In November Election . . . Why GOP Candidates May Not Get Resounding Wins

By DEXTER DUGGAN

Actress Julia Roberts starred in the 1999 movie Runaway Bride, about a recurringly hesitant wife-to-be who keeps leaving her grooms cold at the altar.
Was the movie just re-released?
There’s Mr. Conservative Activist at the head of the church aisle for the 2014 election, waiting to tie the knot. He still believes in traditional rules and “social issues” like opposite-sex weddings. But coy Miss GOP has disappeared again, white lace flapping.
Big, bad judges are inventing all kinds of weird rules these days, including creating homosexual “marriage” as a constitutional mandate. Tremulous Miss GOP doesn’t want to offend anyone, left, right, or in-between. But if she absolutely has to disappoint, she’d rather do it to the faithful guy who brung her than some judicial bar-fly who holds her in contempt.
No wonder Miss GOP is so clumsy at getting hitched and moving into that darling White House she wants on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here we are, the honeymoon all set to begin after Republicans wipe out the Democratic Party of the wildly unpopular, widely rejected Barack Obama in the November 4 general election. But Miss GOP just can’t get comfortable over a future with the one who trusted her.
The general expectation was that voters, fully fed up with toxic Obama, would be irresistibly attractive for Republican candidates in the midterm elections. But in poll after poll, state after state, significant GOP candidates often are ahead of Democratic rivals only by a few percentage points, if at all.
Polls can be wrong, of course, and there can be variables like third-party candidates siphoning off votes. Also, as Election Day draws near, voters may stop dawdling over making a decision. But, with the election just on the horizon, how to explain little ripples on the seashore when there should be cascades and tsunamis?
Try this for a reason. Voters are fully fed up with Obama, but they don’t think they’d get much of a reward by flocking to his foes. Miss GOP just gives them a little peck on the cheek when they were expecting a big smooch. Why bother to put the ring on her finger after all? Just stay home and watch football.
The sudden arrival of judicially imposed “same-sex marriage” in state after state this year, even after it was rejected by repeated popular vote, provides the latest example of a tepid response by an uninspiring Republican establishment.
Of course, radical Obama’s political party and media pals cheer wildly for this arrogant assault on the legal system, morality, religion, tradition, and culture. But, from the Republican establishment, an embarrassing silence.
One would think the rapid approach of November elections would energize the national GOP to do all it could to remind voters of how left-wing lawlessness undermines society, with phony “marriage” the latest example. Dream on.
Nervous Nellie trembles at the idea of winning with conservatives. Isn’t there some nice, aging, boring moderate Republican for her ring finger who’ll snooze all the way through the honeymoon?
Commentator and former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee was at wits’ end over the self-imposed GOP surrender. The conservative Daily Signal website headlined on October 14, “Huckabee blasts GOP for failing to defend traditional marriage.”
The site had a video of Huckabee a few days earlier on Fox News reminding his audience that there’s a proper way to enact law, and it’s not by courts inventing it. If people want “same-sex marriage,” “then get the people’s representatives to vote for it, the chief executive to sign it, and then have the courts agree with it,” Huckabee said.
He spoke for legions of Americans when Huckabee declared, “I’m utterly disgusted with fellow Republicans who want to walk away from the issue of judicial supremacy….Grow a spine, show a modicum of knowledge about the way we govern ourselves, and lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way!”
The Christian Post website quoted Huckabee: “I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans, who have abdicated on this issue. If the Republicans want to lose guys like me…just go ahead and abdicate on this issue. And while you are at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter either, because at that point you lose me.”
Both the Christian Post and Fox News Radio said Huckabee said he could go ahead and become an independent voter.
Actually, on October 14 conservative national radio talk host Mark Levin explained why the GOP establishment doesn’t want a strong conservative House majority elected. The untamed right-wingers would want to do their thing.
However, if the House GOP majority can be held down to a “governable” size, Levin continued, then House Speaker John Boehner can call the shots and cut corporatist deals with Obama and his Democrats.
Think of all the GOP establishment’s animosity against patriots of the self-started Tea Party movement, who actually seemed to put the nation’s well-being ahead of Wall Street deal-cutting. Instead, the establishment prefers a cozy, secret get-together at the White House with Obama about imposing elitist “immigration amnesty” unilaterally.
The establishment has its slogans. Then reality exposes where it really stands. When conservatives or traditionalists make a proposal, the establishment cautions them that the time’s just not right.
Don’t upset the apple cart. Don’t do the radical or extreme or far-out. No earthquakes, please. Moderates and independent voters don’t like that frightening kind of stuff. It would take years to prepare people for what you want.
On the other hand, left-wingers jump in hard, with both feet bristling football spikes. Unprecedented abortion on demand legalized nationally overnight. Obamacare rammed through against nationwide majority opposition. Homosexual “marriage” imposed after people from coast to coast voted against it for years. “Amnesty” to be shoved through in any way that Obama can reject majority opinion.
For some reason, the GOP establishment doesn’t bellow, “You liberals have got to back up! You’ve gone way too far. Repeal what you’ve done! The people won’t stand for it.”
Not at all. The establishment says it’s time to surrender and move on to something else. Which also will be surrendered in due course.

Saving Them
From Themselves

As for the issue of ballot security, popular with the public but not with Democrats who know it’d be even harder to win office if they had to do it with a basically accurate vote count:
A person needs a photo ID to check out a library book, enter a security gate, or board an airplane, but that little piece of plastic suddenly becomes monstrously burdensome if a person has to show she’s who she claims to be when exercising the solemn trust of choosing political leaders.
Ballot security would help Republicans, so the establishment doesn’t care about it.
On October 10 national conservative radio talk host Laura Ingraham urged timorous Republicans to come out of hiding on issues like amnesty, abortion, “same-sex marriage,” and middle-class wages. That would make them stronger candidates, Ingraham said. “I’m trying to save you guys from yourselves.”
But how much can you save the limp and listless?