Redstate

By Martin A. Knight Posted in Archived — Comments (33) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Alright, I think the time is ripe for a little Monday morning quarterbacking. For all that there is a well deserved amount of attention being lavished on the Republican abandonment of 1994 principles and they surely do deserve some punishment for it, let us face up to one simple fact; technically Republicans ran a horrible horrible campaign. Even with the fact that the GOP had largely lost sight of what made it win the majority for the first time in 40 years in 1994, they could have won if they had run a better campaign. This is a battle we conceded from the very beginning.

Let's start from the top.

When it came to the election committees for both the House and the Senate, the Democrats had us vastly outclassed. Against the smartness, ruthlessness and fundraising prowess of Chuck Schumer we fielded Elizabeth Dole, the ineptitude of whom in this cycle people noted and warned about since last year. Against Rahm Emmanuel, whom everybody acknowledged to be a brilliant member of the Clinton White House's political operation, in the House, we had Tom Reynolds (who ended up having a tough time keeping his own seat). Now I was not paying as much attention to Reynolds as I was to the Senate races but let's note a single fact; the Democrats left only 10 Republican House seats uncontested. We left 40 Democrat held seats uncontested.

As I wrote before here, we can no longer afford incompetence like that displayed by Liddy Dole (I want to weep when I think of the amount of money Dole spent on keeping Lincoln Chafee(!) ... and the idiot lost anyway!) to continue beyond the one-year point in an election cycle at the very latest. NRSC and NRCC chairmen should be subject to votes of confidence (by secret ballot) one year into their tenure, not after they have been a total disaster in both recruiting and running the campaign. Unless I'm missing something, can anybody convince me that there is not a single Republican we could have gotten to give Kent Conrad a good fright in North Dakota?

I mean, c'mon,people! Take a look at who we lost to; Speaker of the House elect Nancy "Moonbat Grandma" Pelosi and soon to be Senate Majority Leader Harry "Land Deals" Reid! In the name of all that is Holy, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Howard "Yeaaargh!!" Dean! When Pelosi bangs the Speaker's gavel in January, the Judiciary Committee would have as its Chairman moonbat extraordinaire John "Impeachment!" Conyers. Charlie "Taxes Up!" Rangel would be heading the Ways and Means Committee and all sorts of other crazy people who should not be anywhere near those Chairmen's gavels would be in charge of Committees that have the power to seriously alter the course of the average American's life.

Look again, at what we had on our side. We have an American economy in amazing shape; record low unemployment, wages up, productivity up, consistent GDP growth, revenues up, rapidly falling budget deficits ... and all this while there is a war on, after a devastating attack on America's financial capital, the worst natural disaster in fifty years hitting America's major petroleum refining areas, corporate scandals of epic proportions and the burst of the dot com bubble. And, even better, this is all while keeping taxes at their lowest in decades. Why wasn't this pounded on until the Press was forced to acknowledge it?

We had the Democrats on record against the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program, the PATRIOT Act and the SWIFT Terrorist Finance Tracking Program; all of which had solid pluralities, if not majorities, of the American people in enthuthiastic support. How difficult, exactly, was it to tie these programs by the Administration, supported by the GOP, and opposed by the Democrats, to the fact that there have been no successful attacks on United States' soil since 2001?

We had the Democrats on record conceding defeat in Iraq and advocating withdrawal before the job is done. Here's a thing I know about the American people. A victory is a hundred times better than a defeat anyday. How come not one person working at the Republican National Committee thought to highlight the similarities the Democrats' proposals for "withdrawal", "redeployment", "timetables" etc. have with the 1974 Democrat Congress that withdrew funding for the war in Vietnam while American troops were still on the battlefield?

None of these issues issues made an appearance the way they should have during the campaign. Judges are still a big issue for the base. We hadly saw an ad that made it clear that we need a Republican Senate to ensure that we get to have Stevens and Ginsberg replaced with Justices who understand the difference between interpreting and legislating.

We simply missed opportunity after opportunity. They, meaning the Democrats and their allies in the Press, successfully nationalized the election and made this a referendum on the President and his party. But apparently nobody in a position to do anything about it, to get the GOP to notice the change in the electoral environment, took note. We knew this as far back as three months ago, before Mark Foley, before Bob Ney, when something could have been done to avert or mitigate the disaster of the day before yesterday.

And in this the blame largely rests on the White House, for resting on its laurels for the entirety of 2005 and only doing the bare minimum to claim credit for its achievements and keep the Iraq War sold. Bush is now faced with a wholly Democratic congress and a Press Corps that want him (metaphorically) dead in every possible way, and they are already sensing blood in the water. No free rides anymore. His Presidency and the chances of the GOP retaining the White House in 2008 hinge entirely on Bush overcoming his aversion to explaining and defending himself. Like I have posted up since last year, I continue to see better arguments for the White House's proposed policies from anonymous posters on the internet than I have ever seen coming from the President's mouth or the White House Communications office. Bush now has to fight and quite frankly, I'm very happily curious to see if he can - it is in adversity that you discover the true measure of a man, and to be honest I have lost a great deal of respect for him - a man who stands silently as his own honor and integrity is impugned is really nothing to admire.

Bush and his White House have continuously refused to defend their decision to topple Saddam Hussein and instead sat silently, uselessly, as the Democrats successfully pushed and established the story line that the President based his decision and gained their initial support on deliberate lies and deception when the Democrats' own words (including stories printed by Democratic newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times) from even before Bush was first sworn in as President gave the lie to that allegation.

The purebred stupidity of Congressional Republicans played a huge part as well; House Republicans gorged themselves on pork and the privileges of power - going so far as to, God help us (!), provide a smokescreen for a Democrat caught on tape taking a bribe and hiding the money in his freezer. Today that man is going to take a seat in the 110th Congress while Dennis Hastert has to say good bye to many good, decent and honest colleagues on his side of the aisle and hand the Speaker's gavel to Nancy Pelosi(!) before he shuffles to the back benches.

Senate Republicans were worse; they went around being "collegial" to Democrats and stabbing themselves in the back while Senate Democrats were happily stabbing them in the back and front. Soon-to-be-former Senator Mike DeWine would have to content himself with all those lovely "moderate" accolades he got from the New York Times for the "Gang of Fourteen" while he watches an empty suit like Sherrod Brown take his seat in the Senate.

The Republican National Committee deserves a serious beating as well. The simple fact is that Ken Mehlman could have done a lot more to hold our losses down but he failed woefully. Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove are brilliant men, but brilliant men do slip up and these guys, in my opinion, slipped up pretty badly. They remind me of the kid in Toy Story. They became so enamored of their creation; the GOP's GOTV operation (which apparently, performed quite well for what it's worth) that they simply ignored, entirely, the other parts of the campaign that we all once thought were necessary. We got so hung up on our ground war operation, we conceded the air war throughout the election cycle.

And what is even more interesting is that so many of us on the Right in the blogosphere also allowed ourselves to fall for it and join them in their delusion. "Ignore the polls! Ignore the polls! Ignore even the internal GOP polls! They're lying lying lying! It's all about turnout! Let's get out the vote! Our GOTV would save us! Yeaaargh!"" Much love and respect gamecock and my good Redstate colleague Leverkuhn, but I am looking at you guys as classic examples. Forgive me!

Heck, we did not even fight the air war i.e. the battle of perceptions - the battle to define yourself and your opponents in the voters' mind in a way that favors yourself. We were so busy admiring the Republican turnout machine's performance in 2004 (and expecting it to work 100% the same way and yield the same results yet again) that we stupidly stood by and watched as the Democrats, aided by their heavy artillery forces in the Fourth Estate, successfully attached a rotten smell to the Republican brand - and I cannot deny that we played some significant part in giving them ammunition. But the issue is that we did not bother to give voters a reason to vote for us, to properly and forcefully contrast ourselves, even with our myriad of faults, favorably as against the other side, and the fact remains it is necessary to do so in every single election. I think it was the only thing I wrote about in the past few weeks here at Redstate. Over and over again till I felt I must have been missing something everybody else could see.

I swear to all that is Holy that it is an absolute miracle that we got off so easy with just losing just 29 seats in the House while just going down to 49 in the Senate.

The ground war happens in the last week of the election season. The air war starts at most a year prior to election day; it is the war that if fought well enables us to establish a favorable environment in which to head into the last days of the campaign season with our ground game as the trump card. A badly fought air war sabotages the ground game; the GOTV 72 hour program is like a weapon - it is useless if it runs out of ammunition (people inclined to vote Republican). And unfortunately, in this context, the ammunition is perishable. It needs to be re-enforced and reforged constantly; you simply cannot afford to be complacent and assume that the guy who voted for you two years ago is going to vote for you again this year. We lost some very reliably Republican seats to Democrats who ran to the Right of our incumbents. Which just goes to show that Conservatism wins everytime it is contrasted with the alternative. It wins even when the advocate of it is a Democrat and he or she can point to where his or her Republican opponent has parted ways with his espoused conservative principles.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my fellow Redstaters, we have a serious problem on our hands here.

It's a fact that incumbents, by and large, are very difficult to dislodge. But here's a fact, Democrat incumbents are far more difficult to dislodge than Republican incumbents. Gene Taylor of Mississippi is a Democrat who represents a very Red district and he apparently owns that seat until he falls down dead. Chet Edwards of Texas seems to have that same hold on his district. Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Earl Pomeroy, Stephanie Herseth, Max Baucus, etc. are Democrats representing extremely Red states and districts if you go by 2004 numbers. But we consistently fail to even just recruit good challengers for them. And what is worse is that they vote with the liberal majority of their party far more often than Republicans representing Blue states and districts vote with the conservative majority of the Republican Party.

A major reason, I believe, is the simple fact that the Press Corps, even in the Reddest of states are largely composed of liberals who would play a big part in enabling their Democrat Senators and Representatives to get away with playing the Conservative at home and liberal in Washington DC. Tom Daschle's career would not nearly have been so spectacular if the Sioux City Argus Falls Leader (SD's largest and most influential broadsheet) not been a campaign asset for him throughout his life in politics. Republicans representing Blue districts and states don't have that luxury. They cannot vote with the majority of their fellow Republicans as often as Democrats in Red states vote with their party's majority without the major newspaper(s) that service their district/states starting to fulminate in both the editorial and news pages that they are "too Right-wing" or "too Conservative" for their constituents.

Please let us not make the mistake of underestimating the power of the Press again. You have to congratulate the reporters,editors and producers of the New York Times, Washington Post, Phiadelphia Inquirer, Houston Chronicle, et al, CNN and the networks, for this is as much their victory as it is the Democratic National Committee's. All that the 7th made them realize is that all the exposures of national security programs, all the front paging of unfalsifiable charges of racism against George Allen, the deliberate burying of information that contradicted the BushLied^TM narrative, the hyping of Joe Wilson, etc. were all worth it. It helped them win back their Congressional majority after twelve years in the wilderness, under a San Francisco Democrat no less.

This would be the most extended honeymoon period in history - it started a month before the election and would probably continue until well into 2009 if the Democrats retain their majorities - which they're most likely to do. After twelve years, the Fourth Estate is not going to give up its majority that easily. They are going to do everything they can to prevent a replay of 1994 for the forseeable future. If possible they will cover up Democratic malfeasance, and if indeed they are forced to cover it, they will do everything they can to isolate the rest of the party from the wrongdoer. Until they can no longer get away with it, Democratic scandals would be covered in the back pages and the story would be dropped after three days. This is in contrast with what happens when a Republican is caught falling short of ethical, moral or legal standards - it's on the front page, it will be in the headlines for weeks and "investigative" pieces with tendentious headlines and phrasing would be written exploring whether or not the entire GOP leadership knew about it and aided and abetted the miscreant.

So when it comes to the Press, we can no longer afford to take the attitude that we should just sit back, relax and wait for them to implode. It ain't gonna happen without us helping them out.

But the endpoint, when it comes right down to it, is that we LOST. It's time for us to eat crow, savor it, add some hot sauce to get it all down. Let's allow them the chance to gloat and offer our congratulations anyway even if they'll accept it with poor grace.

But we should remember that one of the worst things we can do is to emulate the Kossacks after they lost in 2002 and 2004, by attacking the integrity, intelligence and honor of fellow Americans because they rejected our candidates. I've already seen far too much of that, especially in this thread (Sorry KyleH). We should respectfully accept their decision, accept that they made it from the best information available to them and from that information, they found us wanting.

Another really bad mistake for us to make would be to sit back and wait for Pelosi and her troops to make a mistake in pushing Far Left legislation and expecting that to propel the GOP back into the majority. I'm no soothsayer but quite frankly, it would be ridiculous for us to assume it's going to happen that way. It is not that I'm saying that they would not push Far Left legislation, but you have to remember who would be informing the American people about the details of the legislation.

The main issue is for us to consider where to go from here on in. I see these major areas in which we have to concentrate on and improve:

[1] We need a return to first principles: Reaganism all the way. And while getting back in touch with our fiscal conservatism, let us not listen to those urging us to commit political suicide by throwing aside social conservatives who, contrary to popular belief are not all religious, or even interested in establishing a "theocracy" in the United States. One can be opposed to gay marriage and not be an adherrent of any religion. One can be pro-life without actually believing in God and one can be opposed to embryonic stem cell research without it being a directive from his Mosque, Church or Synagogue. And besides, why exactly is it considered unacceptable for someone to allow his or her religion inform his choice on who or what to vote for? Note that Democrats for all elected offices around the country since 2002 have loudly proclaimed their belief in God and campaigned in Churches perhaps even more so than Republicans e.g. Harold Ford.

[2] We need better leadership: We need to clean up our image; I hereby nominate Mike Pence/Marsha Blackburn for House Minority Leader, John Shadegg/Marsha Blackburn for House Minority Whip and Bobby Jindal/Jeb Hensarling for House Republican Conference chairman. I also nominate for your consideration Mitch McConnell as Senate Minority Leader (let us just hope his spine does not spaghettize - please Lord no more of this "Senate Collegiality" BS), John Cornyn/Jon Kyl as Whip works for me and John Sununu/Jeff Sessions would serve as Senate Republican Conference Chairman. I concur with the Directors and I enthuthiastically support Michael Steele for RNC Chairman. I doubt there's a better salesman for the GOP than Michael Steele today.

[3] We need better recruitment: This where Redstate.com as a Republican political entity can come in handy. In fact, this is where the entire Dextrosphere can have the influence over our party that the Kossacks and DUers have. We should play a big part in identifying and nominating candidates for races across the country. I believe this website should emulate FreeRepublic in one way and have sub-sites for each state i.e. md.redstate.com, ia.redstate.com, nh.redstate.com, etc. and a nominations sub-site where Redstaters can submit the names of local politicians, Republican activists or just plain good people who they think can run for any race, whether local, state or Federal and win it for the GOP. Our search should start now.

[4] We need a major image overhaul: This is where someone like Michael Steele as Republican National Committee Chairman comes in handy. He ran a magnificent and nearly flawless campaign. Unfortunately he was saddled with a party that has lost its way on the national stage, a President of his party that refuses to stand up for himself, in a year when the GOP forgot how to be a political party and allowed itself to be tainted in the eyes of the American public. And yet Michael Steele was able to garner 45% of the vote in a state in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by 2 to 1 and the President is as close to hated as it could get. If that is not impressive enough, he was delightfully creative and smart enough to wipe the floor with somebody who has been in politics for three times more years than him. We need to connect with African Americans and Hispanics. We need to have somebody who can make us look good and from his campaign Michael Steele understands that and knows to win good will.

[5] We need to remember how to play this game: The Press may have been carrying the Democrats' water and we may have been blindsided by Foley and maybe this was just the mid-term where the President's party suffers. But that doesn't change the fact that we lost to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean and Arthur Sulzberger. Enough said.