The Republican Party is Like a Dry Drunk, Yet Only Two Days Sober

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:04 pm

In Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and probably Florida (waiting for data) based on the Obama campaign’s successful new voter registration drive and get out the vote operation, a combination of minorities, women and younger adults powered Obama to victory over Mitt Romney.

The takeaway from this? Everyone is talking about how the demographics are going in the wrong direction for the GOP. And so some resigned Republican strategists are saying, yes, they will have to address this. They must stop appearing to hate brown people. The solution?

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a) To come up with some kind of immigration reform policy other than self-deport, electric fences, and papers please. b) To run a Latino in 2016.

Haven’t we been here before? When the GOP thought they would get the female vote by running Sarah Palin as a feminist in 2008, women were insulted because Palin’s policy beliefs restricted their freedoms.

Similarly, listening to Republicans talk about tricking Latinos into voting for them by hobbling together immigration reform that doesn’t sound so brown-shirty and getting someone dark skinned to carry the mantle for their anti-freedom message is most likely not going to work.

Here’s what would have to happen for that to work.

Minorities would have to forget that it was the hatred of the Republican Party that championed Papers Please, trained angry white people to challenge the votes of brown skinned people around the country, thinks of brown skinned people as lazy, entitled welfare cheats, and so much more.

I highly doubt the majority of minorities are going to forget the last two years, let alone the last 40 years of Southern Strategy on behalf of Republicans, who vilified minorities for the sole purpose of getting out the angry white person vote. But more importantly, the data coming out is showing that the Latino vote growth came from the youth. That’s potentially an entire generation the GOP alienated over the past several years.

Romney lost 99% of the African American vote in some areas. He worked hard to generate that kind of hatred, using the African American community as the bad guy in his plot to generate some enthusiasm among the GOP base. He used them as the foil, setting them up over and over again as the lazy destroyers of America.

Now, the Republicans accuse those same voters of being racists for not voting for the guy who not only held them in contempt, but used them as target practice in a desperate attempt to hold on to the Republican base.

Running a Latino is not going to change that.

Coming up with some kind of immigration policy that isn’t full of intimidation and hate isn’t going to change that either, because guess what, the Democrats already have an immigration reform policy that is not based on race baiting and hate.

Let’s see. Do we think people would vote for the folks who have shown them nothing but hatred and disdain but suddenly came up with a policy that is NOT full of hate, or the folks who stood by them when times were tough?

Here’s one of many things the Republican Party can’t seem to get. They lost a portion of working whites in swing states in 2012. How did this happen? Well, the working class people in the Midwest have this thing they call the BS detector. You can be a Democrat or Republican, but if you are selling BS and you think they aren’t going to know it, you have another thing coming. And so the Jeep lie crushed Mitt Romney among people who were already looking sideways at him after Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.

The BS detector is strong among those who know they are not the elite and have no desire to be the elite. They just want to work hard and earn a decent paycheck. Whereas, in the Romney circles, the more you BS the more you are approved of for being a “winner”, in the Midwest, the more you BS, the less you are trusted.

Republicans think they can just rebrand their crap policies, stick a Latino on the cover and presto, we will all fall in line.

What about the women? What about the young people?

After the Republican Party started attacking unions and the working class and used religion to do it, my grandfather swore to never vote Republican again. He spent every single family dinner warning us all to never trust a Republican if they were using God to get us to vote against the working class.

I suspect that conversation is going on in households across this nation, after we witnessed the obscene, deliberate, unforgiveable attempts of Republicans to steal the liberty represented by a vote from minorities.

No, that won’t be forgotten.

The Republican Party needs to clean up its act, but it won’t be done with a shiny new immigration policy and a Latino on the poster.

What is required of them is not new wrapping or new ways to deceive people, but rather real soul searching. Unless it starts with an admission that their policies under Bush were big government for their buddies’ corporations and fiscal recklessness, they are not to be trusted.

The Republican Party is like a dry drunk, yet only two days sober, who is not in any kind of recovery program. They are just looking for a new way to escape reality.

The truth is, until they apologize and own the past, not a word they say in the future can be trusted. They can’t come for the liberties and freedoms of American citizens, setting neighbors upon neighbors and turning the working class against itself for political gain, destroy the trust in government and send women to jail for having a miscarriage all so they could get the next drink and think that we will all forget the wake of destruction they left behind.

Run a Latino? For real? They couldn’t be more race obsessed if they tried. It’s not about the SKIN COLOR, it’s about the policies. Until they face that fact, and are even willing to consider that maybe minorities know what’s best for them, maybe they voted for Obama because his policies showed them a modicum of respect as human beings, until then – the Republican Party is a noxious, toxic brew of desperation, grasping at straws and willing to destroy the foundation of this country all so they can get their next drink.

Every time a republican suggests that minorities vote for Obama because he’s black, they lose another block of people. They can’t see that only the race obsessed would suggest that, and that the suggestion itself is insulting and racially biased. What they are really saying is that they can’t imagine any reason why you would vote for a black man, other than the fact that he is black.

And yet, it is the Republican Party that has shown itself to be obsessed with race, as they clearly can’t see this president as he is. They never get past the skin color to see that he is not the radical Marxist they think he is. I hear this even from brilliant, otherwise decent Republicans, and it troubles me.

They ran against a fictional black man and they lost big time. Now they want to fix that by running a Latino, suggesting that they think that Latinos will prove more gullible than women were in 2008.

I doubt that will end any better for the GOP.

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Sarah Jones

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