Via Slate’s Tom Scocca.
If you’re a Republican strategist with an eye on winning elections down the road, the above chart has got to be a concern. As Scocca points out, Republicans made the mistake of taking the perceived enthusiasm for Romney in the “white bubble” as representative of the electorate as a whole. That was a fatal error.
Simple minds like that of Bill O’Reilly’s believe it’s just a matter of Democratic voters wanting “things” and “stuff”.
[I]t’s a changing country, the demographics are changing, it’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it.
And, whereby, 20 years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.
You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama and women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?
They really don’t get it.
Scocca:
The white establishment, undone by hordes of various-colored people who demand stuff. Even as he admitted the white bloc was too small to win, O’Reilly still saw the winning side as an undifferentiated counter-bloc, rather than a coalition of Americans.
Obama won the Latino vote, 71 to 27. He also won the Asian vote, 73 to 26. Those voters all look the same to the losers. That’s why they’re the losers.
And as long as the GOP chooses to listen to the O’Reilly’s and ignores the David Frums of the party, you can count on Tuesday’s election results being repeated every four years. I don’t agree with everything Frum says in the clip below (“Romney could have been a really good president“), but he does zero in on the biggest problem facing the GOP today with this line.
Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.
In a majority white nation, Fox and conservative media have played a big role in exploiting xenophobic Americans into supporting the GOP. With the changing demographic landscape of the country, that same “entertainment complex” will be the downfall of the party.
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Yes — like a cooperative where we all work together for the good of the country, including the representatives we send to Washington; a level playing field; opportunity for all regardless of race, age, ethnic background, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and gender; affordable health care coverage; equal pay for equal work; fair trade; protection for the social entitlements we’ve worked for all our lives; national security; the end to war; respect for all citizens, and respect for our nation around the world; green technology; energy independence, etc. President Obama understands and works for these needs and dreams of the people every day. Mitt Romney — despite his rhetoric — was insensitive, transparent, and clueless. Republicans just don’t get it, and they only have themselves and their lack of compassion for the masses to blame.
Yea, O’Reilly, and the rich white guys don’t want ‘stuff’. These people and reality are not in the same room.
They are not going to listen to Frum. They will continue on as before.
The rich white guys want ALL of the stuff. How dare the little people even hope for crumbs.
The GOP believes that they just have to explain conservative ideology to the Latinos and their good as gold. Yes sir. Just explain, in Spanish of course, that it is a good idea to give up your Medicare so the wealthy don’t have to pay one cent more in taxes. That will work.
It is mind boggling to believe that conservatives have been lied to and never been informed on the reality of what is out there.I guess the entertainment complex believe in the evangelicals coming to the trough like sheep and being fed lies about the second coming of Republican saviors and they will believe.
Education is part of Obama’s program. It is now more urgent than ever to invest in education and stop the entertainment complex misinforming the public and twisting the truth to fit their ideology. This is not journalism but propaganda in its worse interpretation.
My wish would be to investigate Rupert Murdoch as they did in England and denounce the war on decency that he continues to vilify in the name of freedom and liberty. He is the worse scourge to come to America from Australia and he should be shipped back to the outbacks where snakes,alligators and scavengers thrive.
There are other reasons Republicans have come up short this time around too.
For one thing, they preach one doctrine and practice quite another. The larger America sees this and reacts to it rewarding their hypocrisies with defeat and rejection of ideology.
For example: Many Righties claim to operate entirely from and on Christian Principle in all or most everything they say, think and/or do – - – and yet, in practice, the things they propose as guiding Laws for the nation seek to disenfranchise the middle class and the poor in direct opposition to all the tenets of the Christan dogmatism.
Another problem seems to be that a lot of them – - – too many of them – - – perhaps a majority of them have secluded themselves from the “Real” world and have created protective invisible ideological and doctrinal walls (cocoons) around themselves so that they really pragmatically interact with no one but those who are like themselves.
Add to this the fact that from the standpoint of power and social structure, they have managed to become a minority instead of what was once an all-powerful majority in the demographic of the evolving nation.
The sad thing as far as I am concerned is that many of them will probably stubbornly resist the fact of their downward spiral, will consider it as leftist propaganda and will take no steps for a course correction and will eventually do their own political system in and bring it to desolation – - – pure stubborness and arrogance can achieve that result and as far as I can see, many of them are none too short on those little virtues are they now?
The hard core never learn. I read somewhere recently that Rush Limbaugh said Romney lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. As Digby (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/) puts it, for the right wing conservatism can never fail – it can only be failed. Ergo, Rush’s comment.
My concerns…..the GOP are so good at using propaganda for their own benefit. They have been stringing the evangelicals along for decades with the promise of legally stopping abortion, a promise that they have never been ever to deliver. They have been stringing the true conservatives alone with the promise of cutting spending…..another promise broken. They know how what people want to hear in order to get their vote.
What will stop them from doing the same thing to the Latino community? They will promise them the world and deliver nothing. But these people can put them back in power, and if that happens they will continue along with their same stealth bullshit power trip.