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Forget Sarah / Find Richard
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Over the last three weeks, I have come to a startling conclusion, the true believers in the Republican Party do not understand why they were showed the door on November 4th. As Roger Simon’s article points out, the power brokers of the party are still under the illusion that their message was correct, it was the fault of either the messenger (John McCain), the economy, or the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
As a voice crying out in the wilderness, whose calls to RNC-chair candidate Michael Steele have yet to be answered, it falls to me to communicate the obvious to the politically inept… if the Republican Party does not change its message, we will not have another Republican president in my lifetime (and I am only 43).
The reason for the gloomy prediction is the Electoral College and the increase of Hispanic voters. In 2008, Barack Obama received more than seventy percent of the Hispanic vote. These new voters in key swing states such as CO, FL, NM, and NV switched these 46 electoral votes from red in 2004 to blue in 2008. Every one of these states increased their number of Hispanic votes by an average of five percent between 2004 and 2008. If our hard-line policy with immigration stays the same, there is a possibility of Hispanic voters in Arizona and Texas becoming a large enough minority in these states to switch them from red to blue in eight years.
The bottom line is that the Republican Party needs to forget Sarah Palin and find a Richard Nixon-type candidate in 2012. Richard Nixon was a pragmatic conservative and was able to win two national elections when the electoral map was in a state of flux due to an increase of new minority voters, African-Americans. Richard Nixon used his presidency to add teeth to Affirmative Action policies and to begin Minority and Women Business initiatives in the federal government. Nixon made inroads to this new voting block while keeping his conservative principles of small business growth and development.
Can we leave behind the non-policy ideologue that is embodied by Sarah Palin? Or are we destined to repeat this failure of leadership in the 2012 election cycle? Finding this Nixon-esque balance is not only possible and achievable, with the changing demographics of the electoral map, this balance will be necessary to win back the Congress and the White House.
