Also, the GOP establishment bringing out old RINO retreads like Tommy Thompson and George Allen didn’t help, either.

Wethal on November 22, 2012 at 2:35 PM

That “retread” in Virginia beat the “Tea Party” candidate by 42 points.

Virginia wasn’t really the problem. It’s FIVE seats we should have had but wasted the opportunities in Colorado, Delaware, Nevada, Missouri, and Indiana in the past two years. In every one of those cases, the candidate winning the primary was the one polling WORST against the Democrat.

These political “purists” are the best thing to happen to the Democrats since Watergate.

crosspatch on November 22, 2012 at 2:13 PM

Akin won in a three-way primary because the Dems were running ads through a PAC pumping up his “conservative” creds because they wanted to run against him in the general. Akin’s wife was apparently a driving force behind his entering the primary (She was tired of just being a House member’s wife, and wanted to move on up to being a senator’s wife), and staying in.

Huckabee also contributed by supporting AkIn (if only to show that Huck’s endorsement could mean as much as Palin’s.) I don’t doubt Huckster kept privately telling Akin to stay in even after the “magic spermicidal secretions” junk science blooper because it was “God’s will” that Akin won the primary. (God doesn’t sometimes teach you humility, and graciously stepping aside?)

As for Mourdock, he might have won had Lugar even endorsed him. Lugar and his IN supporters refused to. Mourdock had promised to support Lugar if Lugar won the primary, but Lugar would not make the same pledge.

O’Donnell was a weak candidate, to be sure, but again, Castle refused to endorse her. The state GOP only reluctantly did about a week or so later after the primary. Some advice from the state party might have stopped the awful “witch” ad, and told he to just laugh it off as the usual college hanging otu with some of hte odder people.

RINOs have to be held to the rule conservatives have been required to follow: everyone endorses the winner of the primary.

1. ANY Republican candidate for Senate in MO besides Aiken. He was the weakest candidate we had in polling against McCaskill.

2. Sharon Angle vs. Sue Lowden in Nevada. Lowden would have beaten Reid. Angle was the candidate Reid wanted to win the primary because he knew he could beat her.

3. Mike Castle vs. Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. Castle was an ex-Governor of the state and very popular. He would have won.

4. Lugar vs. Mourdock in Indiana. Stupidest move in 100 years. You don’t “cleanse” your party when you are in the minority, you wait until you have a solid majority to do that.

5. Norton vs. Buck in Colorado. Again, a weak “tea party” candidate hands the seat the Republicans should have had to the Democrats.

The party that is in the minority in the Senate often sees members cross over to vote with the other party. Ace had a graphic of that behavior on his website in the past year. It doesn’t matter who is in the majority, R or D, 99% of crossing over is done from the minority party to the majority. If you want to STOP the crossing over, first get a majority. This seeking of political purity is doing nothing but electing Democrats that will vote against you 100% of the time. It is STUPID. Where would we be today with those 5 easily takeable seats that we basically HANDED to the Democrats on a silver platter? We would have a tied Senate rather than 55-45 Democrat majority.

These political “purists” are the best thing to happen to the Democrats since Watergate.

If Romney could not landslide 0bama it may be best 0bama won for this very reason

Sekhmet on November 22, 2012 at 12:58 PM

This is something I noted months prior to the election: all of our candidates were weak, and if the inevitable establishment candidate, Romney, were to win, it might only be by a small enough margin (assuming Obama’s fully negative campaign) that he’d have no mandate, he’d take a pounding in the media for not being (D) enough for their tastes, and he’d have an uneventful and difficult presidency as a result of a newly-energized liberal base. The post-election totals pretty much confirm this fact.

In light of this, why waste too much time worrying about trying to remove the albatross around the Democratic party’s neck? After 8 years of Obama, the next Democratic candidate is going to have to run away from his record, and by that time, people are going to want….wait for it…

…change.

mintycrys on November 22, 2012 at 12:52 PM

Gotta agree with you on that. What has kept liberals from lionizing Carter for all these years was the fact Carter got stomped in 1980. If Romney could not landslide 0bama it may be best 0bama won for this very reason

Is it because Obama was re-elected by a small margin with far smaller vote totals than his previous win after waging a campaign of pure negativity against a weak but superior challenger?

Obama has NO mandate whatsoever, and he has to understand this much. If he doesn’t pretend to want to placate the right and governs like he has a mandate, the 2014 electorate is going to hand him a 2010 redux, which is something the Democrats might not be able to recover from anytime soon.

People are down on this election, but this really is the optimal outcome in the long-term: a Romney presidency would’ve been destroyed by the Democrat-media complex regardless of what prosperity he might’ve brought and racial hatred and resentment would’ve been stirred up by his election. This, on the other hand, gives America four more years to realize exactly how much they dislike a President who was enjoying underwater polling before he dragged Romney into the gutter with him, and once you go into the gutter, you don’t come out of it. He sank to uncharted depths to win re-election at the cost of any goodwill from rivals, which puts us in a fantastic 2014 and 2016 position considering the rising stars set to shine on the GOP stage come next election. Even the Democrats realize this, which is why they’re already working on Rubio.

Seriously, imagine where the Democrats would be today if we’d had 8 years of Jimmy Carter.

He told me he never heard that before, but fortunately we have a lot more to work with here than in NK.

It works out great in good economic times. Until it kills the economy.

Progressive policies flourish best in times of robust economic growth,

“The problem with socialism is that sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”

-Margaret Thatcher