re: #549 Gus 802littlegreenfootballs.comre: #549 Gus 802

Michael Steele’s comment does speak to the new Ron Paul wing (including Rand Paul) and a significant portion of the Tea Party in the GOP. The question will arise does the GOP gain from Steele’s comments on Afghanistan by attracting more “Ron Paul” style voters?

It may cause rumblings but the gain might be larger than a perceived loss which won’t occur since people that intend to vote Republican will not switch sides — regardless of Steele — since they won’t be voting for him come election day. Right now it’s just a PR problem with Steele’s comments and serves only to publicize an existing disunity that exists within the GOP.

I think people are seizing Steele’s comments to float exactly that strategy and see how it plays for the GOP more broadly.
I also think that it’s not just a gaffe— this is a view that is more widespread than we’d like to admit, and very soon I think it will be the dominant GOP view.

They appear to have lost all their prior smarts about messaging. I fully expect the wingnuts to tag Afghanistan as “Obama’s War”, and have complete amnesia. They’re reacting at about the level of rats in a skinner experiment. They think “War was bad for Bush eventually in 2008, so it will be bad for Obama in 2012, right?”

That’s about the extent of republican ‘strategery’ at the moment.