Prairieson: Post Mortem

Post Mortem

I am not going to pound on George Bush -- and there are many reasons why. Bush made some serious blunders and he has to take his share of the blame for what happened. But I'm not nearly as angry at him as I am at people like McCain, Hastert, Foly, Lyndsey Graham and the rest.

Remember Cunningham? I thought about the "corruption" charges and most of them wound up involving Republicans. A few were Democrats -- like Jefferson -- but most were Republicans. We could say it was a witchhunt by prosecutors in bed with Democrats -- DeLay is an example -- but Foly, Cunningham, etc. -- they committed criminal acts and, in the end, confessed to them.

That's not good. It's not good at all.

The GOP must have zero tolerance toward questionable ethics in the future. People like Foly kill us at the polls.If you like Hugh Hewitt, please take a gander at this article by him (it's at Tarheel Redneck). It will knock your socks off. It's a powerful indictment of some in the GOP, especially McCain. Everything Hewitt says in that column is factual -- I had forgotten some of the incidents but Hewitt reminded me.

I understand why the Libertarians moved away from the GOP this time. But like I said in a recent post, what good is it going to do for them?

Let's take a look at the election results and count how many Libertarians will be going to the House. Zero. Goose Egg. Nada. They sure showed the GOP, didn't they? Now they have absolutely no representation in the House. I think such "victories" are called Pyhrric and for good reason.

Many Democrats are vulnerable in 2008. If the GOP can take the next two years, clean its own house, let some young blood take charge, get its message out loud and clear (and we can do that despite the MSM), admit its mistakes and point to how it has solved them -- then the GOP will roar back in 2008. We can easily retake the Senate and we can take back most of the losses in the House.

If we want to regain the majority in the House we're going to have to open the "big tent" and give the libertarians a reason to vote GOP again. Ronald Reagan, himself a libertarian sympathizer, was responsible for bringing them into the GOP to begin with (along with conservative Democrats abandoned by their party).

I believe the GOP must do one thing: it needs to hire a permanent media relations staff. We need to get smart about the liberal bias in the mainstream media. There are plenty of smart people in the media world who could go a long way toward helping the GOP find chinks in that liberal armor and exploit such weaknesses.

The GOP's candidates are going to have get more media savy and every major candidate should be given some "media relations" training through the RNC. The GOP already invests money in this area but it needs to do a lot more because, as we know, conservatives will not get a fair shake from the likes of MSNBC, etc. If we're smart, we can find ways to get around that bias and with the internet, there is no reason the conservative message cannot get out there.

Thanks to Prairieson for this very excellent political analysis! Visit his blog at: http://tarheelredneck.blogspot.com/