This is a no-particular-order list of facts-optional things I heard said on Twitter or on faux-news within the last few days after the re-election of Barack Obama
1. "This is still essentially a center-right nation. Because of this, Republicans have an inherent advantage and just need to communicate their message better."
Pauline Kael, meet Dick Morris. Dick Morris, Pauline Kael.
If you aren't familiar with Dick Morris's pre-election pro-Romney bravado, Google it. What happened, though, is that Morris predicted a Romney landslide, completely disregarding polls as liberally biased (which, if you think about it, makes no sense; if you're predicting Obama wins by a ton, wouldn't it dissuade people, most of whom listen to you are liberal, from bothering to vote?). This shouldn't be a HUGE shocker--Dick Morris lives in his own little Fox News bubble in which everybody he knows is voting for Romney and hates Obama. This doesn't reflect the nation as a whole; it reflects the fairly small sampling of people Dick Morris knows. Post-election, I suppose he has to acknowledge that Obama got more votes, but there's no specific need for him to acknowledge that, if given perfect information not skewed by "the liberal media" (a phrase said on a nationally broadcast news network on a daily basis), people would vote Romney.
There's also the fact that Obama's platform would be considered center-right in most of the western world (strong military presence, continued presence of Gitmo, etc.), but that would require Dick Morris to look to other continents while he won't even look outside of his personal bubble.
2. If the GOP wants to expand its base, it needs to be more liberal on abortion.
With most issues, young voters tend to favor the Democrats over the Republicans. Abortion isn't one of them. It's not that young people are overwhelmingly more pro-life than older people; it's just that there are so many clearer issues on which the GOP could actually gain young voters.
People tend to lump abortion and gay marriage as issues which are one in the same but this is hilariously untrue. Abortion is the issue on which young people tend to be more conservative than their elders. Gay marriage is the issue in which young people tend to be FAR more liberal than their elders. One is an issue of conservative Christians inflicting their will because of their own private morality; one is an issue of conservative Christians inflicting their will BECAUSE THE LIVES OF BABIES ARE AT STAKE. Whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, it shouldn't be THAT hard to see that the issues are pretty damn different. Unless "be more liberal on abortion" means "don't have guys like Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock on the ballot", abortion is not the problem.
Abortion is an interesting issue to me in that there are a large, large amount of people who vote exclusively based on it. Pro-lifers for Republicans, pro-choicers for Democrats. Say, hypothetically, that somebody's biggest issue is abortion because they're pro-choice. If the Republicans all of a sudden say they don't want to overturn Roe v. Wade, is this person going to change their mind, or are they going to view them as political opportunists? Republicans lost on abortion this year not because people are especially pro-choice; it's because they lost their collective minds. Even something like a late-90s "no abortions except for rape or incest, appoint judges who will protect life, etc." Republican platform is perfectly viable as long as you combined it with other shit.
Side note: While the dumbest argument in politics is people saying that gay marriage bans are "to protect traditional marriage", as though gay marriage somehow bans heterosexual marriage, the second dumbest might be "protecting a woman's right to choose". And I say this as somebody whose stance on abortion is closer to the Democrats than the Republicans--if the choice, in the eyes of people who oppose you, is generally that of murdering somebody, who the fuck wants available choices?
3. With Obama no longer seeking re-election, he will now impose his anti-business, anti-gun, anti-religion views on the United States.
Similar arguments to this were made in 1996. In 2004, people argued that George W. Bush would now just appoint a bunch of pro-life judges and start new wars and whatnot. Clinton didn't impose stricter gun restrictions and Bush didn't start new wars. It's a bold assumption to assume they ever wanted to do this in the first place, just as it's bold to assume Obama wants to "take yer guns away" given the complete lack of evidence to back this up, but let's say, hypothetically, that Clinton and Bush both wanted, in a perfect world, to impose their political agendas. So why didn't they? They didn't have to worry about their re-election to the presidency.
Well, they didn't. But their party did. The people they agree with did. Bush had a Republican congress and a right-leaning Supreme Court for two years after he was re-elected and they didn't make any drastic changes to foreign policy. It's almost as though, *gasp*, democracy is self-regulating and unless your party is planning on folding soon, there's an incentive to stay pretty much in line with the beliefs of Americans, maybe to support slight minorities but not to go too nuts with it.
4. Barack Obama only won because people voted for him because he was black. White liberal guilt and racial favoritism fueled his base.
Sort of like the abortion thing, this is just so hilariously the opposite of reality.
First of all, I want you to think about this logically--has being a racial minority (not just in terms of numbers but in terms of amount of people in positions of power, in case you were thinking South Africa) EVER been more beneficial than being in the majority group?
Obama lost white voters and it wasn't THAT close. It wasn't as big of a blowout as every other racial minority voting for Obama, but Romney still won the white vote without really having to sweat it. Now, Democrats generally lose the white vote, but as with Obama/Romney, it's the smallest gap along racial lines. Any sort of liberal guilt feeling would have to be totally internal, first of all; someone can say they're voting for whomever they like and then change it and nobody but them would know it.
If you want definitive proof that Obama didn't win the black vote because of his race, look at 2004. John Kerry, with no particular credentials in terms of helping the African-American community (and hailing from a predominantly white state with a bit of a racist history), was going against George W. Bush, who appointed black people into positions of power previously unthought of and, in sharp contrast to Kanye's insane ramblings, did not hate black people (that agreed with him politically, at least). So obviously it would at least be a close race, right?
In what was probably the most lopsided in favor of the Republican in terms of race relations presidential battle since the civil rights movement, George W. Bush lost by 77 percentage points.
*Drops mic*
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