The
Democratic media (pardon the redundancy) will, of course,
highlight Republican gaffes and downplay Democratic ones.
Heard from Plugs Biden since all of this scandal stuff has come
out?? I haven't. You know that particular loose cannon HAS to have
said something ridiculous in the last 31 days. It's just one of
the laws of nature. Yet he's been as quiet as a church mouse. Or
somebody found the right size muzzle. Either way...
Republican technophiles are more than likely really Libertarian
technophiles. I am amazed at the number of Libertarians I've run
across in various jobs in DFW.
David
"There is no virtue in compulsory government
charity, and
there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who
portrays himself as
"caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the
government's charitable programs is merely saying that
he's willing to try to
do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a
voter who takes pride
in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do
good with his own money
-- if a gun is held to his head."--P.
J.
O'Rourke
Republicans’ problem with
young voters isn’t about stray stupid comments, writes
Lloyd Green, but its retrograde approach to technology,
culture and modernity.
The
modernity gap that haunted the Republican Party on
Election Day 2012 has since worsened. Demographics,
attitudes and technology continue to make the
Republicans look like out-of-touch relics of a bygone
era. A record-high 30 percent of Americans now identify
as socially liberal, Democratic-leaning single mothers
are a growing portion of the electorate, and more
Americans than not have an unfavorable view of the GOP,
notwithstanding the recent spate of negative news
surrounding the administration.
To top it off, a report issued this week by the College
Republican National Committee, Grand Old Party for a Brand New
Generation, indicted the Republicans for being
“closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned;†for
singularly attacking government; for hostility toward gay
marriage, and for acting like the “stupid party.†But
too many in the GOP seem to embrace that label.
Limiting the evidence to just the past two weeks, Exhibit
No. 1: Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, a GOP member of
House Judiciary Committee, told a witness — who had
ended her pregnancy after having been advised that the
fetus was brain dead, that she should have carried the
“child†to term.
Exhibit No. 2: Erik Erickson, the founder of RedState, mansplained to Fox News’
incredulous Megyn Kelly this week that “when you look at
biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male
and a female in society, and other animals, the male
typically is the dominant role.â€
Exhibit No. 4, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss attributed
rape in the armed forces to hormones.â€
The real problem, though, is not stray and scatterred
comments. Rather it is that such comments speak to the
party's discomfort with modernity.
(1998 is the last time Silicon Valley sent a Republican
to Congress, and 1988 was the last time it voted
Republican for president.)
One only needs to look at the technology gap between the
Obama and Romney campaigns to see where things stand. On
Election Day, Team Romney deployed ORCA, a failed, bloated
and beached technology. By contrast, the Obama data-mining
operation was revolutionary.
As Sasha
Issenberg described it, traditionally gauging
public opinion “revolved
around quarantining small samples that could be treated as
representative of the whole.†Obama 2012, instead, created a
pointillist portrait in which “the electorate could be seen
as a collection of individual citizens who could each be
measured and assessed on their own terms.†A mobile app used
by the Obama campaign “allowed a canvasser to download and
return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office.â€



One reason
that the Obama campaign got it right was because of the
campaign’s relationship with the world of
high-technology. The late Steve Jobs of Apple and Eric
Schmidt of Google, among others, tutored Jim Messina, the
2012 Obama Campaign Manager and former Deputy White House Chief of Staff on
data, messaging and management. With Obama reelected, the
relationship between Schmidt and the Obama analytics team
has now morphed into a business venture called Civis Analytics, which stands ready
to crunch data and advise businesses and not-for-profits
alike.
The GOP has shown little response to these developments.
Liberty Works, a Karl Rove-affiliated company, recently
won a contract with the Republican National Committee to
create an “i-phone like†and “open-source voter data
platform†Got that? Its nascent performance, however,
has been wanting.
According to Politico, “Liberty Works has gotten off to
a shaky start.†Top techies complain of its narrow
vision and “say the company’s outreach is
underwhelming — as are its salary offers.†Apple,
Google and DreamWorks it isn’t. The view from Dallas is
not the same as the view from San Jose. Texas may be a
testing ground, but it is in Silicon Valley that ideas
germinate and incubate. But, in a hopeful sign, the RNC
just retained Facebook and Google alumnus Andy Barkett, an
actual engineer, as its Chief Technology Officer.
Regardless, the symbiosis between the Democratic Party
and Silicon Valley is, on a real level, disquieting. It
reinforces the censoriousness and paternalism present
among Obama and his allies. The NSA's data grab, Eric
Holder’s war on the press and the IRS’s attack on the
Right are not aberrations, as the Obamans have made clear.
For example, Rayid Ghani, the Obama campaign’s
Chief Data Scientist, told me that academics and the media
should “self-regulate†what they write and say about
campaign data. Likewise, in their new book, The New
Digital Age, Schmidt and his co-author, Jared Cohen, the
director of Google Ideas, announce that “most of all,
this is a book about the importance of a guiding human
hand in the new digital age.†The 32-year-old Cohen
previously served on the State Department Policy Planning
Staffs of both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
Politics is part of Cohen’s DNA, and so is technology.
And that is the GOP’s problem. Forget about projecting
“cool,†Republicans can start by just being modern.
Since 1992 the
GOP has lost the 18-29 vote in each presidential election.
As the adage goes, “although
people’s fundamental political views do not change much
as they age, their propensity to vote does.†In other
words, the GOP’s future could grow ever bleaker as
today’s seniors and boomers are supplanted at the ballot
box by Generations X, Y and Z.
If Gohmert, Bryant, and Erickson have their way, the
Republican’s modernity deficit will further congeal and
fester, with the GOP relegated, at best, to a
congressional party, one that specializes in oversight
hearings and impeachment trials but not one actually
tasked by America to govern.
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