June 28, 2013 01:27 PM UTC

Aspen Conference Reveals that Republicans Remain Clueless.

• 5 Comments
• by: Urban Snowshoer

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

The Aspen Times reports that Karl Rove, at a recent conference, emphasized the need to become competitive with the working class. Reading this article, it becomes apparent that Rove (or at least his party)  remains clueless. Economic policy remains on the GOP’s biggest vulnerabilities.

Republicans are deluding themselves if they think that government benefits are causing people not work. Anyone who lives in reality can attest to the fact that it is the other way around: more people are on benefits because jobs are remain hard to come by, and many of the jobs the do exist do not pay a living wage.  Karl Rove can talk all he wants about courting the working-class but the real test is  whether he and his party can abandon their asinine,  and condescending belief  that the working-class and unemployed are where they are because they are lazy and do not want to work hard. 

By proposing that the party needs to reframe its message, it is obvious that Rove  and his party still does not comprehend the problem. They can brand it “self-empowerment” or any other hogwash they like, but as long as people are not reaping the benefits of the “free market”,  which is an amorphous and artificial construct to begin with,  no amount of reframing is going to save the Republican Party.  David Corn, writing on Romney's 47% diatribe, includes some words of wisdom from George Will: "[Y]ou've got a problem when voters don't like you. You've got a real problem when voters think you don't like them." This was not just Romney's problem, it remains a problem for the Republican Party (as a whole) and no amount of reframing is going to turn it around.

As for Gerson and Rove advocating an end to “corporate welfare,” is the GOP ready to eliminate numerous tax breaks and break up the financial institutions that remain too big to fail? When they are, I will take them seriously but I somehow doubt that the party is willing to renege on its platform that taxes are always too high. I imagine few in the party actually want to break up the banks, provided there is a legal and constitutional way to do so—break up the banks plays right into their free-market dogma about their being too much regulation.

There are people in the Republican Party who get the need to pass immigration legislation and comprehend the fact that the country’s demographics are changing. However, these people do not control the party: the angry, old, white people (frightened by changing demographics)  do.  I do not envision any major changes to the Republican Party in the near future Nonetheless, the Democrats should not let themselves get too complacent—they need to always be on guard and ready to defend their ideas, however superior they may be.