Republicans Begin Rebuilding: Deny Ever Knowing Anyone In Bush Family

Well it seems the overlords aren't the only ones left scratching their heads and wondering where they went wrong after the last election. OK, maybe scratching their heads and wondering if they have what it takes to make it at Walmart greeter school is more like it. Especially now that it looks like the competition is going to be a little tougher.

GOP officials and strategists at party conferences last week offered sharply contrasting assessments of what went wrong, and of how difficult it will be to rebuild. "We're pretty sure god still likes us," said one attendee who asked not to be identified. "Although apparently he doesn't care about his reputation as much as we thought he did."

Older party hands pointed to John McCain’s totally whackazoid campaign and having George Bush in the party. “I have looked down at the grave of the Republican Party and this ain’t it,” assured Mississippi Governor and 90s-era RNC chairman Haley Barbour, “It's over there next to that ditsy chick from Alaska."

The up-and-comers, meanwhile, sounded the alarm of impending permanent minority status unless the party changes. "When your entire constituency consists of bubbas, bigots and bible thumpers, your future is not rosy," said Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.

Barbour argued there was a way to defeat Obama—by rendering him unacceptable to American voters. “And the McCain campaign did not choose to try to make that argument,” he observed. "Well except when they tried to convince people he was a Muslim, socialist, communist, black power terrorist who hated America."

RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, expressed optimism about the GOP’s prospects for the 2010 mid-term elections, suggesting the GOP losses this year were a result of voters actually paying attention to issues rather than personalities. "Give people some nude pictures of Sarah Palin," he said. "Then people will forget what a bunch of douche bags we are."

“If you look at the American electorate, and where they stand and what they believe—we’re in good shape," he added. "I'd like my medication now please.”

“We cannot be a majority governing party when we essentially cannot compete in the northeast; we are losing our ability to compete in the Great Lakes states, we cannot compete on the west coast,” Pawlenty argued, also citing similar problems in the mid-Atlantic and interior west. “Similarly, we cannot compete and prevail as a majority governing party when we have a significant deficit as we do with woman, where we have a large deficit with Hispanics, where we have a large deficit with African-American voters, where we have a large deficit with people of modest incomes. Our whole party is composed of people too stupid to know they're voting against their own self interests, or too rich to care.”

"What's your point?" Barbour asked.

Pawlenty put it more plainly: “The Republican Party is going to need more than just a comb-over.”

He doesn’t advocate for actually accepting reality—few prominent voices in the party are—but rather for aggressively offering irrational solutions on issues such as health care, energy and education that have been viewed as Democratic turf. "We've got to convince poor people that it's OK for them to die at an earlier age, that they really don't need heat in the winter, or to learn how to read. Rich people will take care of them if we just let them get rich enough."

Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, 48, made a similar case. Like Pawlenty, Huntsman said Republicans had to come to terms with a country increasingly different from the one that, until this year, had favored rich white people.

"We’re fundamentally staring down a demographic shift that we’ve never seen before in America,” he observed. "And therefore I suggest that in the next election cycle our campaign slogan be 'Blacks and Asians and Hispanics, Oh My!!'"

Other younger Republicans, though, share the position that the GOP's problems the result of living in a dream world. At a “lessons-learned” conference in South Carolina over the weekend comprised of GOP state chairman and other prominent party activists, there was widespread sentiment that Republicansare about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. “I think one of the biggest things we’re facing is the fact that we've pretty much trashed the country,” observed Pete Ricketts, the 44-year-old former COO of Ameritrade who lost to Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson in 2006. “The American people don’t trust us because we spent the last eight years lying to them.”

"But that's a central plank in the party platform," Duncan said.

Robin Smith chairs the Republican Party in Tennessee, one of the few states where the party made gains this year, capturing the state House and state Senate for the first time since Reconstruction with a conservative message that plays well in the South. "But most of the folks down there can't read," she added. "They just voted for the pretty pictures we put on the ballot."

“I think the Republican Party now is at a point in its life where we’re going to have to have regional messages,” Smith said. "In other words, we'll tell you whatever you want to hear and hope you don't know anyone out of your state. I call it the Mitt Romney Strategy."

The party should not compromise its core “DNA” of small government and lower taxes, Smith added, but ought to allow for some deviation where politically necessary. "And by that I mean totally abandoning our principles if it will help us hang on to power. Just like the last eight years."

“Republicans got destroyed in 1964, they had three election cycles to catch up,"GOP pollster Frank Luntz said. "We got destroyed in 1974, we have three election cycles to catch up. They’ve been destroyed in 2006 and 2008—maybe we should take the hint.”