For GOP governors, just excuses and more of the same

Change? Learn? Compromise? Grow? Not These Republicans

By Joe Conason - November 22, 2012

After so much chatter about "change" in the Republican Party, the innocent voter might believe that the Republicans had learned important lessons from their stinging electoral defeat. On closer examination, however, the likelihood of real change appears nil because the party's leaders and thinkers can cite so many excuses to remain utterly the same.

At the Republican Governors Association conference last week, for instance, the favored explanation for the voting public's emphatic rejection of Mitt Romney had nothing to do with issues or ideology, but only with more effective Democratic Party organizing and communicating. According to Wade Goodwyn, the National Public Radio reporter who covered the GOP governors' meeting, their post-election mood was not one of shock, but complacency.

"It was widely agreed that nothing needed to be changed except perhaps the tone," he found. "For example, the idea that more than 70 percent of Hispanics voted for the president because of Republican positions on illegal immigration was rejected by the Republican governors."

That would be hard to believe if Goodwyn were not such an excellent and experienced journalist, because it is so stupid, so insulting and makes so little sense. Could it really be true that the nation's Republican governors -- one of whom is quite likely to be the party's next presidential nominee -- are so obtuse and so obstinate that they would reject change even on immigration?

(More here.)