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"  The folks at the National Review aren&amp;#039;t overly impressed with the efforts of obvious anagram Reince Priebus in his attempt to rebrand the Republican party as something more than the guy in the subway that you change cars to avoid. Now, as far as I&amp;#039;m concerned, rebellions in the monkeyhouse are none of my affair. I hope for a just and lasting peace among the various factions, and an economic policy that doesn&amp;#039;t read like it was drafted by a macaque with a Magic 8-Ball. My needs are small. But, purely as an academic exercise, this is an interesting sociological study because, honest to blog, I do not know what these people really want. As I&amp;#039;ve been pounding on my little tin drum for a few days now, unless you define peril as not winning the presidency, I don&amp;#039;t think the GOP is in that much trouble. (And, twice in 20 years now, we&amp;#039;ve seen how deftly they can disrupt the administrations of the people who beat them.) They&amp;#039;ve locked up the House for the foreseeable future. They&amp;#039;re getting all kinds of laws past in the states that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. They&amp;#039;ve stacked the courts to the point where the DC circuit can rule against recess appointments, and where it looks like the teeth of the Voting Rights Act are about to be pulled. The entire economic debate is being fought out on ground only a smidge to the left of their own choosing. Sensible gun control turns out to be DOA, at least in part because Democratic politicians are afraid of mighty Republican ad buys in contestable states. Campaign finance is a a dead parrot, and the system in situ is vastly to their advantage. Real action on climate change is utterly stalled. So, with all that, the RNC does a little examination of conscience about why they&amp;#039;ve lost the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections, and everybody goes into high-sterics, as my mother used to say. Jesus, folks. Have a drink. Have a Thorazine. Calm the fk down, will you?  To implement this aspect of the document, RNC chairman Reince Priebus has promised to establish dialogues with groups such as LULAC, La Raza, and the NAACP, which strikes us as unhelpful and willfully blind to the fact that such groups are ideologically opposed to Republican principles. A truly conservative minority-outreach strategy would severely weaken these groups by challenging their claims to represent their respective ethnicities. Yes, and a truly Piercian romantic strategy would have had me run off to Bali with Julie Christie back in 1974. Christ, people. You tried this in the Sixties. Remember? Raising up your own black leaders to counteract the advantages the Democrats accrued by attaching themselves to the Civil Rights Movement. Remember Silent Sam Pierce? If you want to put together groups to &amp;quot;challenge,&amp;quot; say, La Raza for political pre-eminence among Latin American voters, have at it, but you&amp;#039;re going to be wasting your time and somebody else&amp;#039;s money. Isn&amp;#039;t it just easier to let Marco Rubio support what used to be his own immigration-reform plan?  But nowhere does the document offer a substantive argument in favor of the kind of comprehensive immigration reform on offer in Washington, or even come close to demonstrating that support for such a program would accrue Republicans more votes than it lost them, considering that Hispanics are often ideologically liberal for reasons beyond immigration.  Name one, without using the words &amp;quot;welfare&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;moochers,&amp;quot; I dare you. There is a category problem here that you are not acknowledging. The 2012 primary was unwieldy - its sheer length exacerbated the Democrats&amp;#039; incumbent advantage in fundraising and organization, and the debates produced diminishing returns. You know what else &amp;quot;exacerbated the Democrats&amp;#039; incumbent advantage&amp;quot;? The fact that the Republican base forced upon the party the most incredible collection of featherheads in the history of electoral politics, thereby ensuring that the party would have to nominate a man who has to dial 1 and a country code just to contact &amp;quot;insincere.&amp;quot; At least the obvious anagram is trying to keep that from happening again. The good news about the fact that the size of the 2012 loss was significantly due to technological and organizational disadvantage is that this is correctable. And in the end, the most important contribution of the national party apparatus may be to correct it. Michele Bachmann is not a technological disadvantage. Neither is Herman Cain. Neither is Rick Santorum. Neither is Newt Gingrich. All of whom led the primary field at one point or another. Mitt Romney may have been a technological disadvantage as we are only at the dawning of the cyborg era. You know what was a &amp;quot;technological disadvantage&amp;quot;? Getting caught on camera dissing half the country and sounding like G.I. Luvmoney while you&amp;#039;re at it. I carry no water for Reince Priebus but, lord above, at least he&amp;#039;s acknowledging that perhaps, maybe, who knows, Republicans may hold some strange policy ideas that are not popular out in the country. This, on the other hand, is just heckling from the peanut gallery. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20729/national-review-republican-party-rebranding-031913/>