David Plouffe Nails the GOP with the Truth: ‘Republicans Don’t Have a Product to Sell’

On ABC’s This Week, David Plouffe shot down the Republican arguments for their resurgence in 2016 by calmly pointing out that no matter how many field offices they open, “They (Republicans) don’t have a product to sell.”

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The trouble all started when Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus feverishly responded to George Stephanopoulos’ prodding regarding the GOP’s problems with minority voters that the Republicans were going to achieve a cultural shift by opening field offices around the country. (In other words, the Republicans are copying the Obama for America team, only many, many years later.)

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Priebus, who was spied with a noticeably busy adam’s apple and nervous lip licking as he tried to dance around the debate debacle issue, launched into his prepared speech, “We’re deploying the biggest field operation we have ever done in the history of our Party, George. What we’re doing is something no national party has done in an off-year. Since the April meeting back in Los Angeles, we’ve hired 157 people, full-time across the country, we’re going to double that number by the end of the year.”

He continued, “In an off-year, coming off the heels of an election loss, to have that many field people in Hispanic, Asian, African-American communities, its unheard of. And my point is this, if you’re going to get the sale, you got to show up and ask for the order. You can’t show up five months before an election and expect to move mountains. This is a big, cultural shift in our Party as far as our field operation, our data operation. And obviously I think we’ve got some infrastructure issues in regard to our primaries. That’s what I’m working on. I’ve got to control the world that I live in. And that’s the world of party mechanics and operations.”

David Plouffe, former Senior adviser to the President and campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, shot down Priebus’ true believer denial with one short statement, “They (Republicans) don’t have a product to sell.” He elaborated, while trying not to laugh too hard at the endless endurance of Republican delusion, that they could open all of the field offices in the world but without a product to sell, it would not translate to national electoral victory.

Plouffe said, “Chairman Priebus just talked about all of the field organizers — by the way 160 people in this big country isn’t very much — they don’t have a product to sell. You can hire 10,000 people to win the presidency in 2016, 2020 — these are facts, not opinions — but they have to grow their vote with Hispanics, suburban women, younger voters, the growing Asian communities.”

Plouffe added that the GOP is not rehabilitating; they are retrenching.

This is accurate. The media likes to portray Democrats as partisan and thus as blind and inaccurate as Republicans, but that is a lazy false equivalency. Plouffe is the author of The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory, in which he laid out the strategies and tactics that he used during Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 campaign. He didn’t do that by pretending that opening field offices in areas where minorities reside would sell them on policies that would harm them.

Obama opened field offices (largely manned by volunteers, I might add) in areas where his policies were a natural fit — that is, anywhere that the 98% and/or the morally responsible reside.

During the 2012 campaign, the Obama team kept telling the media that their polls told them something different than the polling companies. The media and the Romney campaign happily ignored these warnings. That was a mistake, because it turned out that the Obama team weren’t bluffing. It turned out that they actually dealt with reality in order to strategize a winning plan.

Republicans can’t win until they either face reality or come up with a new way to sell people on policies that are harmful for them. So far, Republicans are doubling down on their Southern Strategy, which is not new and is finally starting to backfire. And let’s face it, if they believed in their own press, they wouldn’t be working so hard to disenfranchise the very people they claim their field offices are going to appeal to. They know that they can’t sell bigotry and hate to minorities, but they must sell it to whatever is left of the whites-only contingency because it is all they have.

As Democrats get more aggressive, as Obama was yesterday and Plouffe was today, Republicans are prone to dismiss the facts as posturing, because Republicans are prone to projecting instead of dealing with reality. The problem with this approach is that it is once again causing Republicans to bury their heads under the sand.

Republicans argued with Plouffe today, but what they still don’t see is it doesn’t matter if they talk over him and it doesn’t matter if the media does their usual lazy reporting and thus labels Plouffe’s statements as partisan. Plouffe was correct. 2008 proved it. 2012 proved it. And Plouffe is correct again. Even insider Republicans are admitting that the party is heading for “disaster” now.

If elected Republicans want to ignore reality again, it is at their own peril and it costs David Plouffe nothing. The Obama team figured out during the 2012 campaign that they couldn’t stop the Romney surrogates from hiding in delusion and why bother trying — It cost them nothing. In fact, if anything, Republicans never saw Obama coming because they weren’t watching the real landscape. They were too busy living in their pretend world of unskewed polls and dirty tricks of trying to keep people who don’t vote Republican from voting. These are the tactics of a party that does not have a product to sell.

Priebus believes opening field offices in areas where minorities reside is going to fix the problem that minorities tend to not support policies that are bad for them. If only the contest were won by who shouted the loudest and who lied to themselves the best, Priebus and the Republicans would be a sure thing.