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Erick Erickson

No

The darndest thing is I’m listening to all this handwringing and most of it is coming from a lot of people who’ve never really been conservative or supported conservatism. These people hated our ideas and values when we were winning and now choose this opportunity to sell us out the way they’ve always wanted. The conservative herd is headed off a cliff led by a consultant class that would otherwise now be swimming in pools full of dollar bills like Scrooge McDuck.

These people would have us believe that we must make fundamental changes to draw in new voters. We must exile social conservatives to bring in young people and single women. We must exile fiscal conservatives to bring in hispanic and black voters. With whatever is left from having exiled both, these geniuses would have us believe the Democrats in whose camp these groups already find themselves will just sit back and let it happen.

The Republican Party will never out Democrat the Democrats. Conservatives will never out liberal Liberals. We should not try.

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JadeNYU on November 12, 2012 at 2:15 PM

Perfect…

d1carter on November 12, 2012 at 2:23 PM

Repeat: it isn’t the policies, it is the ground game.
Future campaigns are going to collect databases of information on potential voters — where they live, if they are registered, which elections they voted in. The winner will be the team that uses this information herd people to the polls with your ticket in hand. All of the platforms and policy positions will only mater for raising funds and getting volunteers.
Deal with it and plan accordingly.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:27 PM

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:27 PM

All that means little if there isn’t a real choice.

Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 2:30 PM

Liberal Lite will never beat Liberal.

Akzed on November 12, 2012 at 2:34 PM

Republicans aren’t painted as waging a war on women because a couple candidates made comments about rape that were either dumb or twisted by the media (though the seem oddly silent when Democrats are accused of rape (Clinton) or leaving women to die (Kennedy)).

One of the main reasons we’re accused of warring on women is our opposition to the Lily Ledbetter act. Should we abandon our position on requiring people to file complaints within a few years and instead require companies to keep files for decades?

Should we support tax-payer funding for abortions, for birth control, etc?

Should we sign on to the Equal Rights Amendment even though we think what is written is flawed?

Should we fight for so-called equal pay even though countless studies have shown that women that have the same level of education and same amount of time in the workforce as men make, on average, MORE than their male co-workers?

If we start abandoning principles in an effort to gain power, we might as well just sign on with the party that already has the easy formula for gaining power.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with compromising on something small to win on something big, but, right now, a lot of the handwringers are implying we have to give up on entire branches of conservativism in order to appeal to non-conservatives.

Either conservativism is a good idea and has something good to offer people in which case we need to make that case better or it’s just a quaint set of ideas that can sometimes win elections but not any more so lets move on to the next winning set of principles.

JadeNYU on November 12, 2012 at 2:15 PM

On that point, don’t emphasize where you ultimately want a particular issue to go, emphasize what direction you want to take it right now.
Think Social Security and Medicare need to go? Argue making them smaller, more privatized, more state-based. Think abortion is murder? Argue cutting off federal funds and giving the states more discretion.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:34 PM

All that means little if there isn’t a real choice.

Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 2:30 PM

You are blind if you don’t see the choice.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:35 PM

We need advice from one of the most far left leaning commenters here? Heh, me thinks you’re not really all that concerned about the Conservative brand.

hawkdriver on November 12, 2012 at 1:11 PM

Because when I want rational advice to advance the interests of the GOP, I always ask far-left trolls on conservative websites.

Good Solid B-Plus on November 12, 2012 at 1:19 PM

since you guys were so wrong for so long, you may want to reconsider your own wisdom’s worth. you know, what if your left leaning commenter, who was right all along, is right again?

sesquipedalian on November 12, 2012 at 2:40 PM

since you guys were so wrong for so long, you may want to reconsider your own wisdom’s worth. you know, what if your left leaning commenter, who was right all along, is right again?

sesquipedalian on November 12, 2012 at 2:40 PM

There is a difference between “right” and “lucky”.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:43 PM

There is a difference between “right” and “lucky”.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:43 PM

being able to see what’s in front of you has nothing to do with luck.

sesquipedalian on November 12, 2012 at 2:45 PM

Every time a moderate loses, the GOP wants to pitch conservatives over the cliff!

INC on November 12, 2012 at 2:47 PM

Every time a moderate loses, the GOP wants to pitch conservatives over the cliff!

INC on November 12, 2012 at 2:47 PM

They are not our allies, and they are not our friends 70% pf the time.

Every time we allow a progressive to use the GOP to get elected it empowers the democrat party to move further left and still seem reasonable.

astonerii on November 12, 2012 at 2:49 PM

Ronald Reagan on losing the 1964 election:

All of the landslide majority did not vote against the conservative philosophy; they voted against a false image our Liberal opponents successfully mounted. Indeed it was a double false image. Not only did they portray us as advancing a kind of radical departure from the status quo, but they took for themselves a costume of comfortable conservatism. Read again their campaign fiction and you will find their normal flamboyant Liberalism hidden under the protective coloration of “the great society,” or as Hubert Horatio Humphrey (who can’t ask what time it is without conducting a filibuster) put it: “We don’t want a planned society — we want society planning.

INC on November 12, 2012 at 2:49 PM

The political arena is in the ring of ideas and vision.

When Mr. Romney was running for president four years ago, he said in an interview that the first thing he would do in the White House would be to bring in some business consultants. In other words, Washington is a management problem.

This is a profoundly mistaken Republican notion that goes back at least to Herbert Hoover . . . More recently, Republicans like Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and John McCain may have been more accomplished in the political realm but all struggled with what Bush 41 famously called the “vision thing.” Time and again, they’ve been defeated by Democrats proclaiming such things as the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, and “hope and change.”

The Great Communicator Ronald Reagan, who spoke mostly in moral terms, was the magnificent exception. He understood that Washington is not a management problem; it is a political problem. Everything the government does is necessarily political, because governments decide not only who gets what, but why. These choices define a candidate’s politics, but they must be conceived and expressed in terms of moral priorities.

Political language is inherently moral, not managerial. It must convey visions, not just plans. It must explain why some things are good and others bad.

Instincts are never enough. You need to have thought about politics in the philosophical sense to know what is going on. . . .
If you cannot articulate the cause for which you are fighting in moral terms, you will lose. . . .

INC on November 12, 2012 at 2:53 PM

Erickson is right on this. We can’t give away more stuff than the Democrats. What we CAN do is explain to people why the liberal giveaways are a bad idea.

Obama didn’t win on facts or ideas. He won based on excellent campaign management and excellent messaging. The Democrats gave specific reasons to vote to women, youth, seniors, union members, the poor and minorities. With those messages, they were able to get out enough vote to overcome Romney’s advantage in reaching undecideds.

We can do the same thing. Blacks and hispanics are culturally conservative. The youth understand the importance of not mortgaging our future. Seniors understand the need to save entitlement programs for their generation and the next. Women want good jobs, safety and security.

And instead of saying the opposition is all basically nice, we need to make it clear that they don’t care at all about the poor. They only care about their own power.

hawksruleva on November 12, 2012 at 2:54 PM

You are blind if you don’t see the choice.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:35 PM

I see the choice just fine. But then again I pay attention all the time,many do not. Millions who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Obama again couldn’t see the difference clearly. Which is why they didn’t vote for Romney either.

Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 2:54 PM

Future campaigns are going to collect databases of information on potential voters — where they live, if they are registered, which elections they voted in. The winner will be the team that uses this information herd people to the polls with your ticket in hand. All of the platforms and policy positions will only mater for raising funds and getting volunteers.
Deal with it and plan accordingly.

Count to 10 on November 12, 2012 at 2:27 PM

One campaign in the present did this. Not surprisingly, they won.

hawksruleva on November 12, 2012 at 2:54 PM

It’s funny how Erickson thinks he’s a conservative.

Dante on November 12, 2012 at 2:55 PM

The first battle that has to be won is in the media. The Treasonous media must be made to understand how they perpetuate division in our society by not challenging the “fair share” memes. Riots when we collapse will hopefully illustrate that, since so many of them are in that “evil rich” group.

The second battle is wherever the majority of people are takers. Get them school choice, get them understanding we can’t afford it, get them to see that the Dem path leads to the collapse of the country that makes them free to make horrible rap music, tweet profanity and be “themselves”. Also get them to understand that they are just people, black, white, hispanic, are just as enslaved under gov’t dependency as they were in the 1800s.

PastorJon on November 12, 2012 at 2:59 PM

They lost me. I do not even think I would vote for Palin running as a Republican. Even if she won, they would so totally back stab her to death that nothing would get done.

astonerii on November 12, 2012 at 2:15 PM

You’re pretty much where I am at this point.

Doomberg on November 12, 2012 at 3:00 PM

The first battle that has to be won is in the media.

The second battle is wherever the majority of people are takers.

PastorJon on November 12, 2012 at 2:59 PM

You’d have better luck doing these in reverse. The media isn’t some liberal monolith. It’s a bunch of people telling stories about the world around them. Sure, they’re mostly liberal, and their stories reflect that. But if you can educate everyone, then liberal reporters will start having less liberal slants.

Jon Stossell is the perfect example. He told stories the same way everyone else did. But the more he learned, the more he realized that the assumptions underlying his stories were false. We just need to make conservative messages easier to access.

hawksruleva on November 12, 2012 at 3:11 PM

It really is not that hard.

Any young person knows that he doesn’t rely on government snail-mail anymore because there are a dozen more effective ways to send documents and communicate with your friends and family. There are also a dozen more effective ways that the non-government sector can provide aid to the poor, provide decent health care, make education affordable, and even build infrastructure. We have to show them that it isn’t compassionate to employ an army of bureaucrats to suck up all the money making 6-figure salaries doing nothing while people keep starving.

It’s also possible to convince young voters that a Leviathan state will inevitably take away their rights to free speech and free expression. I got one young musisican to vote Republican this year by explaining to him that Obama had a guy thrown in jail for making a video that caused some riots in Egypt. If he could throw someone in jail for a video he didn’t like, he could throw someone in jail for writing a song or making a movie he didn’t like.

Young people have bveen watching dystopian-future movies and video games for their whole lives. We can show them that a liberal Leviathan state is much more likely to produce that future than a smaller state wuith freer markets and free expression.

rockmom on November 12, 2012 at 3:27 PM

since you guys were so wrong for so long, you may want to reconsider your own wisdom’s worth. you know, what if your left leaning commenter, who was right all along, is right again?

sesquipedalian on November 12, 2012 at 2:40 PM

Obama won. How is that germane to you ever being “right” about anything?

Good Solid B-Plus on November 12, 2012 at 3:29 PM

rockmom on November 12, 2012 at 3:27 PM

That was not why he was put in jail. So you lied and used propaganda to get a republican vote? Not going to go well if that guy does any research and finds out the real reason the guy went to jail was because he broke his probation, and making the video brought the attention of the law onto him. Kind of like saying the crack dealer went to jail over a broken tail light…

astonerii on November 12, 2012 at 3:38 PM

I’m liking EricK Erickson much more now that the election is over. why could they not have been this reasonable back in the summer of 2011?

alwaysfiredup on November 12, 2012 at 3:49 PM

rockmom on November 12, 2012 at 3:27 PM

I like it. There are a lot of ways a subtle message of liberty can be carried in popular culture. The democrats are pro-bureaucracy right now, 180 degrees from where they were in the 1960s. Its a club that can be used to beat them.

alwaysfiredup on November 12, 2012 at 3:53 PM

You can help along the way Darwin. What did you pay into and what do you qualify to get back. Check out all the programs you qualify for and take it. Every last bit you have earned and qualify for in entitlements.

hawkdriver on November 12, 2012 at 1:13 PM

Also, increase the exemptions on your W4 to make sure as little as possible is withheld from each paycheck. Why give Obama an interest free loan for most of the year?

Night Owl on November 12, 2012 at 4:03 PM

Either conservativism is a good idea and has something good to offer people in which case we need to make that case better or it’s just a quaint set of ideas that can sometimes win elections but not any more so lets move on to the next winning set of principles.

JadeNYU on November 12, 2012 at 2:15 PM

I mostly agree.

But my principles are just that.

I will not compromise one nanometer on abortion.

Immigration is a different ball of wax. I do not think we need to compromise on it, but if a Solomon can cut that baby in half, I am certainly willing to listen.

davidk on November 12, 2012 at 4:08 PM