{"id":3826,"date":"2013-03-19T19:53:45","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T00:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3826"},"modified":"2013-03-19T19:53:45","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T00:53:45","slug":"lessons-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3826","title":{"rendered":"Lessons Learned?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After the election, Republicans vowed to think long and hard about why they lost the election. All that soul-searching culminated in a report released yesterday that attempts to <a href=\"http:\/\/tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com\/2013\/03\/6-big-takeaways-from-the-rncs-incredible-election-autopsy.php\">explain how it all went so wrong in November<\/a>. It&#8217;s admirably forthright in some of its admissions: the GOP is terrible at interacting with anyone who isn&#8217;t a white male, its perceived homophobia scares away voters, and it is too closely aligned with the wealthy elite. But the report stops short of making any substantive policy recommendations. I suspect that party leaders understand that some moderation is necessary to remain competitive, but they haven&#8217;t summoned the courage to stand up to the true believers who are willing to follow their principles into political oblivion.<\/p>\n<p>The Republicans could still get lucky. External events could still push the country to the right without Republicans having to examine themselves in the mirror. I&#8217;m just not sure wishful thinking is a viable strategy for winning elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After the election, Republicans vowed to think long and hard about why they lost the election. All that soul-searching culminated in a report released yesterday that attempts to explain how it all went so wrong in November. It&#8217;s admirably forthright in some of its admissions: the GOP is terrible at interacting with anyone who isn&#8217;t <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3826' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-18-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-ZI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3827,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3826\/revisions\/3827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}