Ich mache das nicht oft, aber diesen Artikel aus dem Time Magazine fand ich so lesenswert, daß ich ihn im ganzen in Englisch poste:
Road to Nowhere
By Michael Grunwald Monday, Feb. 11, 2013
It’s easy to see why Republicans are freaking out. The electorate is getting more diverse, less rural, more educated, less evangelical–in short, less demographically Republican. It’s also getting less hostile to gays, gun control, even government–in short, less ideologically Republican.
So ever since President Obama gave them a second drubbing, despite a supposedly disqualifying unemployment rate, GOP elites have admitted that America isn’t producing enough angry old white guys for them to win national elections, that they can’t be the party of no or the Tea Party party or the stupid party. That’s progress! The problem is figuring out what needs to change.
Predictably, some Republicans have concluded that what needs to change is the electorate. So they’re pushing more of the voter-ID laws and other purported antifraud measures that they designed to suppress Democratic turnout in 2012. Some of them even want to gerrymander the Electoral College: in Virginia, GOP apparatchiks proposed replacing a winner-take-all system with rules that would have given Mitt Romney nine of the state’s 13 electoral votes even though Obama got more actual votes.
But reality-based Republicans understand that banana-republic shenanigans won’t restore their majority. Artful redistricting may have persuaded some politicians that they can choose their voters, but voters usually choose their politicians.
These days, the party line is that Republicans need to change their approach to politics–message, tone, technology, strategy. They shouldn’t make repulsive comments about rape, question Obama’s birth certificate, brag about their unwillingness to compromise or suggest that 47% of their fellow citizens are moochers. They should repair their relationship with data so they won’t be flabbergasted when election night doesn’t ratify the predictions of their pundits. They need to use Skype, improve minority outreach and stop behaving like crotchety reactionaries who ridicule the First Lady’s efforts to promote healthy eating.
Again, this is progress. But while it may be comforting for Republicans to blame salesmanship rather than product, their salesmanship has been quite impressive. In the 2010 midterms, they successfully portrayed Obama’s stewardship of a recovering economy as an epic disaster and his promotion of Romney-style health care reforms as unprecedented socialism. They’ve rebranded themselves as an antideficit party after creating huge deficits in the Bush era, even though they’ve continued to push deficit-exploding tax cuts. After four years of their fighting unemployment benefits, highway projects, Wall Street reforms, disaster relief, insurance protections, millionaire tax hikes and other popular policies, it’s a tribute to their political skills that Republicans remain as competitive as they are.
No, Republicans need to change what they’re selling. For one thing, they’re selling buggy whips. Undeterred by the Iraq debacle, the meltdown of 2008 or the warming of the planet, they’re still peddling rah-rah neoconservatism, deregulation and climate denialism. They’re still carrying water for fossil-fuel industries, anti-gay activists and other interest groups on the wrong side of history while doubling down on the austerity measures that created double-dip recessions in Spain and Britain.
Republicans are also selling hypocrisy. They attack Obama for refusing to cut entitlements but also for cutting Medicare, because their elderly supporters like Medicare. They rarely propose their own spending cuts, except for PBS, NEA and other small-dollar liberal favorites; they often defend wasteful farm subsidies, because ag states tilt Republican. They warn that cutting military spending will kill jobs, the same Keynesian logic they mock when it comes to abstract government spending.
So far, the only policy that most Republicans seem interested in revising is their hostility toward immigration reform, partly in hope of revising Latino hostility toward them. But so far that’s mostly another messaging effort. It’s not clear how a GOP that has shed its centrists can offer a more modern product when its antigovernment base punishes any deviation from the buggy-whip line. And it’s not clear how a GOP dominated by that base can offer a more honest product when even antigovernment Americans seem to enjoy the services government provides. Ultimately, it’s hard to see what could deliver the change the party needs.
Except, perhaps, more drubbings.