The Change Prescription

The Republican party is getting older and whiter.

The rest of America is not.

well said Mindy I could not agree more....Michael Steele's quote from today's WSJ says it all to me:

"We didn't have anything to say to the American people other than, 'We're not Democrats. We're not Obama. We're not Hillary,' " said Michael Steele,the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, who is now chairman of GOPAC,a conservative political group. "Well, we know that. So what else is new?"

I'm more than ready to do my part to help rebuild the party

Tom, you need to understand why businesses were shipping jobs overseas.  Because it's cheaper to do business over there!  Simple as that.

This election should send a signal to the GOP that there needs to be a reshaping.  Like any team that loses, they need to cut stuff that doesn't work and go back to performing the fundamentals to excellence.  That's what Conservatives have been wanting.  The only problem is getting our voice out in the public realm with understanding.  The public needs to understand our positions better and that is the main problem.  Communication.

Like phsycologists say, the key to any good relationship is open and honest communication and it  looks like we're starting to see that people really want that.

Aero, you need to understand how free trade is supposed to work. If you have a trade deficit with another country your currency should decline in comparison to the surplus country. This reduces the trade imbalance.  It is not as simple as saying that the country with the lowest cost of labor will always win.

Unfortunately, business and Wall Street, in cahoots with Asian countries enabled and rigged Asian currencies to prevent the natural balancing of trade.  What has gone on here is not free trade but a corrupt perversion of trade.

Too many people have lost jobs in the name of free trade when it was not even FREE TRADE.

I think what we really need to do is start to stand up to the idiots we have in the party.  I'm always receiving crazy "Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a Muslim!" emails from my friends and family, and I always try to reply and explain that's not us, that's not the Conservative movement, but I think those damn things pushed more people away than anything else.

We have *GOT* to marginalize the Rush Limbaghs and Bill O'Reileys of the party who use "intellectual" as a dirty word and froth at the mouth with misinformation.  Yeah, that whips up the base but all they're doing is driving away moderates.  And how many agnostic/atheist/jewish voters have we pushed away with the consolidation of the Christian Right?  Don't get me wrong, we can't win without them, but they're running off all our Libertarians who have a strong nonreligious streak.

There are so many areas where the current Republican party is lacking. So intellectually bankrupt on ideas, confused Republicans resorted to hyperbolic caricatures of moderate Democrats in order to try (and fail) to gain a toehold in this election.

However, the election would never have come to this if the Republicans could have had a decisive voice on the $700-billion dollar bailout. Instead, they fumbled as they tried to appease their corporate donors and blame minorities for taking out loans instead of placing the blame on Wall Street where it clearly belonged. While Barney Frank was acting like a corporate stooge, Republicans in Congress were actually making sense arguing against the bailout! Why didn't they use that momentum to bring together a populist electoral victory in Ohio, Indiana, and maybe Pennsylvania by talking about pragmatic solutions to the economic problems and playing to people's distrust of Wall St?

According to most exit polling I've seen, the margins of victory in the battleground states look suspiciously like the number of people who voted for the donkeys and who also would not remember what things were like in 1980 (i.e. not born yet, or filling up diapers at the time). I think (but I can hope that I'm wrong) that these folks are going to be seriously disappointed in what happens to our country over the next few years, and after realizing that they've been had they  may tune out on politics altogether--if we don't seize the opportunity they present. We do this by uniting around specific policy solutions to present-day problems as we did in 1980 and especially in 1994. I don't care if these solutions are supported by think tanks or by the Limbaugh/O'Reilly/Hannity  types or, God forbid, both, just as long as these solutions reflect our shared and uncomromised core values. Running on "We'll cut taxes and we're not Gore/Kerry/Obama" is not going to bring in the next generation of conservatives.