Methinks Republican insiders are worried about the wrong thing.
Donald Trump’s rhetoric since the Paris terrorist attacks appears to have helped him with GOP primary voters, according to most polls. But Republican insiders are concerned that his words could come back to haunt the party as it seeks to appeal to a broader audience.
We hear this a lot. We hear it about other candidates, too. We hear it about other issues. There are the discussions about legitimate rape. There are the discussions about Latino immigration. There are the discussions about gay rights. There are always a bushelful of anti-black comments from Republican officeholders to sift through. We hear about all the people who want free stuff- the 47 percent.
At some point, Republican insiders have to start worrying about the people they’re trying to get to vote for them, and also what they feel they need to do to get those voters to vote for them.
The issue isn’t so much that Republican candidates routinely say stuff that will turn off most of the country. The issue is that this works with the Republican base.
Trump is doing great in the polls for a reason, and it’s not because he’s out there explaining Ronald Reagan Republicanism to the masses.
Republican insiders created the appetite for this rhetoric. They’re to blame for the fact that there is now a massive constituency who wants their candidates to deliver on it.
Republican insiders created the appetite for this rhetoric. They’re to blame for the fact that there is now a massive constituency who wants their candidates to deliver on it.
And there is only one way to stop it. However, neither the GOP insiders, or the DC Democratic elite, want to hear it.
Ok, I’ll bite. What is the one way?
Abandon the GOP, create a non bigot but still economically plutocratic oligarchical party and endure losses until the GOP collapses.
See MNPundit’s response to you. He/She nailed it.
lol you finally noticed
What are you talking about? He’s written this many times.
Trump turned himself into a “Birther” and teabag leader long before he threw his hat into the ring. Just as Carson built a fundie donor base over the two years before he jumped on the clown car. So, while this low-hanging fruit has long existed to be exploited, it does take time and effort to learn how to do the picking when there’s competition. Huck, Jindal, and Santorum aren’t any more preposterous than Trump and Carson, but they were mostly invisible to that base they seek during 2013 and 2014 and also lack the sort of charisma to jump in and make a big splash.
Actually, they are less preposterous since they have all been Senator or Governor. Trump and Carson haven’t even been dogcatcher.
Experience in getting elected and having held public office should be a plus for a POTUS candidate. However, they all sound like the former Gov of Alaska which makes them preposterous.
Not to their base. Just to play Devil’s Advocate, is it less preposterous that a man who has not been a Democrat until running for President is getting 30% support in the primary polls? Or that a man self-described as a Socialist (equating to Communist in the popular mind) is getting any traction at all? How far would Trump get if he openly described himself as a Fascist? Or Hillary for that matter since the Third Way/DLC program is classic Fascism (using the state to advance private business, the blending of corporate and state interest).
Check out the 1934 CA Gubernatorial election. An authentic socialist ran for and won the DEM nomination. The loser for the GOP nomination ran as a Progressive. It got messy after that.
Newspapers wielded a lot of power and MGM (Louis B Mayer) produced stop Sinclair propaganda. FDR made a deal not to endorse Sinclair if Merriam supported the New Deal (a promise Merriam honored along with raising state income taxes modeled after the federal tax system).
Four years later, Culbert Olson, who had campaigned for Sinclair, fully supported the New Deal, and was an atheist, defeated Merriam.
Yes, that was a wild time. I read last year in the authorized biography of Robert Heinlein, noted in later life as a Libertarian, was a Democrat back then and was a campaign worker (at a rather high level) for Sinclair.
Why all the noise from Hillary supporters that “Bernie isn’t even a Democrat?” Why aren’t we seeing the same thing from partisan Republicans about Trump who has a very sketchy self-identification as a Republican than Bernie has as a Democrat. Buzzfeed — GOP Frontrunner Donald Trump Was Once A Pro-Obama Blogger And he invited the Clintons to his 3rd wedding and they attended.
No one does Trump better than Trump, but unfortunately the Rep candidates have now become accustomed to actually following Trump’s lead and then trying to up his craziness by 1 ‘rabid dog’ in the neighborhood. The sooner the powers that be find an exit for Trump, the sooner they can break the other candidates’ habit of following him and go back to working subtle hate.
I am kind of enjoying the mental illness angles to describe Trump that are cropping up more and more. But again, if the candidates’ umbilical cord to Trumpisms isn’t broken, they’ll all be lassoed by the white coated men who come to take Trump away.
It’s gonna take more than crazy to move The Donald aside.
The true problem with the GOP is they are more and more coming out with policies that appear to be designed with the intent to punish the American population.
“Republican insiders created the appetite for this rhetoric”
Also the Conservative Entertainment Complex plus various grifters pursuing their self interest. Bad election results are fine for the Murdochs and Limbaughs and Savages, they have no incentive to fix the problems.
This is exactly why the GOP establishment will have trouble changing their base, given all these stakeholders. Back in the day, it was great for the GOP when the Conservative Entertainment Complex helped to get their candidates elected. I remember Rush Limbaugh receiving several honorary awards from the Republican Congress. Now it appears the GOP establishment is having a panic attack and there’s nothing to cure it.
“Now it appears the GOP establishment is having a panic attack and there’s nothing to cure it.”
Sure there is! Widespread voter disenfranchisement. Its just taken a while for them to ramp it up.
Look for a manufactured panic attack on Syrian refugees trying to vote in 2016. Forging and mailing in some registration forms is trivial for Rove/O’Keefe.
Well, according to Chuck Todd this morning, Trump’s rhetoric of late is not “helping the GOP brand” and that is the real problem.
I didn’t watch, but my reading of the transcript makes it appear that Todd was expressing a view and supporting a discussion that Republican rhetoric has been irresponsible since last week’s attacks in Paris, not out of concern for GOP electoral prospects but out of concern for American values. The program’s stacking up of outrageous statements by multiple 2016 POTUS candidates next to multiple statements by George W. Bush which defended Islam and its practitioners and institutions expressed a clear point of view.
And Chuck brought important facts into the discussion as well, like this:
“Now let’s take a look at the big picture here. There’s been nearly 785,000 refugees who have been admitted to the United States since 9/11. Only about a dozen, roughly, one one-thousandth of 1% have been arrested or removed from the U.S. due to terrorism concerns.
None of those folks removed were Syrian, by the way. And the fact is, it’s not easy to get into America via the refugee process. Let me walk you through how this worked just with Syrians. The United Nations has referred just over 23,000 Syrian refugees to the United States.
Of those 23,000, 7,000 of them were thought to be worthy enough to be interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security. By the way, they were interviewed outside the United States. And of those 7,000, just 2,165 were accepted into the United States.”
I’m no big fan of Todd, but credit where credit’s due.
Yes, let’s make Republican insiders look straight at what they have created. They built the mighty Wurlitzer and suborned the media. They stole elections to stack the Supreme Court. They got “their” court to open the floodgates to money and turn their backs on voters. They encouraged the birthers and the Tea Party. They built their own reality, divorced from the real world that has real consequences. The policies they successfully pushed through with feckless Democrats sunk us in endless war and the worst recession since the Great Depression. They exploded the deficit with tax cuts and military spending and then used it as a scourge to prevent recovery so that they would have the anger on their side.
This is the political environment they created and still drive.
What exactly are they worried about? That the time to pay the piper may be nigh?
No idea why they would be scared.
The might lose the Presidency again – but so what? They hold everything else that matters,and draw whatever political lines they want to maximize their representation in the House.
Their base is angry, has finally figured out that they were lied to, and highly armed.
Their base has been angry for fifty years. That’s just who they are. But they aren’t even close figuring out the real lies they’ve been told/sold; so, they’ll reliably show up and vote GOP in the general election.
I agree. They’ll never ever ever vote Dem, no matter what, even though HRC is more their candidate than mine, that’s for sure.
The heavily armed thing? These witless boobs have been heavily propagandized to be pants-sh*tting cowardly fraidy cats. Yes, the occasional person sadly goes out and murders many and creates mayhem. For better or worse, that’s rarely ever related to politics.
This mob is more likely to turn on Dem pols than their “own” sold out whores, but I also can’t see any of them getting off their lazy *sses and doing anything remotely akin to something like a revolution.
I don’t think the GOP is afraid of them on that level. Why they care so much about “winning” the POTUS is beyond me. I don’t see how that office matters all that much anymore.
A friend over dinner – connected with Clinton in NH – suggested we are in the political equivalent of WW1 -each side about equal in strength with no sign of a decisive victory by either side in the offing.
The writer says that the GOP insiders must be aghast at what they have created.
Would this be the machine that holds both Houses of congress, most of the governorships and state legislature?
Can the writer honestly say that there is any reasonable expectation of significant positive change if Clinton is elected?
And what exactly has the Democratic establishment created? No one seriously believes we will take the House back soon, and we are going to run a candidate with high unfavorables and little agenda other than she is not crazy.
To be sure, she is a marginal favorite, but so what?
I will repeat this again: things are not OK. The Democratic establishment does not have a serious plan that will address any of the real problems facing Americans.
And the passive acceptance of this status quo by the left of center blogs shows what precisely?
That the true state of American Politics is that Democrats are holding on for dear life in hopes the final blow doesn’t get landed.
It is true – the GOP rank and file are a problem for the GOP insiders.
Alas, on what evidence are Democratic insiders on any firmer ground?
Oh, but the D candidate is inevitable, because … inevitability.
We aren’t going to take the House back in my lifetime, and I expect to live another 22 years. We won’t take the Senate back this time. We may take the WH, but it will be 4 years of Obama-redux.
The D party had better ask “Why have we lost hundreds and hundreds of seats in dozens of states? Why have we lost the gov in many states which are blue?”
And if the answer is “racism”, get ready for the apocalypse. Because it ain’t racism.
I’m really thick. What is it then? I give up.
<blockquotes>The D party had better ask “Why have we lost hundreds and hundreds of seats in dozens of states? Why have we lost the gov in many states which are blue?”</blockquotes>
Why the losses in blue states?
Try the failure to take advantage of the 2008-10 economic crisis to nationalize the means of production, distribution and finance, taking possession of them them for the common good and in the name of the workers.
The Democratic party focus on so-called ‘social issues’ is the problem.
Once you change the prevailing mode of production from finance capitalism and production-for-profit to socialism and production-for-use, all existing societal structures — racism, xenophobia, sexism, oppressive gender norms included — will of necessity also be swept away.
Root causes… root causes.
And do you expect Hillary, the Senator from Punjab and from Wall Street, to do anything about this? She is going to double down on selling American workers down the river. She has totally capitulated to the Wall Streeters and to the international finance criminals.
She will follow in the fucking treasonous shows of her asshole husband and sign the TPP. Presuming Obama hasn’t signed the shit sandwich beforehand.
The problem isn’t the bully. There’s always bullies. What waxes and wanes is the resolve of those who must confront them. The non-fascists have to stand up a good deal louder and clearer if we are going to have a chance. The milquetoast mainstream DNC stuff is beyond useless — past even enabling.
Where are our champions? I hear Bernie, and every now and then Barack. And HRC makes soothing noises, but doesn’t seem like she’d tear the out root and branch.
And it’s our fault that the opposition has been too feeble, for too long.
Bullies always exist. What varies is the strength of the opposition. While it’s been improving bit by bit for several years now, it is still far too weak to suggest fascism in the US will be defeated.
Pity.
Kansas City dot com: Man tries to put out garbage fire by driving over it in a van loaded with ammunition.
The man appears not to have been queried on why his van was loaded with ammo.
Arkansas Online Judge accused of soliciting sex in exchange for sentence reductions
The GOP base will eventually “sink” the GOP —-> The Whig Party went by the wayside (Confronting Slavery) & Lincoln & Co. founded the GOP (1854-1855). So too, the current GOP. Their base is almost as toxic and as “massive” a defect/flaw as Slavery was to the Whig Party. The Key is for a Democrat (Hillary) to get elected and have the ability to appoint @ LEAST TWO (2) Supreme Court Justices —-> (It could very well be 3-4). Citizens United and other noxious George Bush GOP-inspired clap-trap will come under withering assault. A rollback all across the country (states, counties) of GOP-infested Bush (“W”) era “legacies” will begin in earnest and continue unabated for years to come! Vote for a Democratic president that will change the Supreme Court that will change the country over the next 20-years. That is the most realistic expectation to entertain @ this point in time.
Why do you think that Hillary would not appoint justices that would uphold public interest over corporate interests?
“The issue isn’t so much that Republican candidates routinely say stuff that will turn off most of the country. The issue is that this works with the Republican base.”
I would put it like this: What works best with the Republican base works worst with everyone else. This means not only that the Republican party is preaching to the converted, but that it is driving everybody else away. The long term prognosis is the transformation of the GOP from a national party to a regional, radical fringe.