ASU2003

So what changes do you think the Republicans need to make in order to compete again in the next election?

Here is my list as someone who is independent but voted for Obama. What do you think, would you add anything or change anything?

1. Stop all of the negative campaigning. Or at least limit it. I need to know what the candidate will do instead of only what is wrong with the other person.

2. Need to appeal to young people. They need to figure out how they can win people like me. I had no problem with McCain's age, but I didn't think that he would be able to change things like health care, censorship laws, and energy policies.

3. Immigration. Maybe it's because McCain is from Arizona and he would have a hard time getting elected in his state if he wanted to reform immigration too severely. But we need to know who is coming into this country, and actually let good hard working, smart & productive people in. From all over the world, not just one country.

4. They need to get their approval numbers up. And it's going to be tough unless the Democrats fail and have even lower approval numbers.

5. I don't care about gay marriage. I'm sorry. As long as two people can live together in the same home and be together, it doesn't affect my life. But making laws to take away other people's life choices won't win my vote.

6. Environment. Teddy Roosevelt set aside large areas for national parks and conservation of natural resources. They need to come to the middle on recycling programs (why throw away things when a company can make money recycling), drilling (a lot of jobs can be made switching cars and homes over to non-oil energy), and low emission power plants (new jobs, cleaner air). I would rather see thousands of Americans working good jobs like these than to save a few bucks a month on my electric bill.

7. Entrepreneurship and taxes. This is the American dream and they tried to use Joe the Plummer, but the RNC/McCain needed to make a 30 minute on-line video showing how there are middle class Americans who followed their dream and started a business and are now making lots of money. But also show the people how lower taxes keeps the doors open and allows them to employ more people.

8. International Relations. The war is an issue, but it's not just that. Trade partnerships and less regulations have improved relationships and quality of life in many countries. There has to be some example of a previously poor country now being able to afford American products, isn't there?

9. Big spending. When they were in power, they didn't raise taxes, but they just shifted it to the deficient. If the Republicans want to win, they will need to figure out a way to balance the budget and keep it balanced even in wartime and depressions. Smaller government programs aren't all bad, they need to show how some agencies are doing more with less money. Now a large portion of my tax money goes to pay the interest on the debt and can't be used constructively.

10. Urban and the North areas. They need to figure out how to appeal to these areas. The current message isn't working for millions of Americans.

Willravel

One more thing:

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smooth

I think you've got some good ideas there.
If you were curious about trade examples, you could do some stories on middle class americans starting businesses in Colombia and China and consumer ability to now purchase cheap (low quality) and/or inexpensive (but still high quality) commodities.
I think they might pick some voters up if they actually held true to the idea of limited government, which would necessitate them not harping on abortion and/or gay marriage and/or school prayer. But I don't know whether the pickups would offset the losses.

I'd just rather see some logical coherence in their platform. I don't agree with it, but maybe that'll change when I'm 80 rofl.

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Manic_Skafe

Don't forget this jackass.

The whoring of Joe The Plumber was by far the most disingenuous and exploitative aspect of their entire campaign.

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samcol

Actually, I think she was the only thing they did right. She was a breath of fresh air into a base that felt hopeless.

To answer the OP, I think they abandoned the far right wing, and even more so abandoned their conservative base. They nominated the most liberal Republican possible. It was funny to see conservative sites practically begging the libertarians and Ron Paul crowd to suck it up and vote Mccain. I bet more Ron Paul people voted for Obama than Mccain, but that's just a guess.

The conservative politicians followed in the footsteps of Bush far too long to jump ship 8 years later. I don't think voters forgot it even as the candidates tried to distance themselves from him. That was by far their biggest failure.

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SabrinaFair

Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up....

That being said, I don't think Senator McCain lost so much as Senator Obama won. If that makes sense....

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Willravel

She helped to rally the base, but the independents? They were inundated with SNL and gaff after gaff. Her interviews undoubtedly scared a lot of people that were interested in learning what she was all about. Tina Fey was the echo that was louder than the voice, too.

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Bear Cub

Nominate a socialist in his 40's. If they can do that, they're golden.

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Amaras

ASU2003, I like what you wrote. Balanced and thoughtful, and I feel you sincerely are looking for
answers. Here's my two cents;
-Adherence to their own standards personal conduct. Walk the walk before the talking of the talking.
-You mentioned a few of their stereotypes that should be changed. How about the perception that
they are in the hip pocket of big business. One way they could change that is to promote campaign
finance reform. Politicians have so many favours they owe by the time that they reach office that they
are no longer able to operate efficiently, or honestly.
-Actually helping the government in power to effectively rule with options to proposed legislation,
not just nay-saying.

Just a few ideas....

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YaWhateva

They need to go back to being true republicans, small government, giving more power to the states, conservative spending, not policing the world. You know, all the stuff they used to stand for before they sold their souls to the far evangelical right and the oil companies. This facade of being for small government and conservative spending doesn't work when you spend well outside of your means and fight ridiculous wars.

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roachboy

what did the republicans do wrong in the context of the mc-cain campaign?
depends on what you thought a good outcome was: as it turned out, they did everything right.

actually, many of the problems the campaign faced were not exactly of their own making--boxed in by the coalition and language that enabled them to exercise power since the reagan period; boxed in by the actions of the bush administration and all the more by the loss of traction that the bush-brand experienced after 2005; boxed in at the last minute by the consequences of the economic ideology that the campaign had no choice but retain because of the first problem...

the campaign itself went to hell early. once mc-cain had the nomination, he should have run to his actual political positions rather than becoming a pantomime hard rightwinger. once the schmidt squad took over, it seemed like Mister Leadership was being bossed around by his own campaign team. palin may have made sense had mc-cain himself been running more centre, but he wasn't. the decision to run at the far right base indicated that the campaign imagined that, in the end, the election would come down to machine vs machine and that they could get the bodies out. this was an obvious miscalculation.

the financial situation did not help, but the campaign managed to set up a photo op in the context of which mc-cain came off as the kind of "leader" who has no particular ideas but who feels the need to lurch into situation after situation and REACT. it's a sad state of affairs they engineered.

running an amateur copy of a rove campaign was stupid. it seems to me that the explanation for that lay in the language the conservative coalition used to talk to itself, the old conservative identity politics thing, which meant (in tandem with everything else) that the campaign did not seem to have any actual ideas to offer, merely an endless positioning game (NOT ONE OF US, NOT ONE OF US)--you know the drill---obama is not a citizen (NOT ONE OF US), he's a "socialist" (NOT ONE OF US), a "terrorist" (NOT ONE OF US)---you can't run a campaign based on this level of stupidity and imagine that you're talking to anyone but the base. this because these are not arguments--they're about drawing a line around the base, encouraging the base to draw a line around itself. this is inside. this is outside. that is not an argument. any territorial animal does that.

but none of this is anything "wrong" in the sense that the mc-cain campaign played the shitty hand that was dealt them in a way that was entirely hamstrung by the accumulated past that conditioned the game for the right.

that's why the republicans now find themselves entering a long march across the desert.

personally, i think the right should dump the entire language of conservative identity politics and make actual arguments about their positions, appealing to what folk might think rather than appealing to some fiction as to who they are.

all in all, i'm glad i wasn't a political consultant who was hired to try to play the hand of shit the republicans had to work with.

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ASU2003

While they may have picked the wrong guy, it is the dream that a normal person can work hard and be successful that carries a lot of weight.

I don't want to see the monetary benefits to success go away to people who are not working on improving themselves or society, but I think that is what churches should be helping out with. There needs to be a separation of church and state, but creating or expanding a AmeriCorp type organization to manage volunteers from various churches across the country to help the less fortunate would be a good smaller government step that would have a lot of impact on our communities. Look at Extreme Home Makeover edition. If on Sunday afternoon, churches invited people to volunteer in large numbers (as well as people that aren't in their congregation), they would improve their communities more than any government project with the same amount of money could do.

I didn't vote against McCain, he is a great guy and I have voted for him in the 2000 primary and wish he won in 2000. I voted the way I did because Obama ran a great positive campaign and I think he can improve this country more than what the Republican platform and past experiences have shown. But it's not to say that the Republicans are going anywhere, and the Democrats need to realize that they can't do whatever and turn their backs on the millions of people who have a different idea on how the country should be run.

Willravel

No one is more sorry than I am that pedobear didn't win, but let's not pretend that "socialism" is something that can be associated with a centrist like Obama.

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Bear Cub

I don't have to pretend. Obama's political views are about as centrist as those of 99% of TFPers.

Not going to sit and argue the fact though, that time has come and gone. I'll just sit back beneath my sheet of plastic for four years, bracing for the imminent barrage of shit spattering from the fan blades.

Pedobear in 2012!

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ngdawg

Go back to every Democratic nominee since Kennedy and see who he was. Old? Crotchety? Totally unhip?
Nope.
Everyone won because of what they were: younger(or seemingly so), in touch with their world and enthusiastic about the future; and were not: part of the good-ol'-boys club.

McCain's ideas regarding taxes and health care made more sense to me than Obama's, but when we see from whom the ideas were coming, we don't listen. You don't go after corporations for more tax money-they'll just take their toys and go offshore. Give them some incentives to hire and to expand, not tax them to death. Employer-backed healthcare? Been doing that since I first got a job and it hasn't gotten any better in all those decades. We should be able to shop around and make decisions and make it competitive to keep costs down.
But we bought the opposite views because of the vessel.
I registered Republican when I first registered because of their "less government" attitude while the Democrats wanted to pay for everything except my new car and then tax everyone accordingly.
Now we have a Republican party that wants to enter our bedrooms and be just this side of sticking tracking chips in everyone's head and Democrats who are seemingly out of touch with the way things work in the everyday business world.

And as long as the "liberal" media keeps harping about things like how much it cost to dress a candidate on one side but says nothing about the $450 plates of lobster on the other, we will always end up hearing defensive insults being hurled instead of actual discussion about what matters.
Like I said, gotta consider the vessel and the Republican party hasn't done well in picking a good one, giving everyone plenty of fodder.

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Speed_Gibson

The republicans were "old and stale", at the helm before and during an unpopular undeclared "war"/police action, and running things as the economy tanked due to poor business decisions.
Obama was fresh and exciting, much like the public appearance of Kennedy (minus the actual poor health/painkillers, massive voter fraud aided by dear old daddy when Nixon actually clearly won in '60, and womanising)

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Daniel_

The Republicans could have put up the second coming and promised people free money, and they would probably have lost.

That is the legacy of Bush.

From this side of the water, it looks like the problems were:

McCain was old.
Palin was incompetent and probably corrupt (or at least prone to nepotism and undue influence), this only mattered because of McCain's age - so people have a real beief that he might die in the net 4 years.
Bush was looming over it all.
The campaign was negative.

But a lot of it was about getting the vote out. The Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 and 2004, but the republicans won the college each time - there was no way on God's earth that the Democrats were not going to mobilise and get every conceivable vote on the poll this time.

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Nisses

From the same side of the water, I wholeheartedly agree. I had been saying that the Democrats would win this time, since talks started up about elections again.

No way would they "win" twice, and still lose the seat. No way would the Republicans talk themselves out of the mess that they created over the past 8 years.

I started getting worried when they seemed to actually do this very thing, so I'm glad to see that it did fail in the end.


I'm not sure you've seen the last of Palin though.

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ColonelSpecial

The campaign seemed to be very scattered. From the debates and interviews I saw most of the points conveyed were just straight talking points. I felt Obama had talking points as well but was better able to tailor his speeches to the crowd he was in front of.

I also believe that Obama was more optimistic about the future. He told people there was work to be done but that we can do it together. The helped bolster the mood for many people during a dreary time. I think McCain could have come out being sort of like a wise old father figure. You know, "I have been around and seen what works and doesn't work. Here let me guide you to success." He came out as just wanting to keep doing the same things over and over again.

I think if what has been posted here were taken to heart 3-4 months ago, McCain stood more of a chance to win/be very close in the electoral votes.

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highthief

At the end of the day, Obama ran a very positive campaign full of hope and rays of sunshine. McCain had run a very negative campaign, full of fear and harshness.

People wanted to hear something positive.

The fact that so many first time voters and young voters came out and supported Obama speaks to that.

The Republicans have been a doom and gloom party for years now - they need to change that.

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Poppinjay

Can we as a thinking group put this myth to rest? Every media empire in the United States is owned by a capitalist. Politico broke the wardrobe story, and you can pick that up at your local paper boxes... what? Oh, you can't. It's a DC web publication read mostly by wonks.

You know who still leads the country in magazine circulation? That liberal Reader's Digest with their slanted Humor In Uniform and Life In These United States.

USA Today is the largest paper, followed closely by Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

The fact is, owners of papers, radio, TV and net publications are in it for the money.

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roachboy

mythologies like the "liberal media" and "obama is a socialist" will die off slowly simply because alot of folk like them. liking this sort of thing and that sort of thing being accurate about the empirical world have little to do with each other---myths like "liberal media" and "obama the socialist" operate to make the conservative the Center of Persecution, which presupposes the Vast Importance of the Individual Conservative, who must be an object of concern for the Natas that is the non-conservative world because the Individual Conservative is at the center of this vast machinery the sole point of which is to Persecute the Conservative. so it follows that everything is an Affliction: the state is an affliction, taxation is an affliction, watching television is an affliction...when you drive you car, the image of environmentalists is an affliction...the terrorist is an affliction--everything and anything that is not you is an affliction. and you are Defined by your Martyrdom, the Extent and Quality of your Suffering at the hands of all that Persecutes you. it's all very evangelical. i remember this from back in the day--we used to be encouraged to wear this goofy wooden crosses around our necks even though we all knew that wearing them to school would bring down Persecution upon us--but that was good, because telling detailed and bitter stories about the Awful Outside World was the central activity at prayer meetings as such.

but if that's the case and the Depth of your Belonging is measured by the Magnitude of your Persecution, then conservatives *need* the rest of us. without us, they'd all be like monopolies in hayek's political economy--you know, the most influential conservative economist that none of the conservatives have read. they'd be blinded, operating in a world or projections, substituting what they want to see for what there is. wouldn't want that.

and all this is a pretty straightforward discursive structure. it's a psychological mode that's grafted into the center of conservative identity politics and fed back to you.

and it is an example of the type of being-conservative that has helped bring the republican party to the edge of the big desert, which it will now walk through for 40 days and 40 nights. you know the rest of the story. the choice out there will be whether to continue this story or to make a new one. i hope that this repetition of the same old story turns out differently. for all our sakes.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

dc_dux