One of premier political commentators of the age, Maureen Dowd, hit it out of the park with her column in today’s New York Times.
She noted how the Republican Party – or what’s left of it – can’t yet grasp how it lost the White House to an incumbent president who is struggling with a massive national debt, a trillion-dollar annual deficit and an economy that just refuses to snap out of its doldrums. Her take? Republicans managed to antagonize just about every demographic group it needed to defeat President Obama.
Dowd writes the following.
“Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?”
Her full column is attached to this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-lost-civilization.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
One of these days the Republican Party will pull its head out and realize that it cannot depend on its fringe to carry the day. The Democratic Party tried it in the early 1970s, remember? Democrats came out of the 1968 election that it lost for a variety of reasons. A leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated. Sen. Eugene McCarthy carried his anti-Vietnam War crusade to the convention, but lost the nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey – who then lost narrowly to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.
Democrats then turned to its anti-war leftist base, nominated Sen. George McGovern in 1972, and got wiped out in a 49-state landslide against President Nixon.
Republicans are wrestling now with the reverse of the Democrats’ dilemma. They need to relearn how to compromise with the other side, just as Democrats learned it in 1992 by nominating Bill Clinton, who was elected twice with near-landslide vote margins.
They cannot keep kicking dirt on growing blocs of voters.