Yet again we find ourselves asking, "Who could've guessed?"
President Obama's top pollster [Joel Benenson] said the Republican Party has a 'tolerance problem' and predicted it will continue to struggle at the ballot box if its members don't have a major tonal change.
Republicans assume their little "tolerance problem" will be solved just as soon as they're finished "reaching out" to the same people they were pushing away only a month ago.
Latinos? They love 'em! Especially now that it's all too clear they make up a voting bloc without which electoral success is impossible.
The new Republican post-election "autopsy" panel, euphemistically known as the Growth and Opportunity Project, is confident, with just the right framing, they'll be able to lure voters back, no questions asked.
Because in Republican La-La Land, words speak louder than actions.
According to Benenson, and everyone else who hasn't had their heads buried in the sand since forever, Republicans aren't facing a single-front problem—they're facing a systemic one:
"If Republicans approach this as if they have a Latino problem, I think that they are missing a larger dynamic that's in place right now. I believe that the Republican Party has a tolerance problem. When you define people who look differently than you as illegal aliens and use that term over and over again and talk about self-deporting them, that's a tolerance issue."
All the heart-shaped soundbites in the world won't erase the GOP's well-documented track record of pissing-off just about everyone that doesn't share their rigid worldview.
In other words, everyone that isn't white, male, hetrosexual, or interested in killing the planet.
The Republican ship is sinking, yet the band plays on:
"They should rethink how their positions with these groups are implicitly defining them," [Benenson] said.
Advice they won't take, because they
can't take it.
Every moderate view that has even a hint of compromise gets slapped down—if not by the bigots, then by the righteous, the rich, the warmongers, or the planet killers.
While Democrats haven't done things perfectly, our challenges aren't of the same nature—the only people we're upsetting are those who are upset at us for trying to do right by people and planet.
And there's another big difference: the approach. While Republicans reconfigure the facts to suit the vision and fail accordingly, Democrats acknowledge and adjust, as Benenson suggests:
"[Democrats are] very cognizant about keeping our coalition engaged from day one here going forward."
Why?
[Because Democrats] learned their lesson in 2010.
Working in the best interest of
everyone, not just a select few who offer only empty words for the rest of us, of course, doesn't hurt either.
...
(My emphasis in all quotes)
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