Priebus on the 2012 GOPost-mortem: we’ll get to it
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For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, people keep mentioning the RNC’s Growth & Opportunity Project Report. For example, a reporter put it in the lede of a front page Boston Globe article that commenterion efgoldman shared this morning.
The Republican Party commissioned an autopsy on the 2012 presidential election, trying to figure out why Mitt Romney lost. One of the verdicts, already glaringly obvious to many: The party needed to make itself more attractive to women.
The 2016 race isn’t even over, and fed-up conservative women, saying the party failed to heed the lesson, are angrily conducting a vivisection of the campaign of Donald Trump and, pointedly, the party leaders who refused to disown him.
The GrOPR was a report the RNC commissioned after America passed on the GOP’s shiny white businessdroid and stuck with President Obama. It contains a detailed and sometimes not inaccurate analysis of why this happened, and contains such action items as:
Republicans should develop a more aggressive response to Democrat rhetoric regarding a so-called “war on women.” In 2012, the Republican response to this attack was muddled, and too often the attack went undefended altogether. We need to actively combat this, better prepare our surrogates, and not stand idly by while the Democrats pigeonhole us using false attacks. There are plenty of liberal policies that negatively impact women, and it is incumbent upon the party to expose those and relentlessly attack Democrats using that framework.
Reproductive freedom or President Short-fingered Assailant. How ever is a girl to decide?
The report also came up during RNC PR BS’s appearance on Face the Nation today:
As for concerns that Trump is going against the main tenets of the Growth and Opportunity Report, the famous post-2012 autopsy the RNC commissioned, Priebus said it’s a “prescription for the long term, not the short term.”
“The Growth and Opportunity Report is a message to the entire party as a whole and I stand behind it 100 percent,” Priebus said.
The message to the party as a whole being ignore this until the next time. And when the GOP nominates another bigoted jackass in 2020, ignore it then, too.
More on Preibus and the postmortem via Mediaite:
Dickerson said it sure sounds like Donald Trump is doing the complete opposite of what the GOP wanted. Priebus dismissed that and said Trump deserves credit for going into black communities in the past few months.
He also insisted that the Republican party has worked tirelessly to do way more minority outrage this time around.
Thinking that one’s pick for president deserves credit for going to Cleveland and speaking to Americans who aren’t white explains many things, including the rest of the exchange. (Outrage might be a typo, might be the writer can read Priebus’ mind.)
“It’s not because of the effort that had not been put in. First of all, I contend he’s gonna do better in black communities than we have done four and eight years ago.”
He then repeats the magic mantra “We are the party of Lincoln,” so I guess they’ll be running the ad again this year.
I won’t bother asking how Trump is supposed to out perform McMaverick or Rombot, or why he talks about black communities (which don’t vote) instead of black voters. But I do wonder who the hell he is trying to convince.
