January 27, 2013 01:07 PM UTC

Republicans: we're not the problem

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• by: JeffcoBlue

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

If you were hoping Republicans might get the message after 2012's defeats and change course, I'm about to dash those hopes.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/gop-leaders-insist-no-overhaul-needed-86757.html?hp=r4

The party’s main problem, dozens of Republican National Committee members argued in interviews over three days this week, is who delivers its message and how, not the message itself. Overwhelmingly they insisted that substantive policy changes aren’t the answer to last year’s losses.

Moderation, at least at this stage, is no virtue at the RNC.

“It’s not the platform of the party that’s the issue,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday after being easily reelected to a second, two-year term. “In many cases, it’s how we communicate about it. It is a couple dumb things that people have said.” (JeffcoBlue emphasis)

A slide presented during a closed-press strategy session said that Mitt Romney might be president if he had won fewer than 400,000 more votes in key swing states.

“We don’t need a new pair of shoes; we just need to shine our shoes,” said West Virginia national committeewoman Melody Potter.

Fellow Democrats should be ecstatic if Republicans are already rationalizing away all of the problems 2012 revealed for them. The Republican Party's problem is much more than a "couple dumb things people have said," it is that they have become the party of people who say dumb things. Their shoes don't need a shine, their entire platform must adapt to the modern age, or die like other political movements that ended as anachonisms. For too many years, the GOP has won ideological battles whether or not they were in the majority. Now, they're running out of excuses as the consequences of their ideology show up everywhere.

But forget that. It's time for more denial…