Written By : John Hawkins
November 10, 2012

My latest Townhall column is called, 7 Things The GOP Needs To Do To Start Turning It Around. Here’s an excerpt from the column.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: we got our teeth kicked in on Tuesday. Sure, we added governorships and held our ground in the House, but we went backwards in the Senate and lost to an out-of-touch, incompetent, petty man who centered his campaign around Mitt Romney’s bank account and Big Bird. We didn’t get beaten by Bill Clinton in a great economy; we got beaten by another Michael Dukakis in the midst of a terrible economy. On the upside, if people have ever wondered what Jimmy Carter’s second term would have looked like, then they’re about to find out.

Since that’s where we’re at, we have two choices. We can sit in the dirt for a couple of years, nursing the boo-boo on our collective knee while we moan about freeloaders and wonder what went wrong with America or we can stand up, brush ourselves off and get back in the game.

“Oh, but it’s over, Hawkins! We’ve reached the tipping point! We’re done!”

Really? It’s done? It’s over? What if the soldiers in George Washington’s army who were suffering through a winter without shoes had that attitude? Suppose Andrew Jackson had looked at the ragtag band of pirates and mercenaries he had to defend New Orleans during the war of 1812 and said, “Screw this, it’s too hard!” You think the Americans driving state-to-state, looking for work during the Depression had it easy? How about the American soldiers fighting for their lives in Korea against limitless waves of Chinese soldiers who were determined to push them into the sea so they could enslave South Korea? Remember when Reagan said, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose?” They laughed at him — but, nobody’s laughing now.

I can’t speak for anybody else, but I have a very simple goal: I want to kick their ass.

We do that by taking back the Senate in 2014 (which is doable if we have a good year) and then, in 2016, we’re going to beat whomever they run like a rented mule and step over their political corpse into the White House.

However, if we want to do that, the first thing we have to accept is that what we’re doing right now isn’t working and isn’t likely to work if we keep doing it. There’s a reason Albert Einstein said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It’s time for the Republican Party to stop the insanity and go in a different direction.

1) We need a better get out the vote campaign: Did you notice that Romney’s crowds were bigger than Obama’s audiences down the stretch? Yet, Obama still won. What does that tell you? That tells me that Obama did a much better job of turning out low interest voters than Romney. It was well known that Obama had an incredibly sophisticated, well staffed GOTV campaign but the Romney campaign was supposed to match up to that with its own system, Project ORCA. Unfortunately, Project ORCA turned out to be the biggest disaster since the Hindenburg. Tens of thousands of volunteers sat idle all day because the system wasn’t working and eventually it just crashed. It seems entirely possible at this point that the Romney campaign lost multiple states because of the complete and utter failure of his get out the vote campaign. This one factor alone could be the difference between victory and defeat in 2016.

Once again, you can read it all here.

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