Is There GOP Life After CPAC?

At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago -- meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President. Our Party knows how to appeal to older voters, but we have lost our way with younger ones. We sound increasingly out of touch.
-Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project" report.

By now, it's no secret that the GOP is a party with problems. While many reports focus primarily on Republican outreach to Latino or women voters, the fact is that the party has alienated Americans across the board. The list of demographic groups Republicans have either lost by actually attacking them or merely by ignoring them is far, far too long to post. Listing the demographic left to them is just as informative, if much more concise: middle-aged straight, white Evangelical males. The end.

The Republican Party is in deep trouble and everyone knows it. They can't hope to win the White House without radically reforming. And, since they're one appointment away from losing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, that means real trouble for a conservative agenda that relies more and more on judicial activism. They could conceivably lose that SCOTUS majority before the next election. But it gets a lot more likely if they lose the presidency in 2016. On the presidential side, even in normal circumstances, a Democrat winning 2016 puts 2020 in danger, through the advantage given by incumbency alone. Add in unresolved demographic issues and defeating a Democratic incumbent in 2020 would be an exercise in futility. Especially without a Supreme Court willing to hand Republicans Citizens United-type advantages.

Enter the Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project," a 100-page report recommending major reforms to the Republican Party in advance of the 2016 elections.

"When Republicans lost in November, it was a wake-up call. And in response I initiated the most public and most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in prepared remarks in advance of a Monday morning speech at the National Press Club. "As it makes clear, there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement."

There's only one hitch: conservatives, especially those in the base, hate change.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

A Serious Blow to the GOP's Rebranding Effort

After months of soul-searching and wandering the wilderness, the Republican Party has decided it needs to change. Well, not change really, so much as rebrand. After losing every minority group -- plus women as a whole -- to the Democratic Party in their quest to unseat Barack Obama, it's become clear that the infamous, racist "southern strategy" is finally dead, dead, dead. No longer are the votes of white Christian males alone enough to elect anyone to national office. It's now clear that "angry white guy vs. the world" is a fight in which the world will now come out on top, every time. Unfortunately for the GOP, that rebranding effort is scheduled to unravel in the middle of March. Then it will become clear (probably to everyone but the Republican faithful) that rebranding is a hopeless effort -- as is real change. In fact, the great unraveling has already begun.

NationalJournal:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was not invited to speak at the annual CPAC conference this year because he broke with conservatives on key issues over the past year, according to American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas.

Cardenas, whose group organizes the conference, wrote in an e-mail to National Journal that while CPAC was “proud” to invite Christie last year based on his record of balancing the budget and taking on teachers unions, Christie’s record over the past year is far less conservative.

“CPAC is like the all-star game for professional athletes; you get invited when you have had an outstanding year,” Cardenas said. “Hopefully he will have another all-star year in the future, at which time we will be happy to extend an invitation. This is a conservative conference, not a Republican Party event.”

For those new to all this, CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference, a yearly convention that basically serves as the rightwing crackpot prom. It's a big, boiling pot of extremists of every stripe -- racists, anti-abortion zealots, homophobes, talk radio hosts, birthers, people who see Communists behind every potted palm, gun nuts, Islamophobes, etc. For obvious reasons, I tend to refer to it as the Crazy People's Action Conference -- and it is poised to set the effort to paint a kinder, friendlier face on the GOP back to square one, if not into negative territory.

CONTINUE TO POST>>