Discussion for article #232283
That’s right, the Republicans are weak. They only control both Houses of Congress!
Joni Ernst’s plan was better thought out and more knowledgeable than Republican tax cheat, pension thief and corporate bankruptcy expert Mitt Romney’s. Ernst-Romney 2016. The ticket Mitt is on will now win Iowa, New Hampshire and Utah. Oops, I forgot the states Mitt Romney lived in.
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The headline and article discusses their “weakness”, which for one is how they seem to be off message and divided in their approach. That is a weakness, whether you control both Houses of Congress or not.
Re Ernst: The response was awful. I too picked up her recycled campaign speech. With as much time as she had to craft a response, she chose that speech? It’s not like they didn’t have advance notice of what Pres. Obama would say. Also the way she spoke sounded fake and contrived, not sincere at all.
What a train wreck that was. And the bread bag thing last night was a huge fail. I can’t believe she was being lauded as such a great speaker by the GOP and the “liberal” media.
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Ernst was better than Rubio and Jindal, but what does that say?? Her response was unimaginative, uninspiring, full of weak “we can do better” language.
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That’s why the new Republican majority you elected started by reforming Congress to make it function again. And now, we’re working hard to pass the kind of serious job-creation ideas you deserve.
Umm, the House Republicans have had majority for the past 4 years, not one serious job-creation bill was passed in all that time. Last week House Republicans passed their “Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act.” Only problem with the bill was it had nothing to with jobs. Instead, the bill rolls back a number of key reforms enacted in 2010 in Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform bill.
When Republicans talk of creating jobs and helping the middle class, it’s time for working Americans put the bread bags over our feet. It’s going to get deep.
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Actually, it DID highlight their weakness. They speak to a version of America which is completely unrelatable to most Americans in the 21st century. Completely. Her wholly regional life story doesn’t resonate with most people unless you live in a rural area and sounds kinda backwards and unsophisticated.
Her ideas sounded very disjointed and not things that many Americans are focused on just the teabaggers. Many Americans either don’t know about the pipeline or don’t care about it. It’s not a pressing issue. Some in the GOP base have gotten health insurance for the first time in a long time. Why say that your party is going to get rid of it? Sure, that plays beautifully with the baggers but the majority of the country aren’t baggers.
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How The GOP’s SOTU Response Exposed Their Weakness
They televised it.
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I think she should shelve the pipeline promotion. The only thing standing in the way of the proposed pipeline from the Bakken oilfield to Patoka Illinois, is bunch of pissed off Iowans who are fighting it.
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Not for long.
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Joni didn’t come off as “folksy” she came off as phony.
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BRILLIANT. Well done.
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It seems the Republicans put more thought into the titles of their “jobs bills” than the actual content of those bills.
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In addtion, Ernst really helped to hobble the GOP for the '16 presidential election. Having her “represent” them was a bad barometer for next year because it was really clear that the GOP can’t win nation wide. They just can’t. While she didn’t embarrass herself, she did a pretty big disservice to her party by showing how completely unrepresentative they are.
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They are a regional party with a voter base that is increasingly older, more rural, and reliant on a ethnic group with a smaller % of the population every year.
Their policies play well on bumper stickers, but are loathed by large majorities when they are presented in detail.
They currently seem to have only three paths to power. They can win by painting their opponents as incompetent or craven (two problems the democrats have), by manipulating districting and election laws, and by relying on low voter turn out to eke out victories. A positive message is almost NEVER in their lexicon. They have become almost completely reactive.
They’ve played this hand as well as they can, but at the cost of having much hope of winning national elections or holding power during the periods after Presidential years. Any time people vote in large numbers, Republicans lose. Their power continues to be concentrated in states with more land than people and their grip over a few states with larger populations is slowly degrading as moderates and liberals move there from the outside.
So, hooray for the GOP! You’re right. You have a hammerlock, without filibuster or veto control on congress that you will almost certainly lose in 2016. You won’t be able to accomplish anything on your own and so, since it really seems that it’s their way or nothing, nothing is what will get done.
The democrats have huge problems of their own, but I don’t think they’d really want to trade places moving forward.
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Republican leaders and conservative media have spent 6 years training their rank-and-file Congresscritters to kneejerk react negatively to everything Obama does that they literally have no idea what to do now that they’re in charge. Ah…well, they do have three things. Dismantle Obamacare? Yeah, okay, instantly take away health insurance from millions of people. Cut taxes? Ah yes, that old chestnut, because it’s worked so well in the past. And the third is…uhh…whoops?
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It didn’t take but 30 seconds to realize that she was having a Bobby Jindal moment.
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they don’t call her joni baloney for nothing.
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If I lived in Iowa I’d be wondering who my new Senator represents, because neither Keystone’s existing pipelines nor their proposed Keystone XL expansions pass through Iowa at all.
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Welcome to 2015, the first year in our history in which a pundit can use the phrase “hog castration-centered 2014 campaign message” with confidence that his audience will know exactly what he’s talking about.
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