Election 2012: Welcome to Liberal America and the Fall of the G.O.P.

This past Saturday, I predicted, on my Facebook page, the president's re-election by a margin of 49 percent and 290 electoral votes. It was a good thing I wasn't betting, because I was off by 42 of the latter.

I have been a registered Republican since 1998, when I first voted, in essence supporting the impeachment of President Bill Clinton that year. This time around, I championed Barack Obama's removal from office for myriad reasons, but my hope was well contained.

This loss has less to do with Obama than with the nature of today's GOP. Political Science 101 speaks to the "incumbent advantage" electorally: if polling has two candidates tied, then chances are the win goes to the present office holder. The GOP had completely unraveled about two years into the G.W. Bush administration, and has yet to recover as we well witnessed overnight this past Tuesday. It was, indeed, a shelacking. Laura Ingraham has said for months that given these near-dire economic and fiscal conditions, the GOP may as well not exist if it cannot manage to win now. But even she now admits that the widely-perceived failures of the second Bush administration -- including foreign policy -- shook the elephants to humiliating defeat.

So now it's my turn. This is not a dissertation, but a brief run-down of the points of revision needed to the GOP platform.

I- Forget the sentimental, Regnery Publishing-inspired reminiscing about Ronald Reagan and sanctimonious patriotism. Instead, style the GOP after right-wing, european coalitions. When they say they want austerity, they mean it. When they want to cut spending, it isn't to defund one program in order to bloat another (this includes "national security").

If they have to raise taxes on seven-figure earners in order to prevent the outsource of money printing itself to China, they'll hold their noses and do it to get every available dime to balance the budget. Even if it means going back up to former Clinton or Reagan administration tax levels for high wealth holders. Free enterprise flew in the 1980s and 90s, and they did it in Canada to balance their budget in the mid 90s, along with strong reductions in expenditures: now that country boasts a stronger economy than the emerging Mexico to the south. So why not repeat what worked?

How is a slight tax hike on super-high earners ($1 million per year and above) mutually exclusive with cutting the budget by ten percent? The budget mess, which would otherwise include alternate GOP hikes in military expenditures, is what truly threatens to take down the economy, not even in the long run. Listen to today's GOP, and anything other than a tax reduction is blasphemous. The mantra is that we cannot raise taxes "now" with about 8 percent unemployment. But that has been the same argument put forward even in the "good times" at 6 percent or less.

II-Forget mass intervention for Isreal. Why mind it when most Jewish people, with about 70 percent voting for Obama, very much mind you in the worst sort of way? If the 70 percent for Obama in 2012 represents a proportional decline of the Jewish vote from 2008, it is surely with the economy in mind, foremost.

Of course, the real championing of Israel's military interests is so Pastor Hagee and his tele-mega-church in Texas can finally have rapture with Jesus. But the evangelical vote will go to the GOP no matter what, given Obama's socially liberal excesses. Pledging to (nuclear war for) Isreal -- a nation not headed for bankruptcy like the U.S. -- with its untold costs in blood and livlihood, deeply damages the cause. So would Iran's oil wells pay for a war the same way Iraq's did the last time?

III-Get the domestic jobs agenda straight. We hear of 23 million workers un- or under-employed. And 30 million more Americans on food stamps under Obama's first term. Both are put forth as evidence of a bad economy and Obama's epic failures, according to the official Romney electoral platform.

Yet, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin repeatedly excoriated the young adult Occupy protesters, multiple times, to "get showered" and "go get jobs" instead of "whining." John Stossel, the televised Fox News liberterian who often coalitions with the GOP on economic policy, did a whole program segment on "all the jobs" within a short radius of the Manhattan welfare office. This was after he patronizingly questioned the recipients in line as to why they were even there. See an earlier, similar episode of this sort of thing below:





The witty insight. With all those jobs and cable channels, why not give the president another term for delivering (or preserving) this kind of prosperity still unknown much of the world over? To the average, non-ideological independent voter, it makes sense to do so. In essense, the message becomes that those 30 million more food stamp moochers don't really need the "help" with all of the economic opportunity Obama says he's creating. And these jobs are not located far from the food stamp office, either! But at the same time, the entire conservative platform today professes that Obama didn't create these very sorts of oppotunities in any gainful abundance.

Get my point? If you're a hard GOP-er who swallows Sean Hannity rhetoric hook, line and sinker every night, then probably not. Is it truly the job of the president to create more jobs? Or is it really a matter of personal self-reliance to find, or create them for yourself?

Either way, it's this sort of nonsense that prevents people from voting for you. It's highly contradictory and sanctimonious to suggest that the vast number of "dependants" are so out of personal sloth and gluttony, while still opposing a president on the basis of failing to deliver "opportunity" for enough individuals and families. As much as modern conservatism is aimed at "the bottom line," in practice it's really often based in emotions and more self-righteous moralizing.

IV-Get "prosperity" straight: Many immigrants and urban residents pulled for the Dems in even greater numbers this time around, despite the awful economy. But what is the GOP's alternative for prosperity? Under Bush, there was private sector job growth: many $9 an hour jobs, sans benefits, in the wake of losses in the millions of gainful, blue-collar manufacturing positions to the third world. This led to the rise in the belief of the necessary four-year post secondary diploma. Now, scores of young adults, graduates and non-graduated drop outs alike, are crippled by heavy debt and long-delayed adult launches.

Instead, what we have is a ghetto mentality that guages our broad electoral viability by what we think of each other at CPAC. Doing things "our way," rather than taking what works from all angles and combining them to outperform the Democratic opposition -- which is radical by Clintonian standards -- has become the crux of GOP values.

First, the watershed was 2006, when Nancy Pelosi was elected House Speaker against the failed record of G.W. Bush. The GOP said then that it would re-tool. Then came the next watershed election of Barack Obama in 2008. It was just a matter of waiting to see "how big" he'd make the federal government before re-canning the same arguments. The 2010 mid-term election can now be cast as a fluke, since modest voter turnout turned the House over to the Republicans.

But what's the rationale now? That Mitt Romney was a defective candidate? We all knew his defects long before heading into this -- his alienating aristocratic priggishness and non-aggressiveness for one -- yet most Fox News pundits bet big on his win last Tuesday. We forget the not-so-distant history of 2004, when G.W. Bush likewise had an abysmal performance in the first debate, against John Kerry. The two had been polling neck and neck for months, for Kerry to concede upon learning of Ohio's electoral results.

At this point, the GOP will have to forget its social causes for the next generation. Obama's inevitable Supreme Court appointees will ferment Row Vs. Wade AND its surely forthcoming gay marriage case. The latter will be legalized nationwide by the Court, with a warmer public reception for it than for legal abortion. So whether the Party goes more "moderate" or "softer," as some insist to win over more single women voters, versus hard right, will fast become a moot point.

Chances are that Obama's second term will be as disastrous as was Bush's, though more on the domestic economic front more than foreign policy (as bad as things look with Libya). As all punditry has stated in recent days, the Party does need fresh voices, but also a few substantive tweaks to its platform. Though so far, the proclamation has been to keep doing what we've been doing, only louder for now on. We all know the classic definition of insanity: Leave the unelectable old tunes of Palin and Gingrich in the dirt.