Apparently nothing. A lot has been
written and discussed on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and News Channels
on the election post-mortem, particularly what went wrong with the
GOP. We learned that women, Asians, Hispanics, non-white males, young
people and basically everyone other than (old) white males hate the
GOP. Well, according to all of the pundits anyway. And maybe “hate”
is too strong of a word...well, actually, not really. So what happens
when you get your butt kicked? You review the tape. You see what
mistakes you made. Did we not expect this particular play to happen?
And if we did, why did we still screw that play up anyway? That's
exactly what the GOP has done. At least that's what they've said
they've done – they have supposedly reviewed the tape. And others
have done it for them as well. And what do you do after a bad loss,
you fix the mistakes you made and improve on the things you did well.
The only problem is that you really didn't do much right. You lost
because you had a lot of mistakes. A LOT.
So, what has the GOP done to rectify
their problems? Let's see. Leadership is the same. Preibus will
probably be RNC Chairman again. Their message – whatever that is
– is not getting out. They are losing the PR battle once again. On
one hand they talk a good game about reaching out to Hispanics, which
they NEED to do if they ever want to win a national election, and
pretty soon if they want to win in solid Red states that will soon be
in play – like my state, Georgia. But, on the other hand, you have
Ann Coulter going off on Hispancs as being lazy among other
despicable things, and in my state, Georgia HB87 is moving forward
after being stuck in court, and you actually have the Republicans in
the Golden Dome giddy about it. Nice job on the Hispanic Outreach GOP. Excelente.
And now on to the Fiscal Cliff. The GOP
leadership in the House, and Boehner specifically, is losing the PR battle. Purging the conservative voices from committee leadership positions is not helping the conservative cause. In fact, #FireBoehner has been a top trending hashtag on Twitter since his purge of fiscal conservative House members (Rep. Justin Amash and Rep. Tim Huelskamp) from the important Budget and Financial Services committees. President Obama is enjoying approval ratings not seen since the capture and death of Osama Bin Laden. An ABC News-Washington Post poll
released Tuesday indicted that nearly half of Americans approve of
Obama's handling of the negotiations versus the quarter of
respondents who approved of Boehner's. And in a Wall Street Journal/NBC survey released late Wednesday, three-quarters
of Americans say they would accept raising taxes on the wealthy to
avoid the cliff. Here's the thing though, raising taxes on the "rich" (successful) does not solve the nation's huge $16 trillion debt and chronic budget deficits.
Obama refers to Clinton-era tax rates, yet we hear nothing from the GOP requesting Clinton-era spending in return. Balance, as defined in the President’s plan, consists of $4 in tax increases up front for every $1 in loosely defined spending cuts promised down the road. We have a spending problem in Washington and the President's plan simply does nothing to address this. Nice job on the improved messaging GOP. Not.
So, again I will ask the question what
did the GOP learn from the 2012 Election? Nada.
