Republicans SHOCKED To Discover Voters Hate What They Are Selling
Culture war today, culture war tomorrow, culture war forever ... just keep it on the DL.
BREAKING: Republican social policies are about popular with Americans as a plate of warm dog shit. Film at 11.
More than two-thirds of us support gay marriage and abortion rights, while opposing anti-trans legislation. And yet Republican legislators are still going pedal-to-the-metal on culture war issues, passing draconian abortion bans and demonizing trans kids. Of late, it has begun to occur to conservatives who aren’t gerrymandered into Republican sinecures that making your party toxic to large swathes of the population is kind of a crap strategy longterm.
Even the loathsome toads at FreedomWorks, one of the Koch-funded Tea Party fronts, are trying to tap the brakes on some of the more unappealing policies they’ve cheerfully championed for two decades. What if they keep hating on poor people and destroying the environment, but, like, dial back the obsession with other people’s pink bits just a skosh?
This morning Politico published a memo from the organization’s president Adam Brandon outlining his plan for a “rebrand.” It starts with the obligatory Sun Tzu quote, and then moves on to Cato Institute founder Ed Crane, extolling the virtues of “yuppies” in the 1980s.
Then we get to the BIG IDEA: Republicans should stop trying to rile up the base by yelling about Mr. Potato Head and instead return to their roots of hating poor people.
“The yuppies of 1985 are today’s independents who dominate the only districts up for grabs in today’s world,” Brandon writes, adding that the road to paradise leads through a “block of upper-middle class voters” living in suburban swing districts.
That’s right, kids, they’re bringing back Gordon Gekko.
“While it's popular to claim that discussing issues like entitlements in politics is a ‘third rail,’ this cohort knows change is needed,” he goes on, adding that “This cohort also pays taxes and knows that they'll be footing the bill of the soon-to-be $50 trillion in debt if we don't figure out a solution soon.”
Strictly speaking, we all pay taxes — lots of states even tax food at the grocery store. But Brandon is busy painting a rosy future where Republicans claw back power by pitting the haves against the have-nots.
And while these well-fed suburbanites aren’t down with overt racism or gross old dudes getting between women and their doctors, they “believe in a meritocracy, meaning equal opportunities but not necessarily equal outcomes.” So if the wingnuts can just ix-nay on the abortion shit for half a second, maybe the GOP can make some inroads with the club soccer set by playing on their fears that little Ashlynn and Skylar are going to lose out in the college admissions process to some poor kid from East Saint Louis who probably won’t be able to hack it in an elite academic environment anyway.
“If Sun Tzu was alive and advising us today, he would see the independent voter in swing districts as the opening that will redefine the political battlefield,” Brandon assures his readers, before dangling the juicy prospect of leveraging these comfortable youngsters to reduce Medicare spending.
Well, it’s ridiculous, and not just because FreedomWorks spent the past twenty years pushing Tea Party loons into power by leveraging the same culture war issues they’d like to shed now that their funding has dried up because it’s embarrassing to be associated with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
For all his blathering about “classical liberal principles” and “changing the incentives in Washington through a cohort that demands serious policy solutions,” Brandon is trapped in the spider web his own organization spun. His entire premise is that each party is a lock to win 200 House seats, leaving only a handful of swing districts where independents control. But that reality is thanks to a wildly gerrymandered electoral map which guarantees that representatives can get elected solely by voters from their own party. Of course the GOP is stuck with wingnuts who appeal only to the base — they spent two generations gerrymandering legislative districts to ensure that the real contest was the primary, not the general election in November. And you can’t get out of a Republican primary by saying that “gay marriage is a settled issue,” and abortion “should be safe, legal, and rare,” no matter what this talking bowl of vanilla pudding would like to believe.
FFS, these assholes can’t even get rid of Donald Trump. But sure, fella, tell us more about how you’re going to moderate your tone and save the country on the strength of the douchebag vote.
[Politico]
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I just want to give a shout out to the GOP post-mortem that said the same thing right before they dove head-first into the pussy-grabber.