GOP is killing its own chances at the White House

If there was ever a time that the out-of-power political party needed to be united it is this election. Under the Obama Administration, the nation has taken a sharp turn to the left and the nation’s debt has surged. More people are today dependent on government largess than ever before. Under President Obama, the nation’s entitlement system has expanded and will expand even more if he is re-elected.

So one would think that those opposed to this growth in statism would want to make a serious challenge and would seek some kind of unity.

But the GOP seems to be incapable of doing that. Fractured between evangelical politics, the fiscal Tea Party movement and traditional moderate Republicans, the party isn’t singing from the same songbook. If the GOP were a choir, it’d hurt the ears with its disorganized song.

Republicans have a strong argument to make that the Obama Administration has taken the country off course and in a direction that is simply a version of European socialism. And look what shape Europe is in due to its welfare state mentality.

And yet, the GOP is so busy slicing up each other internally over social issues that it has lost its focus of the large picture. It has become a caricature of itself — Romney as the rich white male who is out of touch with the working class; Gingrich as the nutty professor; and Santorum as the zealot of the religious right whose social agenda is an anathema to moderates. If Democrats tried to create a fictional story line of oddball Republicans, they couldn’t have been this creative.

No, the GOP is killing its own chances at regaining the White House, bleeding from a thousand self-inflicted cuts. Part of that is due to how the GOP has restructured its primary process, a collection of moves that could have the nomination go all the way to the convention floor.

But it’s also part ego of the candidates. While it would be a very, very long-shot for either Gingrich or Santorum to secure the nomination, neither is willing to step out of the race so that the party can start to build a sense of unity. If they really believe what they preach — that President Obama needs to be booted out of the White House and that the good of the country comes first, then they would put their own egos on the back burner and sacrifice themselves for that greater good.

That isn’t happening so far. It’s not the country that really matters, it’s the winning or losing.

In most Presidential elections, this might be a small matter. But this election is seen by many as a potential historic turning point for the country. Another four years of a liberal Obama Administration could forever change the relationship between citizens and the government as more and more people would become addicted to a nanny-state for their existence. Government was once the caretaker of the extreme underclass; now it is expected to take care of the financial, medical and social needs of the middle class.

The process of doing that, however, has seriously undermined the nation’s work ethic, especially among the middle class which had historically been the country’s backbone. That process began before President Obama — George Bush did his share, too, of addicting people to government. But the process has accelerated under Obama.

It’s not clear if the GOP really does have a different agenda than President Obama at this point. The party is so busy fighting among itself that it has not been able to raise any clear distinctions between what it would do in power and what is happening now. Romney, the likely nominee, is in many ways the Republican Obama. And yet, he is probably the only GOP candidate who could pull enough of the moderate independent voters to make a serious challenge to the President.

All the distractions over social issues within the GOP has taken the focus off of the only real issue in this campaign which is a government that is spending the country into chaos. Unless there is some major change in the fiscal policies of the country, none of the social issues will matter because the nation will be torn apart by a crushing debt that will do massive economic harm. If you’re starving, those social issues won’t be very important.

Maybe the GOP will get its act together and coalesce behind a candidate. But time is running out; a few more weeks of internal fighting may kill any chance the party has of retaking the White House.

And if that happens, the GOP won’t have anyone but themselves to blame.

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And speaking of self-inflected nuttiness, the Bibb County School System in Macon Ga. is about to adopt an expensive training program for its teachers that essentially blames the lack of progress of black students on white oppression.

According to an article in the Macon Telegraph, the predominately black Bibb school district is looking at hiring the Pacific Educational Group to do training in a bid to close the achievement gap between black and Asian and white students.

The Telegraph quotes the group’s mission statement as being: “At Pacific Educational Group we believe systemic racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished capacity of all children, especially black children, to achieve at the highest levels, and contributes to the fracturing of the communities that nurture and support them.”


Yea, right. Underachievement in inner city schools that have mostly black students and black teachers is simply due to “racism.” It has nothing to do with fractured families. It has nothing to do with widespread drug addiction and black-on-black crime. It has nothing to do with a culture that doesn’t, in general, put much value in education. It’s somebody else’s fault.

According to an editorial in the Rocky Mountain News in 2006 about this program:

“The program also promotes a world view in which American society is relentlessly oppressive; in which individuals, even today, remain at the mercy of their racial origins; in which ‘white talk’ is ‘verbal, impersonal, intellectual’ and ‘task-oriented,’ while ‘color commentary’ is ‘nonverbal, personal, emotional’ and ‘process-oriented.’ Enlightened whites, in the authors’ description, speak in the chastened, cringing language of someone who has emerged from a re-education camp.”

And people wonder why public schools have come under such intense criticism from parents and politicians?

Read the full article if you really want to be scared about the direction of education in the country.

http://www.macon.com/2012/03/18/1950823/bibb-school-system-considers-deal.html

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.