Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 11:20 am
CNN titled a segment with Reince Priebus, “Republicans: Lessons Learned.” The short answer is… Nothing.
Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus blamed Democrats for the Republican Party’s failure to rebrand in the manner to which their post 2012 “autopsy” indicated that they needed to grow, namely among women, minorities, African Americans, and the gay community. Or rather, they needed to stop offending those groups so much that they looked like doddering old white men on the verge of extinction.
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Given their failure to do rebrand, as seen most starkly in the Virginia gubernatorial race with Republican Ken Cuccinelli wanting to jihad against Planned Parenthood and wanting to make oral sex illegal, Reince blamed Democrats. He claimed that it’s not that Republicans say inappropriate things, it’s that Democrats pounce on them.
Watch here:
Candy Crowley reminded Reince of the fail with quotes from Paul Ryan’s “generations of men not even thinking about working”, when he blamed poverty on “inner city” folks:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
Ryan’s apology for this comment was to claim he had been “inarticulate”.
Reince claimed that it was all the Democrats fault that Ryan looked bad, “Democrats are lying in wait as well to pounce on anything.” Priebus said that Ryan really cares about poverty. He was “actually touring the country” to deal with poverty when he made his “inarticulate” gaffe blaming people for being in poverty.
Crowley pointed out that no one was questioning the motivation, but the language that was used.
Reince then tried to suggest that Joe Biden is a racist but no one picks on him like they do Paul Ryan, “Right so when Joe Biden says ‘free people up from the chains’ we don’t talk about that, but we talked about Paul Ryan” who is “momentarily devoting his entire life right now in this moment” (literally, this means he is devoting this moment) “to talk about this issue.
Here is where the media needs to wake up. Sure, Republicans do like to talk about poverty. Talking about poverty isn’t solving poverty. And talking about freedom and how they believe that not helping people is actually helping them is not a solution to the issue right now.
The issue is that there are children starving. What is the policy prescription that Republicans are championing? Rhetoric about bootstraps does not feed hungry children.
In truth, the reason Republicans do not discuss policies specifically is because their policy is to ignore the starving in all but rhetoric. We heard Paul Ryan’s idea when he passed along a story meant to justify why Republicans feel we don’t need to feed hungry kids school lunches because according to Ryan they don’t want free lunches. It turned out that the story was fabricated. This matters because it reveals the stark reality that rhetoric isn’t solving jack. It turns out, and this should not be a shock, that hungry children would prefer food over the Republican idea of “freedom”. See Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The question the media should be asking these folks is not just did you offend some people, but what do you plan to do policy wise for hungry children, right now. What method will you be using to get food into their mouths? If you have no method to deliver food to them, then your idea is to let them starve. Calling starvation “freedom” is little consolation to the starving.
It seems like Republicans’ new go-to is to blame Democrats. Paul Ryan also blamed Democrats for making Republicans look bad over school lunches, saying Republicans are the villains in the Democrats’ morality play, as if standing up for starving children is some kind of “gotcha” for Democrats.
Republicans’ “idea” is that by ignoring hungry children, they will learn to fend for themselves. This is profoundly inaccurate, but as rhetoric it sounds good because it feeds into our collective belief in hard work. Hard work is a value most Americans share. The problem with the Republican ideology is that they blame the starving for being hungry, implying that they are hungry because they don’t want to work. This has been proven to be inaccurate.
The fact is that Vice President Joe Biden champions policies that help the poor. He isn’t using chains analogies in order to justify letting hungry children starve. But if Priebus wants to claim that Biden is a racist because he used “chains” as an analogy, then I guess the entire Republican Party are racists for constantly comparing the national debt to slavery, which is much more egregious because it is used to justify imposing austerity on the vulnerable.
In light of their epic failure to rebrand, Republicans’ big plan is to whine about Democrats making them look bad.
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