A guaranteed prediction about this November’s elections: There’ll be a GOP wave. Whether a wave hello or a wave goodbye to additional Republican Party clout is the question.
Waves don’t just stay at tsunami stage. They rise and fall. The GOP fantasy “front-runner” in the 2012 presidential contest, magisterial multimillionaire “moderate” Mitt Romney, couldn’t even defeat the worst president in the history of the nation, the glowering, nose-aloft radical Alinsky Democrat Barack Obama.
By mid-September 2014, there was speculation aplenty about whether the Republicans actually would score stunning results with the voters in the mid-term elections on November 4, as had been expected earlier. They may not if they expect to win in the Romney way, holding a coronation instead of fighting a contest.
Even Romney’s vice-presidential running-mate, Cong. Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, warned at the Washington Examiner on September 22: “This idea of running as a referendum, assuming a wave, assuming you’ve got the wind at your back, assuming with an unpopular president we therefore by default will win, I don’t buy that. I think you’ve gotta give people a reason to vote for you.”
One of the GOP’s perennial problems, of course, is that it’s like the love-starved dog that has to ask a cat to design the perfect dog.
It’d be better to avoid asking your claw-sharpening feline enemy to devise your party’s contours. But that’s the predicament when the dominant paw of the communications media, which drafts the news agenda, would rather have the GOP locked up and tossed away than winning elections.
The cat loves feline, left-wing Democrats. Odds are the cat thinks the dog should become a lot more feline than canine and should love surrendering to and serving the cats.
Whenever the GOP tries to wish away, avoid, or ignore this media problem, it fails to face reality.
No doubt tens of millions of voters are burning with outrage against the grimly lying, lawbreaking, arrogant Obama, who thinks they’re putty to be mashed into whatever shape he pleases. But do these voters have sufficient reason to turn up at the polls and vote Republican?
On September 18, The Hill political news site reported that U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) took an audience question concerning immigration after he gave a speech on boosting the economy at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. Boehner reflexively cranked up the usual establishment GOP jabber that voters have every reason to fear.
“I think immigration reform would help our economy, but you need to secure the borders first. We have a mess and I think everyone knows we have a mess,” Boehner said, according to the C-SPAN transcript.
“Our legal system is broken,” the border’s not enforced, and people “are here without documents. We are a nation of immigrants. The sooner we do it, the better off the country will be,” he said.
Boehner couldn’t bring himself to use factual terms like “illegal immigrants who are breaking the law,” or to question Obama’s and Wall Street’s plans to flood the beleaguered workforce with millions upon millions of newcomers, many low-skilled.
At least, according to the C-SPAN text, Boehner said and repeated that the border has to be secure as he delivered the usual “reform” pitch. But just look at how well the political elitists enforce current law to protect this nation and its people. They just brush it off, as they plan to flick aside any new pretense at securing the border.
On September 21 the online Arizona Daily Independent ran a political cartoon showing whose song Boehner might as well be singing. The left-wing, open-borders House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi was depicted saying, “I have a plan to destroy the annoying middle class once and for all.” Looking on, an appreciative Boehner was cartooned as responding, “I’m listening.”
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported on September 22 that Joni Ernst, the bright conservative hope and Senate candidate in Iowa, was among four Republican U.S. Senate hopefuls expected to turn up at a Florida fund-raiser hosted by none other than Jeb Bush, the notorious open-borders GOP “moderate” pondering a 2016 White House run.
Does anyone expect that Bush won’t expect some favors in return from those he helps?
“In a sign of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s fund-raising prowess, four top-tier Republican Senate candidates are personally attending the…event he is headlining on their behalf in Florida,” the Journal’s “Washington Wire” reported. The other three, it said, were Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, Oregon’s Monica Wehby, and Colorado’s Cory Gardner.
On another front, the Washington Examiner reported on September 22 that a majority of Republicans in a Pew Research Center study believe the GOP isn’t doing a good job at representing their views, but 60 percent of Democrats think the Democrat Party is doing a good job presenting theirs.
One example from the Examiner story: “Republicans want their party to take a more conservative approach when it comes to illegal immigration, with 33 percent of the dissatisfied saying the party is too liberal and just 18 percent saying it is too conservative. Overall, 56 percent of Republicans said the party is not doing a good job when it comes to handling illegal immigration issues.”
An explanation comes to mind for the difficulty: No matter how popular Republican views are, the dominant media will attack and misrepresent them, but no matter how radical and wrong Democrat views are, the Democrat-loving media will minimize or ignore them.
Obama can promote completely callous permissive abortion throughout pregnancy, mandatory tax funding for it, and refusal of medical help for babies who survive abortion, but the media will avert their eyes and praise Democrat “moderation” on “reproductive care.”
Yet let a Republican candidate express some compassionate pro-life view and the media artillery will launch round-the-clock salvos against “theocracy,” “hating women,” “denial of treatment,” and whatever other senseless slogans can be crammed into an explosive device.
Conservative candidates need the courage to educate the public on such issues, or else they make themselves vulnerable to unrelenting media savagery. The facts are on the pro-life side, but the media twist themselves into monstrous pro-death contortions because they feel confident no one will dare stand against their ferocity.
The dominant media are in this fight to win, no matter how high they have to pile the mountains of aborted babies. A conservative scared to oppose such propaganda promoting barbarism probably wouldn’t be much of a fighter for key causes anyway. He only has truth and morality on his side, but shouldn’t that be enough?
Just as the dominant media think they can’t be challenged successfully, the big-money Republican elite spent this spring’s primary-election season hammering any younger GOP aspirant who thought his fresh face might look better than a grizzled incumbent’s against a Democrat in the general election.
Is it automatically such a good idea to pour millions of dollars into insisting on running some GOP incumbent for still another race who has served in Washington, D.C., since Democrat Jimmy Carter was president? Now the GOP elite has got itself into a fix, and is beating the bushes for millions more in campaign donations to save older, endangered officeholders.
One example would be Kansas incumbent GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, age 78, who was elected to the U.S. House back in 1980 — the same year Ronald Reagan first won the presidency — and suddenly is running scared to win his fourth six-year Senate term.
The GOP elite thought that once Roberts defeated his primary-election challenger, he’d cruise to November re-election. But this elite is always a step behind cannier Democrats, who simply had their candidate drop out of the general-election race in hopes that a third-party “independent” hopeful can beguile his way to victory, then caucus with the Democrat side of the aisle in Washington.
In a telling sign of desperation, Roberts’ campaign called up retired Kansas GOP Sen. Bob Dole, age 91, to make appearances with him on September 22 and 23, with no less than open-borders Jeb Bush scheduled for an appearance the following Monday.
In a September 22 email, Ken Cuccinelli, president of the activist Senate Conservatives Fund, wrote that a recent fund-raising pitch by the GOP establishment’s Karl Rove “comes after the GOP establishment worked to ‘crush’ conservatives ‘everywhere,’ and used race-baiting attacks to get Democrats to hijack the Mississippi primary. It also comes after the party wasted millions in primaries to protect incumbents in safe Republican seats and failed to vet candidates like Pat Roberts…who doesn’t live in Kansas anymore.”
Cuccinelli began his email by saying, “The Republican establishment in Washington is worried that their strategy of attacking conservatives and standing for nothing might fail to win them a majority in the U.S. Senate. Instead of taking responsibility, they’re beginning to blame conservatives for their own mistakes.”
A Limited Forecast
Arizona conservative Republican political strategist Constantin Querard told The Wanderer that he expected to see GOP gains, but he wouldn’t forecast further.
“Overall the GOP will make gains,” he said on September 22, “but there is legitimate question over whether it is a wave election that pushes the GOP to 53 [Senate seats], or if the wave fails to materialize and we end up stuck at 49 or 50.”
Although “polling can be exciting and fun for pundits,” Querard said, “as we get closer to Election Day, polls shift from registered voters to likely voters, and that shifts results as well. The other important thing is that candidates and campaigns matter. It isn’t all about the national environment.
“Most Democrat incumbents have very large financial advantages, and it is helping to keep them competitive,” he said, adding that the Kansas strategy of having their own candidate drop out of the race is an example of where they’re “playing games” to win.
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