During the month following the election, it has been interesting to see how the Republican Party controllers view the huge upset of their landslide expectations because they believed what they fed to Fox News. They are still in denial and cannot see why they lost.
From the Maui GOP chairwoman to Mitt Romney, elected GOP leaders to the party controllers, one recently in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they think they failed because Hispanics, blacks, middle class, poor, gays, women, the young and Catholics, just about everyone but white males, didn't get their message. The controllers' whine is: There is something, a dollop, in the GOP agenda for each of those classes of voters. Their solution is to retool the message, not to begin representing those people.
The message those voters sent to the Republicans has fallen on deaf ears. The ears belong to the Grover Norquists, Karl Roves, Ralph Reeds, all cynical power-brokers closely allied with former jailbird Jack Abramoff and still-delayed jailbird Tom DeLay, as well as Speaker John Boehner and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
The message they are not hearing is: Your policies keep us down, degrade us and deny us what used to be the American dream, all in the interest of lining your pockets and doing the bidding of the money-changers who made you rich.
You get the vote when you respect people as for all of what they are and represent them accordingly. Your current leadership doesn't get it.
Howard Fields
Lahaina
