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Republicans clearly didn't have the kind of election cycle they wanted or expected, so it seems wise of the party to go through a detailed process to determine what, exactly, went wrong. But while the idea may be sound, the RNC's new "Growth and Opportunity Project" isn't off to a great start.
Republicans raised more than $1 billion for the presidential campaign, blanketed the airwaves with campaign ads, dispatched hundreds of operatives to battleground states, and promised the best get-out-the-vote effort in party history.
Now, more than a month after Mitt Romney's loss in the presidential election, the Republican National Committee has formed a team to determine what went wrong. The RNC is calling its official postmortem the Growth and Opportunity Project, and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has picked five party leaders to head up the effort.
In addition to scrutinizing this year's failures, Priebus has tasked the group with, among other things, crafting a plan for improving campaign mechanics, messaging, fundraising, and outreach. What's more, it's worth noting that the five-person panel includes a Latina woman and an African-American man, and as a result, the "Growth and Opportunity Project" is already more diverse than the Republicans' leadership in Congress.
So, what's the problem? Andrew Kaczynski noticed that two of the group's members -- former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer and Republican committeeman Henry Barbour -- can fairly be described as 2012 "Poll Truthers." They were, in other words, some of the same folks who insisted that all independent polling had been deliberately skewed to mislead the public, and that Mitt Romney was well on his way to victory on Election Day.
There's nothing wrong with the RNC scrutinizing its missteps -- introspection is wise after a defeat -- but in the wake of its 2012 failures, Fleischer and Barbour are exactly the kind of party officials who have less credibility, not more. Those who whined incessantly and incorrectly about "oversampling" look foolish with the benefit of hindsight, and tasking them with analyzing their party's mistakes suggests the Republican National Committee does not yet understand what it doesn't understand.
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Here's my take. The GOP is a bunch of crooks that hired themselves to handle the "On the ground campain". Then they are shocked when the crooks ripped them off and didn't do their job.
The conclusion the RNC review will come up with: Must. Cheat. More.
Because the right has shown their group think doesn't allow them to do anything else.
Case in point: Congress.
I don't see any mention of changing their actual policies, so I'm guessing they're just going to keep polishing the same old turd.
Whatever went wrong, it wasn't their fault.
I know some of the real party faithful, the kind of old white guys, like Ari Fleisher, who were shocked when they lost. They live in a fantasy world where everybody looks like them, sounds like them, and thinks like them. They told each other that they were winning because most of the other old white men and women they knew were angry just like them. After all the nice blond people on Fox News told them they were winning.
They don't need a "Growth and Prosperity Project." They need a "Re-discover America Field Trip."
What Ron said.
That's not fantasy, that's their hunting club.
They just figured out that Nero was playing the wrong tune when Rome burned, and Walmart is looking for someone to blame for their tragic fire. Chances are it was Obama. snark.
I am so glad they are retaining Ol' Reince. I mean, he is such a personable fellow with an amazing track record.
Seriously, we thank you for ensuring continued democratic gains through your abject incompetence.
Seriously, the guy is everything you DON'T want in a man. Short man with the "little man" complex who craves power and will do or say anything to get it. He is ugly inside and out. And he sucks at his job. Great representative ya got there guys.
Ditto - if Reince wants to find major reasons why the GOP lost in 2012, he can find one of them in the nearest mirror.
Yesterday a "Grinning Young Twerp" appeared on Martin Bashir's program, and said flat out that they had the perfect candidate and the perfect message, but the delivery was flawed!
-While Obama had people on the street, the GOP relied too much on Teh TeeVee.
(I guess he fell for the Madison Avenue dictum of putting lipstick on
pigs, er Pintos/Edsels/Romey.)the GOP relied too much on Teh TeeVee.
Mainly, they watched Faux news and believed what Faux was telling them .
The negotiation should not be about the holding the debt ceiling hostage... it's about creating jobs. The infrastructure in this country needs a makeover. The Gov. needs to produce these jobs which will bring in private sector jobs, which will bring revenue, which will lower the deficit.
The GOP is circling the wagons in an echo chamber within a cocoon.
They will learn nothing, and will keep failing at a federal level.
We should focus on state and local government, smash the tea party for good, get some progressives elected and correct all the gerrymandered districts that have allowed the extremists to get power to begin with.
The problem: The Republican Party has been distilled to a core constituency that has systematically cast out any moderate voice within their ranks in some sort of quest for ideological purity, but that's the rank and file. The people pulling the strings are the people who write the paychecks, and it's become obvious they're the billionares like Adelson and Norquists' key foundation backers.
The solution from the center is simply for the Republican party to stop having principles and start having priorities. The difference lies in that the latter is flexible and open to compromise to get a little here, a little there to take home. In short, Moderates (which both sides should be fighting over) want someone that will act in their best interests, even if they didn't vote for you. What they don't want is a partisan drone that will contribute to more political gridlock.
The solution the Republican party is going to inevitably come to is that they need better racial tokens as a part of their 'cultural rebirth' without actually changing their core policies, and grow a larger constituency of energetic, mal-informed voters they can scare into going to the polls. In short, rather than fix the problems, they'll just get crazier and throw up their token Latino, Rubio, in a bid to make their wealthy string-pullers more money.
As a broken clock is set to tell the correct time twice a day, the Republicans broken political strategy of dusting up anger and resentment every election cycle to reap majorities in gerrymandered districts and on the national stage is all they have if they choose not to fix that damn cloak! -Kevo
Is there a 5th grader on the panel...
"'Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we will be not judged.'
"President Lincoln was, of course, commenting on the peculiar institution of Southern slavery. But he stopped well short of passing judgment. It is important enough to be considered the Second Lesson of US History: 'Let us judge not that we will be not judged.'"
So, following the hotly contested election of 2012 perhaps today we Americans should step back and cut the Republicans a little slack.
Read more at
http://lifeamongtheordinary.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-second-lesson-of-us-history.html
I think they were surprised because they thought the voter suppression would be successful. They did not expect a boomerang effect of people being more determined to vote because they felt like they were being disenfranchised. I know several people who voted in their first election for Obama because of voter suppression tactics in other states. I think Rachel's commercial ("If you don't vote because it is hard, you are following somebody else's plan") was instrumental in enfranchising at least one of them.
I think they also counted on Citizens United money to carry the day. I have been impressed by the failure of money to buy elections - in Meg Whitman's campaign and others. We are being inoculated against advertising. Each ad has less effect and serves to turn us off instead of engaging us.
I suspect their freezing out of Ron Paul supporters at the convention had an unaccounted for negative effect as well. I have not seen any acknowledgement of this from anyone, but know several Ron Paul supporters that were seriously miffed by it.