I know the Tea Party has obviously stumbled in their relationship with the GOP.

I know the promise of the Tea Party when it first coalesced as a grassroots populist movement, and I know the Tea Party has failed to deliver on that promise.

What the Tea Party needs to do, and how it can reform the GOP, is revive its original promise as a grassroots populist movement. This time, though, they need to aggressively spread beyond their comfort-zone in-group.

Today Limbaugh mentioned that he though Romney was the most decent candidate for the presidency in the past 25 years or so.

…otherwise, what Geoffrey Britain said. In whole, and the disparate parts.

Except for this: the argument for electability will be forevermore wasted upon me. I disagreed with Romney’s “electability” from the beginning, but came to accept the political argument after I came to an understanding of his character.

But. If we couldn’t get that decent man elected, what the hell does your argument of “electability” actually mean in the ground war of politicking?

It’s become apparent that what arguing for a candidate on the basis of “electability” actually means is “I got nothin’ here, but …shut up”.

Don’t you ever, ever try that one on me again.

That experiment resulted in catastrophic failure (for the future of the country) with the most likely candidate in my memory for it to have ever been valid as political strategm.

It will only be an accident of Chance if it ever succeeds.

But as political argument?

…it’s not worth discussing ever again. That dog didn’t hunt.

We needed a firebrand to set a polity on fire. We got an ember that was easily quenched.

Shame on us. We failed America by letting that thieving pack of lying scoundrels continue in office. Shame on us.

Obama did not win. We lost. Shame on us.

The GOP cares about elections. Elections should be an end step, not a beginning step. If you want the GOP to reform, then take all the prior steps that will deliver elections to the GOP. Honor the bargain with the GOP that the Tea Party has so far failed to fulfill and the GOP will follow suit.

*headdesk*

Don’t leave it to the candidates. There needs to be a 24/7/365 populist movement so that the election merely reaps the harvest. Do not count on cramming the whole farming process within an election cycle and having it to bear enough fruit. Activists on the Left are continually spreading and reinforcing their populist movement. The Right needs to engage full force and win the neverending grassroots contest.

gcotharn,

Give the party a winning formula, and they’ll use it. The GOP’s fiduciary duty is to win elections, not ideological enforcement.

In the disagreement between the Tea Party and the GOP, I blame the Tea Party. The Tea Party – not the GOP – failed to fulfill their side of the bargain. The bargain was the GOP would give the Tea Party a path to elected office, and organizational resources and legitimacy. The Tea Party would give the GOP a viral populist movement to counter the Dems populist movement, ie, voters. But as soon as the Tea Party got a few people elected, their populist movement dried up.

The Tea Party failed to deliver on their promise to the GOP yet is still making demands of the GOP.

Solution: The Tea Party needs to go back to their original promise to the GOP and the Right in general needs to do a 24/7/365 grassroots populist movement. Go out of the in-group and go directly to the people. Confront the Left. Flood popular culture and news media so the message gets past the gatekeepers.

The GOP cares about elections. Elections should be an end step, not a beginning step. If you want the GOP to reform, then take all the prior steps that will deliver elections to the GOP. Honor the bargain with the GOP that the Tea Party has so far failed to fulfill and the GOP will follow suit.

Damn skippy.

Except, the Repub big money is, and has been, “Waiting for Jeb”, even going back to 2011. What a disaster. And not b/c his name is Bush. Rather, b/c Jeb is a loser and a stiff and another damnable McCain/Romney style moderate … who will not communicate conservative principles to the electorate. Read it this way: Jeb will not appeal to either low info voters (Jeb is a stiff) or high info voters (Jeb will not communicate small gov principles). Repub money will have lined up behind another candidate whose major selling point is competency. Spit on competency. Competency is appealing to both low info and high info voters. That is competency.

To this point, I have not joined the “torch the Repubs” camp. Pragmatism. However, if Repubs are so tone deaf as to nominate Jeb, then pragmatism demands burning the Repub Party to the ground. It will be the pragmatic thing to do. The Repub Party will have proven itself beyond saving. I am ready to turn my back on them forever. They do not represent me, and they do not care that they do not represent me. They believe I am a troglodyte idiot. Even as they are the true idiots.

And my argument included Gingrich, Palin and Santorum (at least) as well as any general candidate who could and would make the conservative case, and who would fight.

Romney, in the end as we now know with irrefutable certainty, could do neither; and if he could then he would do neither – which is even worse. Credit to the man for running but not being capable of fighting for the cause (my opinion); damn him to hell if he could have but would not.

The others could have and would have. You never know what would have happened had they won the nomination. I don’t care if you put up 50 links. Gingrich is a demonstrated winner. He transformed the country once.

Even so, the job description, the search field, is narrowed by us to people like McCain and Romney.

That search field is a proven disaster. It’s been shown to be wrong and ineffective. Reality is reality.

And so next time, we’ll do what? Nominate the next Romney? They wanted Romney this time. They want his 2016 version next time, who is really the Bush I and McCain versions.

Won’t happen because it’s ridiculous. In hindsight, it was ridiculous to nominate Romney.

As I read you, you are basically saying the result was inevitable. That is your bottom line. Admit it.

I disagree.

A fighter is out there. Let us never nominate the next Romney again.

I even went into Gingrich’s entire electoral history, back to his earliest political days.

Specific reasons galore, none of them having to do with what some stupid pundit said.

And by the way, if I were jumping on board what pundits say, I could have enjoyed some optimism prior to the election about the prospects of a Romney victory. Instead, I was consistently pessimistic. I always thought it was a longshot, always thought Obama had an excellent chance of winning, but always thought (and still think) Romney had the best chance of all the candidates who declared.

Which is not the same as saying he had a good chance. I never thought that, and I don’t believe I ever said it on this blog a single time. And that was when many pundits on the right (and many commenters here and elsewhere) were predicting a Romney victory or Romney landslide.

Do you have specific reasons? He won some number of primaries – and then, on cue, “all the bad things the right people in the know” said about him came into play.

Which is exactly my point: “the right people in the know” did not know.

The best you could say about them is that they were wrong about Romney while possibly right about Gingrich. But they are 0-2 in predictions. Why should we have trusted their prediction about Gingrich?

Gingrich has a track record: He won the Congress in ’94. He won some primaries. His potential to win is seen in the ferocity of the opponents. That’s to be expected in a fight. Again, that’s my point. Palin and Santorum, same thing.

Santorum actually was correct in his closing argument against Romney – that only he (Santorum) could credibly make the Obamacare argument against Obama.

He was right about that. Romney was never able to use that club and he lost a narrow election.

Picking him was a huge mistake, only digestible at all if we learn to never, ever, ever, ever nominate a candidate who cannot and will not fight.