Jackson Free Press

"[W]e've got to give our political organizational activity a very serious proctology exam. We need to look everywhere."

—Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour at a Republican Governors Association conference in Las Vegas, Nov. 14.

Why it stinks: Barbour's statement could actually be good news if we could count on some true Republican introspection on why the party lost its bid for the White House in the last two presidential elections (if only to look for its head where it was last rumored to have been). The problem is, however, that GOP operatives aren't looking to their policies to understand the loss; they're looking only to strategies and tactics. In other words, their reasoning seems to be that it's not that millions of voters rejected what the party stands for, it's that Republicans didn't have the "right" candidate that would say the "right" words in the "right" way. Yeah. Right.

Not every American voter is a dumbass simply because he or she didn't vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Voters rejected what these two men and their party stand for today. Among those tenets are derision for nearly half the population as moochers; disrespect for women and all those whose sexual orientation isn't heterosexual; exclusion of millions based on ethnicity; favoring the wealthy over the middle-class and low-income Americans; and an embrace of far-right wingnuttery in general. That's not to exclude the fact that the GOP's proposed budget plan was long on rhetoric and short of actual math--or that Romney and Ryan just couldn't seem to stop lying, even about their own positions.

Not to mention, it wasn't so long ago that Haley Barbour, alongside his mentor Lee Atwater, started pushing the GOP to engage in the kind of southern race strategy it is starting to regret in order to lure former Dixiecrats. So our former governor might need to do a proctology self-exam of his own. He can't just throw his role in what happened election night into the memory hole.