What bothers me the most about the past GOP primaries was that two of the more successful and qualified governors Mitt Romney and Rick Perry felt the need to be something that they were not – hard core social cons instead of the  pragmatic center-right people that they are.  Romney’s advisers  admitted that it was a mistake to do that.

http://www.ibtimes.com/romney-adviser-admits-we-were-wrong-immigration-917793

An immigration strategy that helped Mitt Romney win the Republican primary likely cost him in the general election, a top adviser admitted in a postmortem.

In audio of a Harvard panel released on Monday morning, a group of top Romney strategists dissect the reasons their candidate fell short. At one point, someone in the audience asks whether the hard-line immigration positions Romney took during the primaries may have damaged his standing among the general electorate.

“I regret that,” campaign chief Matt Rhoades said after a pause.

by Jonah Goldberg

It’s hard for a lot of people, particularly on the right, to recognize that the conservative movement’s problems are mostly problems of success. But the Republican party’s problems are much more recognizable as the problems of failure, including the failure to recognize the limits of that movement’s success.

American conservatism began as a kind of intellectual hobbyists’ group with little hope of changing the broader society. Albert Jay Nock, the cape-wearing libertarian intellectual — he called himself a “philosophical anarchist” — who inspired a very young William F. Buckley Jr., argued that political change was impossible because the masses were rubes, goons, fools, or sheep, victims of the eternal tendency of the powerful to exploit the powerless.

Buckley, who rightly admired Nock for many things, rightly disagreed on this point. Buckley trusted the people more than the intellectuals. […….]

It took time. In an age when conservative books make millions, it’s hard to imagine how difficult it once was to get a right-of-center book published. Henry L. Regnery, the founder of the publishing house that bears his name, started his venture to break the wall of groupthink censorship surrounding the publishing industry. With a few exceptions, Regnery was the only game in town for decades.

That’s hardly the case anymore. While there’s a higher bar for conservative authors at mainstream publishers (which remain overwhelmingly liberal), profit tends to trump ideology.

[…….] It’s only in the legacy institutions — newspapers, the broadcast networks, and most especially academia and Hollywood — that conservatism is still largely frozen out. Nonetheless, conservatism is a mass-market enterprise these days, for good and for ill.

The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.

A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. […….] Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right emulate that echo chamber helps no one.

Ironically, the institution in which conservatives had their greatest success is the one most besieged by conservatives today: the Republican party. To listen to many grassroots conservatives, the GOP establishment is a cabal of weak-kneed sellouts who regularly light votive candles to a poster of liberal Republican icon Nelson Rockefeller.

This is not only not true, it’s a destructive myth. The Rockefeller Republicans were purged from the GOP decades ago. Their high-water mark was in 1960, when the Goldwater insurgency was temporarily crushed. Richard Nixon agreed to run on a platform all but dictated by Rockefeller and to tap Rockefeller’s minion Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate. When the forebears of today’s tea partiers threatened to stay home or bolt the party in 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater proclaimed, “Let’s grow up, conservatives!”

It’s still good advice. It’s not that the GOP isn’t conservative enough, it’s that it isn’t tactically smart or persuasive enough to move the rest of the nation in a more conservative direction. Moreover, thanks in part to the myth that all that stands between conservatives and total victory is a philosophically pure GOP, party leaders suffer from a debilitating lack of trust — some of it well earned — from the rank and file.

But politics is about persuasion, and a party consumed by the need to prove its purity to its base is going to have a very hard time proving anything else to the rest of the country.

Read the rest – The myth of an impure GOP

Rodan Addendum: Republicans have a messaging problem

The Republican Party’s messaging is so bad, it could not even explain how to use a toilet seat. The cowardly Establishment wants the Progressive Media to accept it. Purists refuse to adapt to the electorate or accept new ideas.. This is pure dysfunction which enables the Obama Regime to run circles around the GOP.

The Republican party has a serious problem, and it’s not that the party isn’t conservative enough. The problem is that Americans are having a hard time understanding what we stand for and whom we represent. Put plainly, it is an identity crisis.

This identity crisis recently almost cost John Boehner his speakership. Those who voted against him — and those who planned to vote against him — did so because they feel that the GOP is being pushed in a direction that requires abandonment of their conservative principles. They went to Congress to defend these principles, not compromise them.

[….]

While many will argue that these deals were meant to ensure that Republicans would not be seen as “mean and nasty,” they destroyed Republican credibility. And herein lies the problem: Boehner is more concerned with the media’s perception of the party than with the actual integrity of the party’s philosophy.

Republicans like him are willing to be “Democrat-Lite” as long as they believe it will allow them to keep sitting at the table of power. However, this theory is counterproductive in the advancement of conservative principles — something the GOP should have learned in the Bush years of “compassionate conservatism,” when Bush and Cheney were no less vilified. Did they forget the pummeling we took in 2006 and 2008?

The national Republican Party needs message discipline and find a way to communicate directly to the American people.