You’re barking up the wrong tree, GOP
For decades, liberals have bullied Republicans into taking suicidal positions by warning that the country will wreak a terrible vengeance on them if they do not urgently accede to some liberal agenda item. The demanded policy is invariably one that the white working class either is indifferent to or actively detests.
Over the years, the GOP has been obsessed with winning more votes from some generally Democratic constituencies: perpetually alarmed women (gun control), the media (campaign finance reform) and feminists (Equal Rights Amendment).
{mosads}It never works. Democrats must be astonished at their good luck that Republicans fall for it every time.
Today, Republicans have again decided their path to victory is to concentrate on winning slightly more of another Democratic constituency: Hispanics. Curiously, Democrats never follow their own advice. They don’t neurotically fixate on increasing their support from evangelicals, coal miners, pro-lifers or small-business owners.
Everyone sees it now with previous “moderate,” “sensible” positions taken by the GOP. But no one saw it at the time. Elected Republicans were always the last to know. It’s important to review how stupid Republicans were in the past because they’re being stupid in the exact same way again today.
Guns are the most striking example. Few elected officials of either party are willing to get within 10 miles of any gun control measure these days. But, as with immigration, the media bluffed politicians into supporting gun control with phony polls that showed “huge majorities of gun owners and the public” supported endless restrictions on guns, as The New York Times put it, or that waiting periods for gun purchases were “supported by 95 percent of Americans,” as then-Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) claimed.
The first President Bush voted for a gun control bill as a congressman, then tried to distance himself from that vote during his presidential primary run against Ronald Reagan. He lost. But then Bush went right back to his anti-gun policies after being elected as a result of having been Reagan’s vice president. Although that wasn’t the only way Democrats fooled Bush, the National Rifle Association (NRA) declined to endorse him for reelection. Again, he lost.
The erstwhile pro-gun Dennis DeConcini, now a former senator, introduced a bill in early 1993 that would ban so-called “assault weapons,” telling ABC’s “Nightline,” “The public, they support this legislation.” Within six months, the Arizona Democrat’s approval rating in the state had fallen by 17 points and his probable Republican opponent, then-Rep. Jon Kyl, was running ahead of him by 20 points. Deconcini declined to seek reelection.
On Oct. 1, 1993, The New York Times reported that then-Gov. Jim Florio, Democrat of New Jersey, had “revived [his] popularity” with “strong gun control legislation.” One month later, not only did Florio lose his reelection, his party was wiped out in both houses of the state Legislature — an event former President Clinton attributed to the Democrats’ passage of an “assault weapons” ban.
The Democratic Congress pushed through a nationwide ban of “assault weapons” the following year. The ban was so popular, it led to a Republican sweep of Congress later that year, giving the GOP a majority in both houses for the first time in nearly half a century. The only congressional Democrats who retained their seats that year were the ones endorsed by the NRA.
Republicans are getting the exact same bluff on immigration today. And it’s working. It always does.
The Democrats say it’s urgent that Congress pass an amnesty for illegal aliens: It’s a crisis to have people living in the shadows! If illegal immigration is a crisis, it’s a crisis only for the Democrats, who demand that they be given 30 million new voters. If it were a crisis for the illegal immigrants themselves, there’d be an easy solution.
There’s the Orwellian language. The Schumer-Rubio bill that would put millions of lawbreakers on a “path to citizenship” is called “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Democrat’s 1994 assault weapon ban was titled the Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act.
And there are the phony polls allegedly showing that vast majorities of Americans support amnesty. But this doesn’t quite jibe with the fact that Americans have risen up and shut down three actual amnesty bills in the last decade.
The second President Bush tried to foist amnesty on the country, and his party was wiped out in the next election. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pushed amnesty and lost his presidential bid. Jeb Bush is still hawking amnesty and he’s polling about the same as Donald Trump, despite having unparalleled name recognition and the media’s deep respect. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) ran for office vowing to oppose amnesty and then has spent his Senate career pushing an amnesty bill. Now, the telegenic favorite of cable news can’t catch mild-mannered Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) in the polls.
In the 2014 Republican sweep of Congress, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) took out a sitting Democratic senator by aggressively opposing amnesty. Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) took out an incumbent Republican congressman — and party leader — by attacking his support for amnesty. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) easily won an open Senate seat by opposing amnesty, getting nearly twice as many votes as the two amnesty-supporting Republicans combined. Scott Brown in New Hampshire nearly defeated the most formidable Democrat running that year by opposing amnesty.
So, naturally, the amnesty-supporting Chamber of Commerce is demanding credit for the GOP’s 2014 victory.
And guess what? Republican political consultants agree.
It’s important to remember that political consultants’ main interest is not in winning elections — look at how rich Mike Murphy’s gotten by losing them — but in raising boatloads of cash without breaking a sweat. They assure their idiot clients that conservative voters have “no place else to go.”
In fact, it’s the rich, the business interests and the Chamber of Commerce that have no place else to go. If they want lower taxes, less regulation and protection from trial lawyers, they’re not voting for the Democrats.
It’s ordinary white men and their wives who get discouraged and stay home. The only two Republican landslides for president in the last century were won by candidates who drove up the white working-class vote: Nixon and Reagan. Will elected Republicans ever notice that working-class whites are the only swing voters?
Coulter is a political commentator.
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