Fresh from their failures in the ’22 midterm elections, Republicans have created an “advisory council” to help craft their “2024 vision and beyond.” Cue the hysterical laugh track.
Vision. That’s a hoot. By all accounts, their plan to curb inflation is to focus on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The showrunners on Seinfeld had a slogan for their self-absorbed characters: “No learning.” That’s perfect for the MAGA-infested GOP, which seems incapable of learning anything. In fact, it was perfect for the GOP long before the MAGA metastasis.
After losing the 2012 presidential race, Republicans warned in an autopsy report that the overwhelmingly white party needed to modernize by reaching out to people of color, because otherwise it was “driving around in circles on an ideological cul de sac.” Guess what happened next. In 2016 they ignored their own advice and tripled down on circling the cul de sac by nominating Donald Trump, who proceeded to market white grievance and malign people of color. Then Trump led the party to defeat in three straight elections – the ’18 midterms, the ’20 presidential, and the ’22 midterms.
So now Republican chairwoman Ronna McDaniel thinks that an “advisory council” can help determine what’s gone wrong and how to make things right. And to further that effort, here are three of the advisors she has chosen to contribute wisdom:
* Kellyanne Conway, the Trump propagandist who told Fox News this week that Herschel Walker lost in Georgia because not enough Republican bigwigs came to help him.
* Blake Masters, the defeated Arizona Senate candidate, who insisted that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, that America was wrong to enter World War II, and that America’s gun violence should be blamed on “Black people, frankly.”
* And Tony Perkins, the right-wing religious zealot who has devoted his career to opposing legal abortion and gay equality.
“Our party needs to modernize,” said Blake Masters, who drew lots of support from white extremists whose idea of modernization was turning back the clock on people of color.
But the prize for magical thinking goes to the Republican National Committee, which said that the advisory council members would advise “on continuing the success we saw in 2022 such as growing the party with Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters.” That’s an odd definition of “success.” Black voters basically clinched Democratic control of the Senate; more than 90 percent cast ballots for John Fetterman in Pennsylvania (as did 68 percent of PA’s Hispanics), and more than 90 percent voted for Rafael Warnock in this week’s Georgia runoff. According to the nationwide midterm exit polls, only 30 percent of non-whites voted for Republicans (other estimates put the share at 27).
And imagine taking advice from anti-abortion extremist Tony Perkins, in the wake of exit poll evidence that 59 percent of midterm voters supported legal abortion in all or most cases; that abortion was cited as the second most important issue – and that 76 percent of those who named abortion as the most important issue voted for Democrats.
The funniest line yesterday in The New York Times was a reporter’s prediction that the GOP’s lousy midterm results “will almost certainly lead to soul-searching.” Yeah, right. Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk show host, had the best rejoinder: “Somehow we doubt that the GOP will spend much time rummaging through the soul they mislaid years ago.”
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Speaking of that mislaid soul:
Lying and ignorance were party staples long before Trump came along. Consider these two classics from the the 2012 GOP primary season. Michele Bachmann (remember her?), foreshadowing today’s anti-vax loons, decreed without a shred of empirical evidence that a popular childhood inoculation had “very dangerous side effects” like “mental retardation.” And Rick Perry (remember him?) said during a debate that he was gonna completely eliminate three federal agencies: “I would do away with Education, uh, the, uh, Commerce, and, let’s see, I can’t, the third one, I can’t, sorry, oops.”