Sunday, November 01, 2015

NO, THE REPUBLICANS WON'T LEARN ANYTHING IF THEY LOSE A THIRD STRAIGHT ELECTION

With so many Republican candidates griping about the anchors of the last debate, how is Carly Fiorina supposed to distinguish herself from the rest of the field? By complaining about being the victim of another instance of media bias:
Carly Fiorina is daring the hosts of “The View” to insult her to her face.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Fiorina ripped the hosts of the show, calling the liberal feminists and saying they are threatened by her.

She also said there was a double standard after two hosts of “The View” described her as wearing a Halloween mask at last week’s debate, saying the comment would hever have been made about Hillary Clinton.

“There is nothing more threatening to the liberal media in general and to Hillary Clinton in particular than a conservative women. So of course there’s a double standard,” she said.

“And conservative women from Sarah Palin to Michele Bachmann to Carly Fiorina are long used to this”

Fiorina also dared the show’s hosts to bring her back and make the same comments to her face.

“It will not stop me, it will not scare me and maybe the ladies of ‘The View’ if I come on again, let’s see if they have the guts to say that to my face,” she said.

During a segment of their program on Thursday, “View” host Michelle Collins noted Fiorina’s comment during the debate that people told her she should have smiled more.

“She looked demented,” Collins said of the smile that Fiorina then made on the stage.

Co-host Joy Behar then said that there should be a Fiorina Halloween mask.
I actually agree that this View segment went over the line -- you can see bits of it in the clip below, along with the Fiorina's response -- but it's not as if it's going to decide the election. I'm struck by the fact that Fiorina is responding to it personally. It's the sort of thing subordinates are supposed to respond to, not candidates. Then again, maybe I'm thinking of Democrats or old-school Republicans, not modern Republicans, who, to their voters, seem most presidential when they're carefully nursing grievances, not rising above them.



The key point you should take away from this, and from all the grumbling about CNBC, is that if Republicans lose a third straight election, they're not going to examine what they did in the campaign and conclude that they made mistakes that cost them the White House. No -- they're already preparing to blame defeat on liberal media bias. GOP voters will still be angry at John Harwood and Joy Behar (and, presumably, a number of other media villains) long after non-GOP voters have forgotten the moments that so incensed the right in the fall of 2015. Conservatism can't fail -- it can only be failed -- so this will be the reason for the loss, not the Republican candidate or agenda or rhetoric. There will be no learning. And we'll go through this all over again in four years.

3 comments:

Philo Vaihinger said...

What have Democrats learned from losing the congress and most of the state houses pretty much permanently?

Greg said...

Good point, Philo. If they've tried to spread the message (via media and otherwise) to encourage more voting in non-Presidential years, they obviously haven't done enough. It's suspiciously like they're too okay with the gridlocked status quo.

Feud Turgidson said...

I disagree. I say it's not at all a "Good point", & shows fundamental misunderstanding.

Some elements of the problem are endemic to democracy in America, as they were once much more so in Britain. For example, there are certain factors that contribute to vote inequality that are baked into the cake of election-based representative government (such as every state getting the same representation in the Senate, which results in Wyoming, with under 2% of the population of California, having 100% the same power in the U.S. Senate; and lag times between the allocation of House seats & the drawing of their boundaries, with difference that are slight to start with increasing over time, in theory decreasing with the adjustment that should follow on a census, among the 'natural' i.e. tolerated biases that favor rural over urban voters, and by our regliotic & slave-based history, European descendants over your blah & brow types, and Christianists over all other sects & all sects over secularists; and of course how stubborn they've proven as obstacles to amending the Constitution to get rid of them).

But there's also the problem of one party, in this case for 150 years & running primarily the Republican party, being run as a commercial enterprise to maintain the status quo by resisting all change and retarding and in some instances methodically dismantling all progress in incremental amendment of American political institutions to try to address those endemic problems.

In the result, in 2015 the two parties are very different animals, following the demands of time and isolation in very much a classically Darwinian fashion into becoming different species. What you two think once happened at the local level thru the Democratic party was largely done by socialists, farmer unions, trade unions, industry unions, teacher unions, cultural halls like Tammany in NYC and the organization that Truman worked out of it KC - all of which have been cut back or cut down completely in power and influence, often with the naive complicity of Democratic party supporters, sometimes with active assistance of the Democratic party to the extent it's seen itself as a rival to their power.

But the Republican model doesn't suffer from these defects; rather, it has its own, including feral inbreeding, ignorance, racism & refusal to compromise.

That last, the refusal to compromise, to deal, is, IMO, comparable to when members of the same genus develop so far apart they can't even propagate together, or like a couple whose bickering has escalated to and beyond the level of mutual intolerance. It's not a complete explanation, because one party is so much more in league with the worst manifestations of capitalism and inclined towards systemic cheating, to the point where it's become nearly to actually impossible to draw clear lines segregating the source waters to the river of problems.