Mitt Romney is getting pummeled in the polls and it's being reported that he is even less likable than George W. Bush, here, a very unpopular president except among hardcore Republican loyalists. Even the online gambling site, Intrade, is giving Obama a 79.2% probability of winning vs. 20.9% for Romney.
Is Romney the problem or is the Republican Party the problem? Well, it's both. Romney may be a stiff, insufferable and insensitive dork but the Republican Party itself has morphed into a party that mostly makes folks cringe.
The Republican Party is actually stuck in a time warp while the arrogant and clueless elites who control the Republican Party tenaciously cling to the same tired old mantra that all it has to do to win elections is romance the religious right and get them to the polls to vote. To be sure, the Republican Party has always suffered a profound deficit of solutions for our immense problems and its only bankable strategy has been to mobilize the dangerously unpopular social conservatives.
Well, the game plan is no longer working. Who could ever forget the memorable cringe worthy moments from the Republican primary debates?
Newt Gingrich shouts 'kill them' on the debate stage and gets a standing ovation, here. Ron Paul suggests invoking the Golden Rule and gets booed, here.
Rick Perry is cheered when he boasted that he was proud of his Texas execution record, here.
When a debate moderator raised the issue of just letting the uninsured die, the crowd went wild with loud cheers, here.
Gays in the military? The Republican audience booed loudly, here.
What made me personally cringe is that I was once a Republican until I saw the Republican base for the bloodthirsty hate-filled psychopaths that they really are. Is the Republican base the reincarnation of the Nazi Party? It's a horrifying thought that may be closer to the truth than we care to admit.
I sincerely doubt that Romney shares the views of the Republican mob. Unfortunately, he was forced to shamelessly pander to them to secure their primary votes. Moreover, the Republican Party elites kept screaming over and over that Romney was the only candidate who was electable in a general election. How utterly wrong they were!
The only Republican candidate with the testicular fortitude to directly confront the mob mentality with logic, compassion, humility and humanity was Ron Paul and the Republican mobs crucified him at the primary ballot box. The fatal flaw of Mitt Romney is that the guy was so obsessed with becoming president that he literally refused to take a principled position on anything.
What happened later was even more horrifying as the RNC/GOP machine changed its rules to permanently guarantee that liberty and grassroots activists will never again be able to participate in the nomination process because all RNC and Republican power has now been concentrated into the hands of a few party officials.
Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to do what they've always done - create a campaign strategy that demonizes the other party, even if the other party is no different than the Republican Party except for the highly inflamatory social issues that most Americans are bored with anyway.
Precisely because the Republican Party doesn't stand for anything except more of the 'same old, same old' tied old failed policies that got American into this economic nightmare, the Republican Party is doomed and possibly permanently.
While the Republican Party elites and the Republican base may be at odds, both are even more alienated from the American people and the magnitude of the problems that we face.
Finally, the Republican Party itself is a far bigger problem than the hapless and clueless Mitt Romney.
As someone who has been a Ron Paul voter since the seventies, who also considers herself part of the Republican base, I chafe at being characterized as a hate-filled psychopath. The hard thing is, I couldn't really define the Republican base if I had to for a grade. I consider myself that because I believe in limited government and the Democrat base believes that anything that's a 'good idea' should have the force of government behind it. And yet, even Rush Limbaugh has stated that he and his ilk believe in big government as long as it stands on the conservative side of the culture war and can wage two wars at once at the drop of a hat. The REALLY sad thing is that the talk host who played that quote for me (I had called in to support RP)and talked grandly about how,in time, a government big enough to ramrod your agenda will swing to the other side with just as much power brought to bear against you,did absolutely nothing to counter the CNN treatment that the 'conservative media' gave to Dr. Paul. He bought into the media lie that Paul couldn't win and trumpeted Santorum as the anti-Romney vote even while pointing out that Santorum was fraud as a fiscal conservative. This nation actually isn't ready for solutions yet and that's all there is to it.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with you that the nation isn't ready for solutions. Unfortunately, that's been a recurring problem and I don't know what the solution is.
ReplyDeleteStill, as a Libertarian since the early 1970, I'm hopeful that finally the folks are beginning to wake-up.