Steve Deace weighs in — here is a particularly good excerpt:
Republicans cannot win without their base energized, but they can’t win with just an energized base, either. Yet here, too, it’s about issues and not personalities. The key issue here is the economy, which we all know, except it doesn’t factor in for Republicans the way we think it does.
A Republican who is seen as a corporatist shill cannot win the White House, because he cannot win enough middle class voters. This is why Democrats pounded on George H.W. Bush for not knowing how a supermarket scanner worked, and made sure everyone knew Romney couldn’t remember how many houses he owned. It’s also why McCain’s momentum in 2008 fizzled out the moment he stopped his campaign to aid and abet the passage of the still-hated TARP.
When Reagan defined government as the problem with the economy, getting in the way of the small business owner and entrepreneur, he won two landslides. When George H.W. Bush promised “read my lips no new taxes” he coined the decisive catchphrase of his 1988 victory (and after he violated it in office he received the lowest popular vote for a president’s re-election since 1912). His son, George W. Bush, successfully ran on tax cuts and smaller government as “compassionate conservatism” in 2000.
Read more: BarbWire.com
