Here's a commentary by an Esquire magazine editorialist analyzing the Republicans' greatest disaster of Since November, 2012.
After widely acknowledging that one of the keys to their loss was because of their inability to attract minority -- particularly Latino -- voters, they screwed the pooch in immigration reform.
Interesting read.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Rebranding_Fail
JUN 14, 2013
The Failure Of Republican Rebranding
By Charles P. Pierce
You may recall that the Republican party took something of a hiding in the last election. In the immediate aftermath of the massive systems failure that brought down the Romneybot 2.0, the Republicans took themselves off for some soul-searching as regards the reasons why pieces of the mechanism were strewn all over the landscape. It was determined that the Republicans had massive problems attracting Latino voters, a massive problem attracting young voters, and a gender gap the size of the Dardanelles. The Republicans announced, loudly, that they would work as hard as they could to remedy these situations that, if they weren't addressed, would reduce the dependable Republican electorate to one angry old white man in Council Bluffs. The Republicans, we were told, would "rebrand" themselves for the new era.
Well, what a week it's been for that.
In the Senate, 41 Republican senators voted in favor of a plan that was devised by Senator Charles Grassley on the premise that the poison-pill inserted into the immigration-reform legislation by Senator John Cornyn wasn't poisonous enough. Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the party's putative leader in the effort to "take back" this issue, announced that he would kill his own bill if any provisions were included that acknowledged the LGBT community. This, of course, is a two-fer. Not only has Rubio found a way to oppose his own bill, but also he's found a way to cement with young voters the party's image as a bunch of geezers caught amid a mass sexual panic over issues on which young voters believe that so many of their elders are plainly nuts.
Meanwhile, for you ladies of the company, the House passed a plainly unconstitutional anti-abortion bill while Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona got stupid in public about rape again. (Wasn't Point No. One on the Republican rebranding on women's issues Don't Be Stupid About Rape In Public?) In Wisconsin, the legislature passed -- and presidentially hopeful goggle-eyed homunculus Scott Walker signed -- a mandatory ultrasound bill along the lines of the one that has done so much for presidentially hopeful transvaginalist Bob McDonnell in Virginia.
Well done, folks. This is like rebranding cholera as dysentery.
It is true that the Republicans want "the issue" more than they want actually to do anything about it. Moreover, the Democrats continue to seem bumfuzzled about how to exploit that gap politically to their own advantage. Moreover, again, the president seems still to value "progress" for its own sake, which is why everyone is so optimistic about meaningful immigration reform without ever mentioning the fact that any attempt at it has to pass the House, where a good part of the Republican caucus would light its own hair on fire before it actually would do anything about it. But if you want to see why the rebranding is never going to work, check out where everyone who is anyone in Republican politics is gathering this week -- at something called the Faith And Freedom Coalition convention in Washington, D.C.
This is where the faith-based camouflage for the oligarchical economic agenda gets designed. It's also where the schizophrenia that is guaranteed to undermine any attempt at rebranding the Republican image gets embedded even more firmly into the party's brain. They can't win with these people -- at least on the national level -- and they can't win without them. There isn't a Republican politician with national ambitions anywhere in the country who could spurn this event. For all the talk about the effectiveness of the "Sister Souljah moment," you won't ever see a "Gary Bauer Moment" from a Republican politician. Ain't happening now. Ain't happening tomorrow.
Take, for example, the speech given by 2012 show-horse Rick Santorum, as recounted by Tiger Beat On The Potomac, in which Santorum -- and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick this man is? -- kicked the scattered debris of the Romneybot 2.0 all over the lot.
"One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single-not a single -factory worker went out there," Santorum told a few hundred conservative activists at an "after-hours session" of the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington. "Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn't care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage."
I remember that night as being the most spectacular exercise in public prevarication it ever has been my misfortune to attend. (That was the night that Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin explained how the federal government had no hand in building Oklahoma, which caused me to flunk Governor Fallin in both history and deportment.) But, no matter, Santorum is arguing for more rebranding -- to case the party of corporate oligarchy, the party that nominated G.I. Luvmoney for president, as the Friend Of The Working Man. This would be silly enough. (The janitors, waitresses, and people who worked in that company helped build it because they were unionized, which I don't believe was Santorum's point here.) But he's doing it in front of an audience that cares more about unborn fetuses than it does about 55-year old unemployed steelworkers, and that cares more about keeping gay people unmarried than it does about keeping straight people employed. Until such time as a national Republican politician feels free to blow these people off, and free to speak candidly about why he's doing it, I will, alas, despair of the rebranding effort.
The Failure of Republican Rebranding
