Rand Paul’s Prediction About Future Presidential Elections May Frighten Half the Country
The new ideas are the same ones that have been floating around since the party autopsy report after the 2012 election. The GOP needs better advertising so it can appeal to more voters.
Here's a genuine conservative idea. Instead of making a "new" GOP, why don't we go back to the one that almost worked? Why don't we fix the party by undoing the changes made since 2008?
Let's review the history. In 1994, Republicans won control of Congress, but Democrats still held the presidency. In 2000, we got what we had been working toward, effective control of the government. That's when things began to go wrong.
Under the Bush administration we saw tax cuts, but we saw nothing else the GOP had promised America. All the grand talk about limited government went out the window. All pretense of fiscal responsibility vanished as Republicans began to out-pork-barrel the Democrats. The science denial movement finally got national political support.
The Republican Party abandoned its stated principles without putting up a struggle. My conservative compadres know this is true, because it was that betrayal that sparked the Tea Party movement.
At this point, things could have gone differently. The Tea Party movement could have focused on clarifying conservative principles and working to live up to them. It could have concentrated on fixing the GOP.
Then we elected a black president, and both the GOP and the Tea Party went nuts.
And that's when the Republican Party changed. That's when American conservatism began to die.
From the party's point of view, Barack Obama was a handy way to deflect attention from the party's own failures. Since the GOP had no record to run on, the party leaders decided to make Obama look so bad that people would have no choice but to vote GOP. Talk-radio fans know the progression. "He's a socialist. He's not just a socialist, he's a communist. He's not just a communist, he's a Marxist. And a Muslim. And he wants to destroy America." Fear became the GOP platform.
Question for my conservative compadres: how does demonizing Obama address the problem of elected Republican officials not living up to stated Republican principles? Answer: it doesn't.
The choice to demonize Obama was a marketing choice. A rational conservative knows that Obama is a fairly typical Democrat president. He's simply not the Great Socialist Destroyer that you hear about on talk radio. A rational conservative believes that conservatism offers better ideas, and you don't need to "market" those ideas.
But the rational conservatives were run off. We were branded RINOs and ridiculed by people who get their conservatism through a radio speaker. Look at the 2012 GOP presidential lineup. All but one candidate, Jon Huntsman, was not an active science denier, and he was the only candidate that never got serious consideration.
Now we come to today. The GOP is still in marketing mode. They're looking for a new package or a new slogan. They're looking for a new marketing gimmick.
Here's my idea. Drop the marketing and the messaging. Genuine conservatism doesn't need that. Drop the Obama the Destroyer theme. See "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" for more on that subject. Quit letting conservatism be defined by entertainers.
And quit letting conservatism be defined by business and religious fundamentalists. The corporate world shares no goals with conservatism, and neither does fundamentalist Christianity. Business is about making money no matter what. Fundamentalism is about forcing religious opinions onto other people. Conservatism is about preserving the good ideas of the past. Three different things.
Rand Paul's idea of a "new" GOP is just more marketing. We know what makes conservatism work. We know how to make the GOP politically competitive. It's only the post-2008 conservatives who've forgotten.
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