone knows how.

The President of the United States is the most powerful political figure in the world, but as national executives go his powers are actually quite restricted. Obama will become President, but he won’t be dictator or king, let alone deity. He still has to work with the House and the Senate, and he still has to live within Constitutional restrictions, and with a judiciary that he mostly didn’t appoint.

The main reason this will be a “coming of age” moment is that now Obama and the Democrats have to put up or shut up. Obama got elected by making himself a blank slate, with vapid promises about “hope” and “change”—but now he actually has to do something. Now he has to reveal his true agenda. And with the Democrats also having a majority in both chambers of Congress, now the Democrats really have to lead. And they’re not going to do a very good job of it. It’s going to be amusing to watch.

And the people who fell for the demagoguery will learn an invaluable lesson.

Read the rest, it is a great.

The one good thing that should come from this election is the end of the Racist Nation bullshit.  It was not black America who elected Barak Obama, there was only a slight increase in the number of black voters this time around.  White America elected Barak Obama.  They didn’t elect the privileged son of a black billionaire, they elected the bi-racial son of a middle class family.

I do not want to hear Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton talking about the Two Americas anymore.  I do not want to hear about how adversity cannot be overcome by blacks in this country.  Find another song to play guys, because if what you truly want is racial equity and if your dream truly is of an America where a young black man has the same chances as a white man then your work is done.  I for one am glad to see it come to pass.  Now the two of you can go find a real job and stop living off inciting racial hatred.  That is so last century…