What’s Wrong with the Center-Right and Five Ways to Make it…er…Right

by Eileen | 5:43 pm, January 2, 2013 | Comments Off

If the Republican Party were a private company, it would be in need of a bailout and Republican politicians would be     calling for the state to allow it to fail.

2013 finds me glum, even forlorn. In no small part, this owes to what 2012 set us up for. And that, in turns, may be largely laid at the feet of our fundamentally unserious and lazy ‘establishment’.

What is the ‘establishment’? Obviously, it’s all the people who are keeping me from having appreciable power. I, like so many others, have supremely confident that, were I to have the prerogatives I crave, I could fix everything. Only, in my case, I’m right.

Blogging is the last refuge of scoundrels and members of minority parties….or something.

My grievances aside, the state of the Right in America, tenuously presided over by a comically ineffective GOP, cries for a diagnosis. It has for years. As long as I have been politicking, I’ve watched the Republicans lose one sure thing after another. Every working campaign professional in 2006 should properly have been executed and replaced with an actual competent adult.   Yeah, we had no shot in 2008…but that was because we’d spent the last several years making fools of ourselves.

For now, let’s focus on 2012. Faced with an incumbent President who’d kept few of his campaign promises, who childishly announced that, as the ‘winner’, he didn’t need to reach across the aisle, who signed legislation Americans overwhelmingly didn’t want, who didn’t even try to hide his disdain for the citizens, and who took the economic catastrophe left by Bush and actually managed to make it much worse, the Republican party managed to lose, and lose massively.

What can I say, other than to point out that any party inept enough to lose to Mr. Obama deserves relegation to the fringe. 

This isn’t to deny Barack Obama is an intelligent man who lives and breathes politics and sits astride a potent political machine. What I am saying is that his pathological self-love, disastrous policies, and appalling abuse of his office should have left him dead in the water. Clearly, that did not happen. Nor am I content to lay it all at the feet of an insidious cult of selfish ‘other people’ who wanted to vote themselves rich, who were only too happy to send the pickpocket-in-chief back to D.C.

There have always been greedy people, deeply averse to work and responsibility if there’s any other way to go. There is also an understandable and laudable human tendency to keep a tenacious grasp on what we earn. Is it really, then, as simple as all that? Have we irrevocably slid into a once-great republic, now waiting out her own death as she shovels unmerited goodies at the 47%?

If that’s the entire explanation, we should all be converting our assets and bugging out.

The aftermath, as told by right-wing pundits, was laughably skewed. Were an alien visitor to listen only to the talking heads of Fox News, Townhall, and other bastions of fingers-in-the-ears-I-can’t-hear-you immaturity, he’d soon be palpably confused. Here we saw educated people maintaining two irreconcilable positions. First, we’d hear that America is still an resolutely right-wing nation, that the Republicans lost for not being far enough to the right, with the position Mitt Romney should have taken being one of hard social conservatism, pungent with whiffs of theocracy. Minutes later, the same gang would confidentially assure us – and itself – that they and their own proudly fought for all that’s best and brightest; in this telling, the blame gets laid at the feet of greedy and ill-educated Americans who were either easily swayed by Obama’s monstrous lies or who chose to hasten the end of this great Experiment in Democracy in return for a frontline berth at the trough.

Well, which is it? Are we a nation longing for religiously informed public policy? Or are we so given over the state-funded Bacchanals that there is no hope?

Either explanation, and they’re both absurd explanations, contains an implicit failure of the right.  Either the right couldn’t enthuse its own people  or couldn’t keep a bunch of far-left yahoos, largely disappointed when their Hopeful Savior declined to implement their wilder dreams, away from the polls.  Simply, even the most self-serving fictions cooked up by the professional right to avoid admitting they screwed up still embody that very truth.

Anyway, am I the only one who thinks this dichotomy is one of the single dumbest breakdowns of an electoral aftermath ever? Heck, I don’t think the people spouting this nonsense believe it. But, like I said, we have a profoundly unserious political class.

Right-wing malfeasance could learn much from the successes of the Democrats. The ugly tendency to blame the voters for being stupid, so beloved of losing Democrats, is not one of those lessons.

What I have thought up are five changes I’d recommend for a GOP that believes in its professed tenets and wants to govern as such….rather than….ya’ know…heading out to a boozy lunch at 10:30…again.

These aren’t prescriptions on policy but on tactics, ways to run campaigns rather than recommendation on the ideal platform.

Each idea will get its own post, but here’s the preview:

1. Spend smarter.
2. Treat people better.
3. Do the granular work.
4. Embrace technology.
5. Develop a work ethic.

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