Quote:TPM asked McCain if Republicans can recover in 2016 if the overhaul falters and if the party nominates a pro-immigration candidate. He took a deep breath and shook his head.
“No,” he said.
If this is what's being said publicly, I can only imagine what the private conversation is like.
RE: McCain: GOP in trouble if immigration bill fails
(06-28-2013 01:38 PM)MileHighBronco Wrote: I've heard so many tall tales about what most hispanics want that it is dizzying. Nobody can speak for all of them.
However, there IS a cultural element to this, at least for Mexicans. They are used to corruption in government. They have tolerated it. They also appear to have a more big government socialist mindset than Americans. Which is all the more reason to require immigrants to learn English and assimilate. Quit Balkanizing the U.S. with more and more millions of uneducated third world immigrants.
That's true around the world. It's one of several reasons to consider that Hamilton quote as correct.
US is better than most other nations. Immigrants (legal or not) come here and see a better life. So they hear the nonsense spouted by the left, and accept that gamble: the left is correct and they'll make things better, if not the US is still better than where they came from. But better for them is easily worse than what the US was a few decades ago.
RE: McCain: GOP in trouble if immigration bill fails
(06-28-2013 01:38 PM)MileHighBronco Wrote: I've heard so many tall tales about what most hispanics want that it is dizzying. Nobody can speak for all of them.
However, there IS a cultural element to this, at least for Mexicans. They are used to corruption in government. They have tolerated it. They also appear to have a more big government socialist mindset than Americans. Which is all the more reason to require immigrants to learn English and assimilate. Quit Balkanizing the U.S. with more and more millions of uneducated third world immigrants.
We can take in a certain number of those groups but need to focus on bringing in legal immigrants with skills that will help the U.S. economy and not be a drain on our welfare state. But those will not be reliable dem voters. They have shown that they can think for themselves and not become a dependent ward of the state.
Actually, the MASSIVE problem for the GOP is that these people ARE becoming reliable Democratic voters. That's what so much of the hard right on the immigration is missing. The perfectly legal immigrants (such as my well-educated and high income earning mother that immigrated from Taiwan 40 years ago) don't see an anti-illegal-immigration message from the GOP, but rather an anti-immigration (whether legal or illegal) message PERIOD. As a result, Asian-Americans (the most educated and highest income racial group of them all that one would think would be the most open to voting for the GOP) voted for Obama at even a higher percentage than Hispanics.
Aside from that, George W. Bush carried around 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004 - this was a group that was very much there for the taking by the GOP. If immigration reform had been passed under W's leadership (and I'm not saying W was a great president by any means, but he knew the importance of the Latino vote), then the image of the party could have been radically different among Latinos and Asians. Maybe they wouldn't have created hard-rock majorities for the GOP, but they would at least have made those groups competitive in a way that the Republicans haven't been able to do with African-Americans since the 1960s. The Republicans WILL lose presidential elections in perpetuity with these demographic shifts if something doesn't change. That wouldn't bother me if not for the fact that the Democrats are so willing to kick the can down the road and saddle me and my children with bone crushing debt (which will result in bone crushing taxes) in the future. Why the Republicans can't just focus on the fiscal side and STFU about social issues that are targeted to a myopic and shrinking base that will guarantee future general election losses is beyond me.
(This post was last modified: 06-28-2013 01:59 PM by Frank the Tank.)
RE: McCain: GOP in trouble if immigration bill fails
The problem that the right has that the left doesn't need to combat is the leftwing journalist's stereotyping of the right. THEY feed the low info voters this tripe. They distort, malign, impugn the right incessantly. The left doesn't have to fight that headwind.
But the problem for the GOP has always been messaging. They either have nobody who can articulate a sensible argument, they don't notice the problem or don't know what to do about it. Whatever message they have will be distorted by the media. They will never win that battle until they learn some discipline. I've about given up on the GOP learning anything. One party has turned downright evil and the other is stuck on stupid. The evil one has media cover, the stupid one has to run on their lousy communication of ideas and against a media campaign.
I don't share your belief that ALL these people are becoming reliable dem voters. If people are confusing the GOP's stance on LEGAL and ILLEGAL immigration, it is due to the confusion deliberately sown by journalists.
I, too get disturbed by the focus on social issues and the GOP will never escape that because IF the candidates don't bring them up, the MEDIA will gladly carry the water for the left and make them a big issue. That, and the right has some loose cannons that slip into the election field as candidates and say some truly frighteningly stupid things, which become an albatross around other GOPers necks. If our biased media was honest, they would apply the same template to dems saying stupid things but, of course, they don't.
(This post was last modified: 06-28-2013 02:23 PM by MileHighBronco.)
RE: McCain: GOP in trouble if immigration bill fails
(06-28-2013 01:57 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: Why the Republicans can't just focus on the fiscal side and STFU about social issues that are targeted to a myopic and shrinking base that will guarantee future general election losses is beyond me.
That's what bothers me so much about Rand Paul. He's standing at the door but keeps dipping his toes in the theocratic right pool, tainting him for independents and giving ammo to Dems in exchange for what? A finicky base that would vote for him anyway if they had to pick between him as a libertarian and whoever follows Obama (Clinton? O'Malley?).
RE: McCain: GOP in trouble if immigration bill fails
(06-28-2013 02:21 PM)MileHighBronco Wrote: The problem that the right has that the left doesn't need to combat is the leftwing journalist's stereotyping of the right. THEY feed the low info voters this tripe. They distort, malign, impugn the right incessantly. The left doesn't have to fight that headwind.
But the problem for the GOP has always been messaging. They either have nobody who can articulate a sensible argument, they don't notice the problem or don't know what to do about it. Whatever message they have will be distorted by the media. They will never win that battle until they learn some discipline. I've about given up on the GOP learning anything. One party has turned downright evil and the other is stuck on stupid. The evil one has media cover, the stupid one has to run on their lousy communication of ideas and against a media campaign.
I don't share your belief that ALL these people are becoming reliable dem voters. If people are confusing the GOP's stance on LEGAL and ILLEGAL immigration, it is due to the confusion deliberately sown by journalists.
I, too get disturbed by the focus on social issues and the GOP will never escape that because IF the candidates don't bring them up, the MEDIA will gladly carry the water for the left and make them a big issue. That, and the right has some loose cannons that slip into the election field as candidates and say some truly frighteningly stupid things, which become an albatross around other GOPers necks. If our biased media was honest, they would apply the same template to dems saying stupid things but, of course, they don't.
Some part of it is messaging, but remember that the left was saying the same thing back in 2002 and 2004 with the war on terrorism and taxes: "If we could just communicate *our* message better, then the idiot voters out there that live in Ohio and Florida would finally realize that we're better for them." Plenty of self-loathing books were written by liberals back then about how much better the Republicans were at getting out their message and how much Republican voters were supposedly voting against their economic self-interests (tying how the populist social conservatives generally had little in common with the free market fiscal conservatives).
So, just thinking that it's all about the "message" is extremely dangerous thinking for Republicans just as it was for the Democrats a decade ago. It's a faulty symptom of partisans convincing themselves that the voters out there just need to be informed of what they supposedly don't know, when the reality is that voters are a lot more informed than partisans give them credit for and simply do not like certain policy proposals.
Regardless, the share of voting age Hispanics and Asian-Americans in the electorate is going to get larger and larger (as the children of first generation Americans grow up) even if there isn't a single new immigrant let into this country. There is a fundamental demographic shift in this country and there are heck of lot more places (i.e. Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, Florida) where that's going to damage the Republicans by simple math. There is no messaging that's going to change that trend, so the Republicans can either adapt their policies or we'll be here talking about how the party is getting steamrolled by Hillary Clinton from 2016 through 2024. An attempt to change messaging without any changes in policy isn't beating the Clinton machine.
Now, the Democrats could certainly overextend themselves by passing draconian fiscal policies that could turn the political tide. Both political parties have amazingly misguided beliefs as to how much of a "mandate" that they have whenever they win elections and are experts at shooting themselves in the foot. There's always that opening for the Republicans. However, the demographic shift means that the GOP almost has to wait for the Democrats to make mistakes, which isn't anywhere near as appealing as being in a position where you can be proactive.
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McCain: GOP in trouble if immigration bill fails
His version of the GOP is the only one that has any shot at winning presidential elections.
![[Image: lb0620cd20130619085912_zps0ca31620.jpg]](http://s1096.photobucket.com/user/CRE48/media/Immigration%20Album/lb0620cd20130619085912_zps0ca31620.jpg.html)