I’ve been incidentally watching the festivities at CPAC, where conservative voters will shortly register their choice for the 2012 party favorite. By all accounts, as in previous years, CPAC is going to shoot far right of center: last year, they picked Romney far and away ahead of McCain, and in 1999, George W. Bush lost to super-homophobe Gary Bauer for being too liberal. What’s great to see, though, is that the few backwater sites that pass for the conservative “netroots” continue to push the party in that direction. “Red State,” the poor man’s “Kos,” is shocked and encouraged to see Mike Huckabee draw huge crowds… at a conservative event… and loudly begs RNC Chairman Michael Steele to kick the three Republicans who voted for Obama’s stimulus out of the party.
Yes, by all means. Kill the moderates. The GOP will only start winning again when they realize that the benchmark for success isn’t who makes Phyllis Schlafly smile: it’s who connects with the most Americans outside the CPAC hall. Oh, and please keep treating “Joe the Plumber” as a luminary.
Rove to speak to CPAC tonight… oh joy.
Posted by Ames | February 27, 2009, 4:01 pmWow, the GOP is in a state of disarray.
Now CPAC is http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19433.html, and yet they are not proposing anything new. This quote says it best (from the same link):
Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and current host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” warned the GOP against becoming the party of resistance and urged conservatives to tone down their rhetoric against Obama.
“We have to present alternatives, we can’t just say no,” he said. “There is an alternative to everything we hear from the White House every single day, but we can’t just say no.”
He added: “We’re not going to win votes and we’re not going to win elections by calling Barack Obama a communist.”
But various scenes from the conference suggested that won’t be so simple. When House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the president’s $787 billion stimulus a “down payment on a new American socialist experiment,” the audience exploded in enthusiastic response, just as it did when Cliff Kincaid, the editor of Accuracy in Media, suggested that Obama is not an American citizen.
I wonder if they know about cognitive dissonance?
Posted by Ian | February 28, 2009, 9:04 amSteele is not very wise if he thinks he can control Specter, Snowe, or Collins. They could easily switch to the Democratic side if they were so inclined…leaving Steele and his friends out in the cold. He should be careful.
Posted by Teleprompter | February 28, 2009, 9:03 pm