“We have become what the left was in the ’70s — insular”

Ha ha, okay, this is kinda funny actually.

To a degree this is true, the die hard social conservative wing of the party is especially guilty of living in a bubble. When you force candidates that are so extreme, so inarticulate, and so unlikable that you cannot even win a seat in Missouri against a wildly unpopular incumbent, THEN you should know you have a problem.

The thing is, the left is stuck in their own little bubble, and its actually far more encompassing than any self delusion occurring on the Republican side.

The mistake the right made this year, is that it tried to run a base turnout strategy with a candidate that didn’t excite the base. This is not the fault of the candidate, and to be fair the Romney campaign instead tried to win by forming a center right coalition that would outnumber any base turnout the Democrats could muster. It would have potentially worked, had the Independent vote been as large of a part of the electorate as in 2008. Instead, the tone of both sides of the campaign prompted independents to stay home in large numbers.

The problem is, these two strategies are mutually exclusive. The language typically used to excite the base, typically turns off the center, and trying to win the center turns off any distrustful elements of the base.

Despite that however, the democrats SHOULD be sounding warning bells. Mitt Romney, for all his competence, was running behind Obama almost the very moment the primaries ended. He was broke, being massively outspent, and came out of a particularly brutal primary that left the Republican party divided. Worst yet, Romney didn’t catch on at all, until a month until election day, leaving him next to no time to make up the deficit.

Yes despite all this, and despite getting a boost from a Hurricane a few days before the election, Romney came within a hairs width of getting the votes he needed, in the states he needed, to win the Presidency. Worse yet, Romney was favored on most of the issues rated most important, and in the end only lost narrowly because Obama was more likable.

In other words, Obama won because of superior strategy over the opposition party, but lost almost across the board on issues.

This puts the whole democratic party into a poor position. They only have two years before Obama begins making a quick transition into a lame duck President. After that point, opponents lose any motivation to work with Obama, and allies slowly pull back their own support to protect their own election bids.

After that point, the democrats have a problem. With so little time to accomplish anything, Obama’s second term is almost guaranteed to look like or worse than his first term. That means that whomever democrats run next, is likely to be less charismatic, and will have to defend a platform that will likely be even more unpopular two years from now.

Basically, Democrats will soon be in a position to learn whether their agenda can survive without a presumably charismatic, historical politician like Obama propping it up.

History, indicates that they cannot. 2010 demonstrated that without Obama on the ticket, liberalism lost soundly. Even numerous bad candidates were not enough to keep Republicans from taking the House and making solid gains in the Senate.

This thought should terrify Democrats. The fact of the matter is, America has been under crises for the last four years, and most Americans know it. Therefore, the first party that can successful deal with these problems is likely to reap massive rewards.

Rather than doing that however, Barack Obama insists on playing a partisan and blaming the lack of movement on others. Which means, that Republicans have an excellent chance of solving these problems, and reaping the rewards, the next time they stumble into office.

If Republicans learn from their mistakes at all this year, they have an excellent chance at doing just that.

WolvenOne on November 12, 2012 at 4:10 PM

PS: I really am tired of all the Republicans complaining about how insular the party is. Republicans actually, CARE, about African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and so on and so forth. We just aren’t very good at demonstrating this.

WolvenOne on November 12, 2012 at 4:32 PM