On behalf of Fox News, Christian Whiton asks, “Where does the Republican Party Go From Here?”
The key now will be for Republicans not to form a circular firing squad, but to grasp important lessons as to why we lost…
… In the end, the Republican establishment thought they had this election in the bag. They decided to play it safe with a moderate. They stuffed a candidate down the party’s throat who opportunistically had been on both sides of most issues and told people what he thought they wanted to hear, rather than what he believed.
As I expected from Fox, the important lesson for the GOP is they need to take an even harder line. They were so happy when Romney seemed to trounce Obama in the first debate, and yet they don’t see that he did that by moderating the positions he had taken in order to win the nomination? If Romney hadn’t “Etch-a-Sketched” himself post-primary he would have lost even more of the undecided voters than he did last night.
Personally, I won’t mind if the Republicans take pot shots at each other. They seem to be incapable of grasping the important lesson of why they lost. Whiton apparently doesn’t understand the difference between Romney’s lack of conviction and Obama’s willingness to compromise. Their failure wasn’t rooted in Romney being at heart a moderate, it was them forcing him to appease the Tea Party in order to get the candidacy.