“…are ‘blah’ about the midterms because they’ve lost faith that winning them will make a difference.”
Here in NH, the NH GOP is all happy talk – and I’m not all that sure it is warranted and I will be honest, I am cautiously pessimistic. It does me no good to reverse my predictions (lose the Gov, lose the Senator, maybe pick up one of the Congressional seats, effectively lose the NH Senate (heck, one could say that with Nancy Stiles, they lost it last time anyways and then the rest of the Rogue Republicans just put that condition on STEROIDS with the Democrats’ Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion, the broad based gas tax, and implementing their mini-DISCLOS Act (aka, SB120), can one really tell much of a difference? And with NH Senate Republican Majority PAC blowing tons of donor money to prop up direly flawed candidates (that would be David “I don’t know if I was drunk” Boutin and Nancy Stiles) in the Primary, well, the message has been sent. It seems that the egg on my face may well be the NH House – but th game ain’t finished until its finished and it is STILL not clear the GOP has the GOTV capability that the Dems have (with Catalist and their allied groups).
So, I’ve been putting up other folks’s writings that encapsulate why Conservatives and the Liberty & Freedom folks all over the country are loath to support GOP candidates based on what the Grand Old Party has done to them. Let’s get real – people are no longer to support your candidates after you’ve beat them about the head and shoulders and told “we don’t want your kind”. From the National Review’s Campaign Spot (reformatted, emphasis mine):
So why do so many conservatives feel disgruntled, disappointed, bored, or frustrated with politics at the moment?
Republicans look around, see a country and world in chaos, and don’t understand why they’re not seeing a broad, angry reaction to President Obama and his allies in Congress. As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been vindicated by events. Leaving no troops in Iraq — “combat forces” or not — left a vacuum for ISIS. The prospects for Afghanistan aren’t much more promising. Far from being “on the run,” the Islamist threat is spreading and intensifying.
Forget that 5.9 percent unemployment rate; most Americans are gripped by deep, far-reaching, deeply embedded economic pessimism. Wages are stagnant. There’s a strange lack of hiring even as posted job openings increase. The biggest incentive for private industry is to pay sufficient tribute to the political class; lobbying Washington remains a $3 billion–a–year industry, as the incentives for crony capitalism and favor-seeking remain as strong as ever. A budget deficit of $486 billion is considered a good sign.
Democrats will boast that Obamacare has reduced the number of Americans without insurance — without providing affordable insurance for everyone, as it promised — and ignore the fact that this has mostly been done by expanding Medicaid. (The issue of entitlements will be kicked down the road, once again.) The promises about keeping plans and doctors were, as skeptics charged, cynical happy talk; ill-informed liberals are shocked to learn their premiums are going up.
Most conservatives have been calling for tougher and more-thorough border security for years. This summer we saw the humanitarian crisis of tens of thousands of children crossing the border. Now there are persistent rumors of ISIS trying to come across the border from Mexico; even if the rumors don’t pan out, we’ve been hearing for months about the number of ISIS fighters with Western passports who could easily slip into the country.
In a highly symbolic symbol of rot at the top, a series of stories in the Washington Post revealed embarrassing mistakes and cover-ups at the U.S. Secret Service. Now a new allegation claims investigators were pressured “to remove information that could have been embarrassing to [the Department of Homeland Security] and/or to the Obama Administration in an election year.” Allegedly not even a 25-year-old aide can be held accountable for unacceptable behavior, if his father is a major Democratic donor.
The president asserts that test scores and college enrollment are up and his audiences applaud, oblivious to the fact that the most recent figures indicate the opposite.
Take your pick; there’s no shortage of things to be outraged about. Hundreds of millions wasted on state insurance exchanges that don’t work. The IRS abuses. Lois Lerner, refusing to answer questions from Congress. No one at the State Department getting fired over the security decisions leading up to Benghazi. Assurances about Ebola that don’t pan out.
There are a lot of additional reasons that could have been listed – the “dense pack” of overload has, in a lot of cases, had Conservatives go “how do you start to unwind this”? They do look at their fellow citizens, even those on the other side of the aisle, and wonder – does the WIN now trump the Rule of the Law? Has a new level of “the spoils system” now upset the traditional values that prevented that in the past? Has our traditional notions of Government as public servant disappeared before our eyes as we watch an absolutely insolent and sneering IRS Commissioner Koskinen not only disrespect those who have Constitutional oversight over them and absolutely no respect for the average citizen.
Republicans are ‘blah’ about the midterms because they’ve lost faith that winning them will make a difference. Obama’s contempt for Congress, and lack of interest in working with it on his true priorities, is obvious. He’s pledged to unilaterally rewrite immigration enforcement to suit his needs. Large chunks of Obamacare are adjusted, nullified, improvised, and revised on the fly with no change to the written law. The president begins wars without waiting for any authorization for the use of military force. The U.S. attorney general is held in contempt of Congress with no real consequence.
No one can blame conservatives for being frustrated to the point of fury. But if American rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans conclude that the game is rigged, that it’s not worth playing, and withdraw from political life . . . then that will be the ultimate triumph of this president.
And in no small part, that fury is also directed at its own Party, especially those that came of “political age” / activation in the TEA Party runup that dragged over the finish line in 2010. They feel betrayed – we worked, we gave, we shorted our families (and perhaps our jobs) because we felt it was absolutely necessary. And this cycle, the message from the GOP top was not missed by these folks:
That was so last cycle – now you are threatening us. That cannot stand or be allowed.
They expected that having given the GOP the winning hand, having gone to the mat in the political trench warfare, to see a Party go pedal to the metal and keep that fight going. And what they’ve seen is a Party and Ruling Class that don’t have the same intensity for the fight that they do – rather, they see a slow walk and hardly the fight in ’em to even defend themselves.
And with the talk of Amnesty (yes, Kelly Ayotte, that means you) and all of the attention paid to the political ramifications of that (“Hispanics are NATURAL Republicans!” – even as poll after poll showed they preferred a larger government that gave them more entitlements), it became clear that swapping out their current base for a new base was no big thang. Maybe even wanted. Gosh – even Obama says that the Republicans should be for Amnesty to keep themselves relevant (seriously, the Rs take that seriously?).
Consider message received – that the Republican Ruling Class is not to be Trusted. And then the Ruling Class gets upset, having sent that message that we don’t need you, that the grassroots have actually listened to that one – and acting on it?
