A Nightmare for the Modernizers

Friday - January 15, 2016

RUSH: I want to get back to this story in TheHill.com, and then, after we finish this, we're gonna get to some of the latest polling data that is hidden in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, because there is some shocking internal information. 

In addition to the fact that Trump's lead continues to grow, there is some really surprising inside stuff about... I'll just tell you one thing. Of all the Republicans in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, while it acknowledges that Donald Trump is adding to his lead, there is one Republican, according to the people polled in their responses here. There's one candidate who could beat Trump for the nomination, in the eyes of Republican primary voters, and that's Ted Cruz.  Now, I don't have to tell you that that little tidbit of information is not something that's causing 'em to do handstands and flips at the GOP.

"Ted Cruz?  Are you kidding me?"

They want that name to be Jeb Bush -- and if the name isn't Jeb Bush, they want it to be Marco Rubio, as we said yesterday.  Now we've got stories all over the media -- Politico, the New York Times -- about how the Republican Party is all of a sudden saying, "Well, yeah, you know what? Maybe we can live with Ted.  Maybe Ted's not looking so bad now." The establishment people say, "Yeah, Ted could be one of us."  So they do want to win.  I don't doubt that.  But I found one guy who doesn't, if the victor is conservative.  And let me get right back to this.  It's in TheHill.com. 

It is about a Republican donor and organizer (a young man, by the way) named Ford O'Connell.  He's a "strategist," Republican strategist.  He's one of the many in the Republican Party "who has long insisted that the party must expand its demographic appeal." He's one of the people that believe the Republican Party simply cannot win with Republican votes alone, so they have to go out and get other voters.  They've gotta go get Democrats, they've gotta go get Hispanics, have to get African-Americans. They have to go get whatever.

Which is fine, but don't do it acting like Democrat Lite!  If you want to go get these other voters, go do it as a proud Republican conservative.  That's what's not happening here.  And this story details a nightmare scenario for the "modernizers" of the GOP.  The modernizers are these people that think for the Republican Party to have any long-term chance of survival as a winning and dominant party, it has got to expand, and it cannot be known as conservative.  It's gotta go much farther than that.  The nightmare scenario, as detailed in this story, the nightmare scenario is a conservative candidate becoming the nominee and then winning the presidency. 

That is described as "a perfect storm," an outcome that will "postpone the hard conversations the party needs to have internally."  In other words, Ted Cruz becoming president is a problem, according to this Republican strategist, because it will falsely portray the GOP as a conservative party, "and that's guaranteed to kill the GOP," is what these people think.  Even in the scenario where Cruz becomes president, that very fact is seen by these people as a death knell for the GOP.  What can you conclude from that? 

"'If they are successful,' O'Connell said of candidates such as Trump and Cruz, 'then those who are arguing to broaden our appeal will be pushed to the edges of the party.'"  Can I translate this for you?  This guy and whoever else in the party he's talking about do not want a conservative to win no matter what.  I remind you: How many times have you seen -- in the past weeks, recent months -- various Republicans quoted as saying if Cruz or Trump are the nominee, they will vote for Hillary?  You may have heard me pass that news on to you, or you may have heard it for yourself.

But it's not just a few.  It's a rather significant number of Republicans who've been public, saying, "Hey, if it's Trump, I'm voting Hillary.  If it's Cruz, I'm voting Hillary."  A conservative winning the presidency is a nightmare beyond belief.  Mr. Priebus, what are we supposed to think here?  I'm not making up anything anybody believes.  I'm not manufacturing what people are saying.  I do what I do every day.  I sit here, I read, I consume whatever is to consume out there, and I react to it. 

And contrary to what people might think, I do not arrive at the Golden EIB Microphone with an agenda. Meaning, I don't plan this program every night and say, "Okay, do this. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. Tomorrow we do that. Friday that and Thursday this, all for the purposes of expanding..."  No. I deal with what happens as it happens and react to it accordingly.  Here's how this story begins.  It's by Niall Stanage.  It's S-t-a-n-a-g-e. I'm not sure how you pronounce.  S-t-a-n-a-g-e. 

"The front-runners for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are casting aside the lessons of the GOP 'autopsy' that was intended to prevent Republicans from losing the White House in 2016.  The autopsy report, issued by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in March 2013 after Mitt Romney's losing campaign and titled 'the Growth and Opportunity Project,' was intended to help the GOP set itself up for victory after losing two presidential elections in a row."

So this thing was set up 2013, here we are 2016. We're coming three years old is this battle plan.  They have been operating on a three-year-old report on how to win that was done by a bunch of insiders who told them exactly what they wanted to hear but not what was correct.  "In both cycles, GOP candidates lost badly to Barack Obama among minority voters. The former Illinois senator also defeated Romney in 2012 and Arizona Sen. John McCain in 2008 among women and voters under the age of 30.  Now some Republicans fear their party is making the same mistakes." 

The same mistakes that were made nominating Romney and McCain, I guess? What "mistakes" are we making?  That's what we're trying to stop here is the same mistakes.  We keep nominating people that don't have a chance.  We have a three-year-old report talking about how to prevent that from happening and they want to keep repeating the process that guarantees them defeat.  But it makes them feel better but who they are. "'To win the White House, a political party has to make folks feel welcome and show that it cares about their daily life,' said Henry Barbour, who was one of five authors of the 2013 report. 

"'Attempting to appeal to only one segment of the population," that would be conservatives, "is bad for governing and even worse for winning a general election. And that's what Trump and Cruz are largely doing.'"  What what what what?  Trump is conservative now, along with Cruz?  These people, that's what they're saying?  So here again, Trump or Cruz winning? Bad for the party.  Who ever...? You know, the Pittsburgh Steelers are playing the Denver Broncos on Sunday in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs. 

Antonio Brown, their best playmaker, their best wide receiver, maybe the best one in the league, was ruled out today because he cannot pass the concussion protocol after the hit by Vontaze Burfict of the Bengals last Saturday night. So they don't have their best player.  Their best quarterback may not be able to play anywhere near 100%.  Should the Steelers stay, "You know what? We don't want to win. We don't have our best players on the field, so we'd just as soon lose.  It'd be very, very bad to win.

"We don't have our best players here, and if we win without our best players, our fans are gonna get the wrong idea and people are gonna think that management doesn't know what it's doing. If we can win with the backups, then why aren't the backups playing?" Is this the way they think?  You think the Steelers don't want to win because they don't have their best players going this weekend against the Broncos?  It's silly.  But apparently we have ranking members the RNC preparing this three-year-old report on how to avoid what happened to Romney happening.

They're saying, "We cannot win if we have a conservative nominee that wins the White House. That's bad for the party. That's bad for our long-term plan to expand and grow the party."  And who's telling them they have to expand and grow the party?  Isn't it the Democrats and the media telling them what they have to do?  Isn't it the Democrats saying, "You can't win with your attitude on immigration"? Democrats say, "You can't win the way you look at women." Democrats say, "You can't win with your lack of diversity." 

Meanwhile, you look at RNC field, the GOP field; it's more diverse than anything the Democrats could hope to put up.  The Democrats are in the process of destroying this country.  The people at the RNC don't seem to think there's anything out of the usual about that, nothing out of the norm about this.  "Yeah, it's just the latest Democrat to get elected, but we gotta get 'em back! We gotta get our guys."  Voters think that we're in the midst of a major, major crisis with the country hanging in the balance, and the RNC people at the GOP apparently don't think that. So they think anybody who does think that is kooky, a little weird. "We can't have those people determining who our winner is!"

The story goes on. Haley Barbour gets to this quoting Ford O'Connell. 

I'll tell you who he is.  Ford O'Connell's a young guy. 

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Okay.  I'd never heard of Ford O'Connell, so we did a little research here, and here's what we came up with.  He's a young guy, maybe a Millennial.  He founded something called Project Virginia, which is a political action committee that's supposed to help Virginia Republicans seeking public office to better utilize social media and voter mobilization technologies.  He claims to have worked for several campaigns, McCain-Palin in '08.  In 2013 he published a book called "Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery."

That would dovetail with the 2013 RNC report on how to avoid repeating the mistakes of McCain and Romney.  This guy's book is "Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery."  He's been talking about this stuff even before Trump arrived at it on the scene.  Here are some of his 10 steps.  "'Hug the Gays;' embrace them and make them part of the political base. Reform the GOP primary process to make it a little more like the Lincoln Douglass debates and less like a deathmatch version of 'survivor.'

"Reach out to nontraditional and Leftist media. End the Reagan fetish. Come to terms with the fact that Ronald Reagan and the Reagan coalition are dead and not coming back." That's who The Politico has written about today that is very worried that if a conservative is nominated and win the presidency, then it delays implementing all of these things that he thinks the Republican Party has to do if it's to be viable down the road in the future.  So the Era of Reagan is over and that's a "fetish."  Come to terms with that; realize it's not coming back and move on and hug the gays, embrace 'em, make 'em part of the political base. Hug the media. Same thing. The left-wing, nontraditional left-wing media.