The Embarrassed Republican: Now What?

While Democrats are idling over which commemorative re-election tile to purchase for their coffee mug, a lot of Republicans are still wondering what happened.  We got lost in our own sauce, that’s what happened.

As it turns out our own “un-slanted” polls were wrong, and the FiveThirtyEight blog at the Times was dead on.  It wasn’t voter identity theft. It wasn’t loss of the youth vote.  It wasn’t the rise of the moochers.  It was living in a dream.  You can’t wish for voters or pretend their existence, they have to show up on their own.  They do that because you appeal to them.  Plainly, we didn’t.

We’re not alone, Paul Ryan was shocked, Karl Rove was flabbergasted and Bill O'Reilly was depressed along with the rest of Fox news.  2+ years and billions of dollars gone and an emboldened President to deal with.  But that’s the key going forward, dealing with it.

Make no mistake our troubles will just be beginning if we don’t get a new attitude right now.  The President and Democrats in the Senate now have a popular mandate for action.  The people have chosen and woe to those who get in their way.  The current plan in Washington is to quickly come up with an interim solution to deal with “the fiscal cliff”, and do the heavy lifting throughout next year.  That includes re-designing the Tax system, which will take a long time.  The Republicans in Washington are behind this, most of them are getting ready to deal. Some of them may even be willing to stop calling multi-billion dollar hedge funds “small business.”

Republicans in congress are not going keep playing the “stop progress” game, you can have only so much egg on your face and big donors and big business are sharpening their pitchforks.   A lot of the new legislation and changes are going to be part of the President’s legacy, that just goes with the territory.  We have to make sure it’s part of our legacy as well.  Republicans have to change from naysayers to constructive critics.  We get nothing by blocking, and we might win big if we’re part of the process.

Negotiating for the best terms should be a major part of our battle plan.  We need to drop the “47% are freeloaders” talk and start saying things like “We want to help every American we can, live the best life they can, but we have to be able to afford it,” and then ask for ideas.  That means swapping talking points for talking sense.  What about “Government has a place,” instead of “Government is too big”?  We should certainly see after Sandy that Government has a place.  Anyone who has filled up their car in the last two weeks was probably getting some of the 23 million gallons of gas FEMA had shipped in.  And the next time some wise sage of business tells you “The private sector does it better,” think about JCP&L.  

One of the party’s biggest hurdles is this turns out to be everyone’s country.  Shutting our eyes to millions of other Americans is a sure loser.  The demographic has, and is changing.  It’s always changed we need to get used to that, and change with it.  Maybe 75% of the voters are white, but but a huge fraction of them thought our candidate stunk, or just couldn't figure out what he stood for.  That needs to change.   There are reasons that we didn’t appeal to the conservative latino vote, reasons we can remedy.  There are reasons that the “War on women” phrase resonated so deeply, we need to think seriously about that.  As for gay marriage, why is that anyone’s business but theirs?  We're firmly in the minority if we think it is.  Get used to it.

The party has adopted all sorts of exclusionary notions that frankly don’t matter to governing at all.  That exclusion is killing us and further grandstanding and non-cooperation will certainly seal our fate.  It’s time to stop listening to the doomsayers and crank conspiracy theorists.  We all woke up in the same country after the election and it’s not Greece or communist Amerika, nor will it ever be.  Will FEMA round us all up and put us in internment camps?  Sorry, they’re a little busy right now.  Is the President really a Kenyan?  In four years that will matter as much as whether Warren G. Harding was really born in Canada or not.  Believe what you like, it wont change a damn thing.

The Presidency was lost by a small percentage in the popular vote and a wide margin in the electoral college, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.  A lot of us were too busy talking to bother listening.  We tuned into the news we wanted to hear and shut out the rest.  Here’s our prize. Now it’s change or fade, it’s up to us.