Prolonged Primary Good For GOP

Katy Grimes: There is much sermonizing and opining in newspapers over Republican politics. Most of it these days is full of mockery and disdain.

“GOP inflicts its own wounds” is a common theme, as well as one headline that ran over the weekend. This op ed was about California Republicans, and full of the requisite preachy scrutiny. And while it could be argued that the GOP may be the fastest growing minority in California, Presidential politics this season are another animal altogether.

What most pundits seem to be missing is that the Republican Presidential primary is performing an invaluable service, and the mainstream media is covering it every step of the way.

Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, the four remaining Republican Presidential candidates have successfully highlighted important issues that have been shoved under the rug under the Obama administration. Voters are now talking about energy and domestic oil production, nationalized health care and the cost of Obama’s plan, the sputtering economy, tax increases and tax reform, the escalating national debt, the cost of Medicare, welfare expansion, phony green subsidies, national security, the attacks on conservative talk radio and religious liberty, and the Obama administration’s attack on churches.

Republicans are lapping it up. “Republican Candidates Pressed to Prove Conservatism,” another recent headline, was almost as laughable as the atheistic media asking “tougher questions about faith” of the candidates.

With liberal media attempts to choose the Republican candidate, they are actually keeping the ideas and issues of all four candidates in the spotlight, as well as assisting voters with valuable issue information.

The daily vetting of the Republican candidates only serves as a significant reminder that President Obama never received this kind of intense scrutiny when he was candidate Obama.

But most in the media don’t see it this way. “After one campaign and more than three years in the White House, President Barack Obama’s life is an open book – he’s written two of them – and he does not face a primary fight that might leave him bloodied and vulnerable,” wrote William Endicott, a former deputy managing editor of the Sacramento Bee.

Endicott claimed that the prolonged GOP primary is making the job of Obama’s opposition researchers a great deal easier. That may be true. But the more important issue Endicott missed is that the prolonged primary is also allowing Republicans to stay on the issues, which Obama, his administration, and the media, are running the other way from.

Distractions about contraception and faith, pushed by the mainstream media, only serve to make the important issues stand out more.

MAR. 19, 2012