Echo...echo......echo

The future of the Republican Party: What not to do | The Economist

I liked this paragraph in above short bit of commentary in The Economist:

 SEVERAL of my colleagues have written characteristically incisive pieces about what lessons the Republicans should take from losing an eminently winnable election. Over at the Corner, Michael Walsh and Mark Krikorian recommend a few lessons of their own. For Mr Walsh, the number one lesson learned from Tuesday's defeat is that "the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos." That's number one! "Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation," he writes, as if no such enterprises exist. The best-rated cable-news channel is Fox! Five of the top ten radio programmes (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Neal Boortz) are conservative! Messrs Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al have spent the last four years telling their listeners that Mr Obama is an incompetent Kenyan-Marxist-Muslim-Commie-Socialist doomed to defeat. Such sentiments soothe their listeners and are good for ratings, but the parts about incompetence and imminent defeat turned out to be false. The problem is not that conservatives lack media outlets; the problem comes when they fail to venture outside of them.

And words of wisdom from the Lexington blog at the same magazine:

Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.

It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.

Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.