Roger L. Simon:
Given the current state of the USA, Republicans should be winning every election from Seattle to Key West. The economy hasn’t moved for years with the labor participation rate at record lows — people have given up – and bankruptcy over entitlements looming. The international situation is in free fall with China becoming the global power, Iran making a mockery of faux negotiations and Putin on the way to reconstituting the Soviet Union. Al Qaeda is not only alive, it’s growing. (GM is dead.) Optimism about our country is in the proverbial toilet. More Americans feel threatened by their own government than proud of it.
Republicans should be winning by acclimation for every position from dog catcher to president.
But they’re not. And you don’t need Strother Martin to tell you why – it’s a failure to communicate.
And that’s not just the so-called establishment or the so-called Tea Party — it’s both. Both are doing an atrocious job of taking their message to the people. The establishment remains super cautious, equivocating and boring while the Tea Party walks around pretending as if wearing a three-cornered hat and waving the Constitution (great as it is) is going to impress a culture the vast number of whom (incorrectly!) associate that Constitution with geriatric white slave holders in jodhpurs. Also, you have to be at least as sophisticated as your high school sons and daughters. We do live in 2014. (If you’re not, what you get is a clueless Sharron Angle losing to that hideous mafioso Harry Reid.)
Rather than dealing with these realities, both sides — establishment and Tea Party — spend their time aiming fusillades at each other. How infantile and suicidal.
Yes, the media and Hollywood and the academy are against us and millions of Americans are on the dole (therefore bought)… blablabla. But the facts remain — at public relations, the right sucks. The proof is, again, that on almost every issue — with the possible exception of same-sex marriage, and in that instance the GOP libertarian wing is an asset — the right has not just the upper hand, but the wildly superior upper hand with the public. Liberal ideology is not only dead, it’s decomposed. Nevertheless, even though Republicans have a good possibility with the Senate (they should have every seat), Hillary seems poised for the White House.
Time to wake up, n’est-ce pas? But how to do it?
To begin with, time for Republican fat cats to realize that the media and Hollywood are really really important and open their wallets big time to change the playing field. (They’ll also make money in the process, because that’s where there’s a giant under-served audience.) Entertainment media are where minds are formed, especially those low-information voters everyone talks about incessantly. Hate the media and Hollywood all you want, but until you take them over and/or co-opt them, things are only going to get worse — you can bank on it.
“Both are doing an atrocious job of taking their message to the people.”
They are never going to be ALLOWED to take “their message to the people”. The people get their political messages from media. Some of it is quite subtle such as how various issues are portrayed in entertainment media. A Republican can have absolutely the most clear, concise, accurate, and persuasive argument there is and they public are NEVER going to hear it. It will not be put on the news, it will not be discussed in the talking head shows, and the position will never be portrayed in a good light in the entertainment media.
90%+ of Americans get their view of the world from the top of the hour 5 minute news broadcast on the radio station they listen to on the way to work. How do the Republicans get their message there? They don’t. They won’t. Because those media outlets are basically propaganda organs for the Democratic Party. They are not “news” organizations at all.
The problem here is the expectation that the Republicans could “get their message out” even if they wanted to. Republicans COULD do that back in the 1980’s when you had PBS airing William F. Buckley and a TV series by Milton Friedman but those days are gone. The media are steadfastly partisan. Cities used to have a Republican paper and a Democrat paper. No more. Most cities have one paper and often the same publisher owns the papers of several different cities such as NY Times owning the Boston, New York and Miami markets for many years.
The answer to that is WE need to be the way that message gets out and not by tweeting to Albanians at random on the Internet or among people in our own echo chambers. We need to get out in public and engage in discussions at the coffee shop, tavern, deli and get those ideas out ourselves. If you are sitting around waiting to see the Republican point of view accurately described in your paper or on your television or radio, you can sit there and wait until the cows come home because it isn’t going to happen. Stop expecting it to. It isn’t a failure of “the Republicans”, it is a failure of the journalism trade that has allowed itself to be hijacked and manipulated. When there is a good reporter such as Attkisson at CBS, she is forced out. Her voice silenced.
The media will invest great effort into making sure the Republican point of view never sees the light of day. WE have to be the light. WE have to push back with calm logic, real data, and truth.
Here is an example of the same sort of thing on a completely different subject in a completely different country. It is Germany and there was a climate conference. There was room for 100 people but 130 jammed in there. Amazingly, the main theme was that CO2 was not as big a problem as we thought it was. Should be big news, right? Not one single journalist from any news organization covered it. Not one.
Why? Because it was the “non-alarmist” conference. That side of the debate is squelched in order to preserve the myth that it doesn’t exist.
@crosspatch: Yes. The single biggest problem conservatives have is that the MSM is actively boycotting news and information that is harmful to Democrats. That is a fact.
If ten years ago someone had told me that the IRS could be successfully weaponized by a presidential administration for use against their political opponents and that information was brought out in a public, congressional hearing…and most of the media would refuse to cover it…I would have called that person crazy. But here we are. The amazing thing is…they have no shame. There seems to be not the least bit of care on the part of the media that they are engaging in open partisanship. It seems to be the new normal.
For what it’s worth…and I’ll admit, not much…I have taken to emailing local TV reporters when they only present the DNC party line on a national story with local implications. It’s not much, but it’s what I can do. If you don’t scream on them…they will respond.
It’s a start.
The problem with today’s conservatives, or Republicans, or Tea Party, or Plutocrats, or, or whatever it is that they are today (I mean, they’re certainly not Eisenhower Republicans and they’re not even Reagan Republicans) is that it really isn’t about the deliverance of the message as it is the message itself. People don’t like it. They don’t like the Ryan budget, or the austerity measures, or the corporate kowtowing, or refusal to raise MW, or the allegiance to the NRA, or ending health care reform with no replacement, or the legislative obstruction and the unwillingness to compromise, or their racial overtone, or their snubbing the middle class, or hell, most everything today’s right has become.
The belief of the right seems to be to regroup and change the message rather than adjust the agenda. It’s as if there’s more of an effort to change the lipstick of the pig and hope it will fly, or, or something of that abject stupidity.
People simply don’t want what they’re selling.
Ronald J Ward
THAT’S WHERE YOU ARE WRONG,
there is an influx of joining the CONSERVATIVES FROM TEA- PARTY OR REPUBLICANS,
because their group are showing bright and able people to express their allegiance to their party,
and it come from the student side who rigorously, call out their teachers on what they know is false and lies, it come from the BLACK PEOPLE WHO FINALY TURN IN TO THE CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE THEY FIND WHAT THEY WANT IN IT,
IT COME FROM WOMAN WHO ARE FED UP WITH LIES FROM DEMOCRATS AND JOIN IN TO FIND HOW THE TRUTH IS NOT ALTER TO FIT ONE OR THE OTHER,
THEY COME FROM THE MILITARY FAMILY WHO BELIEVE IN THE CONSERVATIVES RULES OF CONDUCT, AND IT COME FROM THE USA FAMILY WHO WANT TO KNOW THAT THERE IS A LIGHT AT THE END OF THIS TUNNEL, where wrong will be behind and right will prevail,
the indoctrination has faded with the PEOPLE AND WILL DISOLVE ITSELF LIKE SUGAR IN HOT WATER,
WHICH THEY NOW ARE ENTERING THAT DOWN SLOPE TO THE DARKNESS AND NO ONE WANT TO BE PART OF IT,
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE,
YOU CAN COUNT ON THE DIFFERENCE IT WILL MAKE WHEN THEY ARE UNABLE TO CONVINCE THE PEOPLE WITH THEIR LIES ANYMORE,
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS GAINING ON HIS SIDE AND GAINING HIGH SPIRITED PEOPLE ABLE,
AND SHARP WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE OTHER SIDE SCAMS, THEY WILL DEFEAT THEM WITH MORE THAN THE CITIZENS CAN EVER EXPECTED OF THE BEST CANDIDAT WITH THEIR BIRTH CERTIFICAT
ON THE OPEN FOR ALL TO CHECK, ALONG WITH THEIR ONE HUNDREAD PERCENT ALLEGIANCE TO
THEIR BELOVED AMERICA AND THE WILL TO RECLAIME THE BEST OF AMERICA THE OTHER TRYED SO HARD TO DESTROY SINCE HIS ALMOST 6 YEARS WE SEE NOTHING BUT SAD AND DESPERATED CITIZENS BEING SCREWED BY THE THUGS ROAMING THE COUNTRY TO EXTORT THE PEOPLE,
AMERICA WILL SHINE AGAIN, COUNT ON IT , AND THAT , WITH THE REPUBLICANS CONSERVATIVES TEA-PARTY, THE PATRIOTS ALWAYS ON GUARD FOR HER, AND ALWAYS READY,
@ilovebeeswarzone: If you honesty believe that the GOP is winning over students, women, and minorities, well, uh, sure, why not? Whatever it takes to get you through the day, or, or, or something akin to such abject stupidity.
The very 1st sentence of the spew “Given the current state of the USA, Republicans should be winning every election from Seattle to Key West” disqualifies the rest of any consideration of credence.
Most people of reasonable intellect and an iota of political knowledge understand the obstruction of the GOP and their blatant and admitted objection of economic sabotage in order to unseat or undermine Obama.
And even if you want to cherry pick and distort that cold hard reality, proof should be evident from the 2012 Nov election when if your argument had merit, a tree stump should have been elected over Obama. Didn’t happen and the crap the GOP was selling was soundly rejected.
Granted, the GOP may pick up a few seats in 2014 for various reasons but their long term future looks grim.
@Ronald J. Ward:
Well, the new crop of kids are pretty much kicking the Democrats to the curb. The Democratic Party has become the most corrupt political institution that this country has seen in maybe 100 years. In 2009 all of the employees of the DNC in Washington DC were fired and the party headquarters was moved to Chicago and staffed with members of the most corrupt political machine in the country. Hillary is on the porch ready to come in next, she is from Chicago, too. Then there’s Harry Reid. He’s from Vegas. Chicago runs Vegas (and a good bit of Los Angeles).
The kids these days are just pretty sick of the Democrats. And, we have this amazing phenomenon happening just so coincidentally of a bunch of social media types pretending to be all conservative bashing the Republican party from the right. Gee, it’s almost like they want to divide the Republicans against themselves to ensure the Democrats win, isn’t it? They get all over the Internet pretending to be all “holier than thou” with their so-called conservatism and the result is that Democrats get elected. Fancy that.
Or, we get the just plain old propagandists for the Democratic party spewing their screed like “Mr Ward” did above. Lets take one piece of that:
“Most people of reasonable intellect and an iota of political knowledge understand the obstruction of the GOP and their blatant and admitted objection of economic sabotage in order to unseat or undermine Obama.”
Lets see, the American people elected the Republicans to the House IN ORDER to obstruct and undermine Obama and the Democratic Party. That is the entire purpose of us having put them there. Unlike the Senate where the one or two major metros in a state control the Senate Delegation, the House delegations are harder to control from one central urban machine. The House more accurately reflects the sense of America as a whole, and the Senate tends to reflect only the sense of the largest urban areas of the state. Those just so happen to be the areas with the most political corruption. Places like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are cesspools of corrupt Democrats. Many of the other urban centers of the country are, too.
I think people are getting to understand just how dirty the Democratic Party really is.
@crosspatch: I read you response 3 times in order to hopefully acquire some form of constructive or even coherent argument from it. Obviously, I came up short in my quest.
You make some incredibly argumentative statements but come up short in substantiating your argument. The “new crop of kids are pretty much kicking the Democrats to the curb” you say and
Nice soundbites but it somewhat conflicts with reality. How’d them new kids do in November of 2012? As I recall, those “new kids” kinda got their asses spanked and have been pretty much losing popularity since. And that “most corrupt” bit is tossing boulders in a glass house, ain’t it?
I can at least agree with you that many folks (along with the new kids) “are just pretty sick of the Democrats” but again, you act as if the Democrats are the only ones responsible for today’s toxic political environment. Hell, I’m put out with Democrats as well as Obama but that doesn’t exonerate the GOP of their shenanigans or make them electable to implement their austere plutocratic and social Darwinism agenda.
I think Bill Maher (and I understand for you to read 1 of his quotes would be akin to a vampire staring directly at a cross) probably expressed my argument here best when he said
I really don’t know what you’re trying to argue further but no, the electorate didn’t “elected the Republicans to the House IN ORDER to obstruct and undermine Obama and the Democratic Party”, that was just something that happened as a result, something that the GOP should and likely will be held accountable for.
Oh, and Democrats are corrupt because some are from Chicago and some are from Vegas, and, and, and what the hell are you talking about?
crosspatch
THAT WAS WHAT I HAD IN MIND,
THANK YOU,
BYE
Ronald J Ward
YOU THINK YOU KNOW THE DEMOCRATS,
wait till they sink in the ditch with you around, UNABLE TO PULL THEIR WEIGHT,
IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK,
AND DON’T COME HERE TO SPEW,
One thing that is happening is people are starting to learn how Democrats trick them. For example, they will give a poor person a rent subsidy worth $1000 a month ($12K a year) but if they get a raise that puts them even $1 over the limit, the Democrats yank the entire subsidy. So a person has a choice. They can take a $1/hour raise to get themselves an additional $1,200 a year but lose $10,000 or they can stay right where they are and maybe find some cash money work under the table. So the Democrat policy that is designed to “help” them ACTUALLY forces them to stay at the bottom of the economic ladder and punishes them if they try to better their own situation.
Democrats have been running around parroting this crap about Republicans wanting to take away people’s life preservers. No, that isn’t true. We want you to have a life preserve when you need one but also to learn how to swim so you don’t need one forever and aren’t dependent on that preserver for life. Democrats will give you and your entire family life preservers but the instant you make a move like you are trying to learn to swim on your own, they yank it away.
More of the African American population is starting to get wise to this. They now understand how the Democrats have been using “help” to actually keep them down and prevent them from working their way out of poverty. Housing projects and welfare act to keep large populations nailed to places that have no jobs for them. They are basically warehoused votes.
The Democrats KNOW that the black population is getting wise to it, too, so now they are trying to do to the Latino community what they have done to the African American community. The Democrats will “help” the Latios right into generations of poverty, incarcerate the men, put the women on welfare and have them gestate the next generation of Democrat voters. It is really sick. How any normal American can align with the Democratic Party is amazing. One would have to be an absolute despicable human being.
And to continue my argument that people aren’t interested in the GOP agenda, even Obamacare is becoming increasingly difficult on Republicans, pulling more backlash from constituents. According to a New York Times Upshot/Kaiser Family Foundation poll, even southern states that adamantly voted against Obama are not wanting to repeal ACA
The article quoted one Louisiana woman who said, “I’m a Republican, but I’m tired of them saying ‘Repeal, repeal, repeal.’”
When we look at Nov 2012, Obama, who by the logic of the argument of this thread should have been soundly defeated, won by the tune of 5 million votes. Today, 11 million voters now have health care who didn’t then, and are guaranteed to have it promptly taken away from most every GOP contender.
You logic just doesn’t add up.
@crosspatch:
Where do you get this stuff and by what right do you claim to speak for the African American population? Your argument is conjecture on every front. You seem to follow a consistent playbook here of when you obviously don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about, you simply make up a bunch of stupid shit.
Ronald J Ward
JUST BY READING YOUR COMMENTS TELL ON WHAT SHIT YOU ARE TRYING TO SLING HERE,
we are use to your lies , and you can”t get away with it,
we won”t let you here, but sadly you and your little thugs have a job for OBAMA’scover to do,
AND WHEN NOBODY IS AROUND TO EXPOSE YOUR LIES, IT PASS ON THE UNAWARE PEOPLE, and obamacare is doomed
DON’T MENTION ABOUT THE ELECTORATE IT IS FRAUDULENT, OTHERWISE HE WOULD NOT HAVE EVER WON,