BOSTON (AP) — Republican officials are looking to promote a fresh group of diverse rising stars to help resolve their election woes, while frustrated party elders insist that all Republicans must offer more solutions for the nation’s most pressing issues.
The calls for change come nine months after a painful 2012 election in which the GOP lost the presidential race and a handful of close Senate contests. A tug of war over the Republican Party’s future is on display as conservative activists and party leaders from across the country gather in Boston this week for the Republican National Committee’s annual summer meeting.
“We have to get beyond being anti-Obama,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared at the gathering Wednesday, offering a particularly harsh critique of Republican strategy on health care.
Gingrich said congressional Republicans would have “zero answer” for how to replace the president’s health care overhaul when asked, despite their having voted repeatedly to repeal the measure.
“We are caught right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we’re negative and as long as we’re vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything. And so we don’t,” Gingrich said. “This is a very deep problem.”
While there is little sign of GOP unity on solutions for immigration, health care or a looming budget standoff, RNC officials are launching a program to highlight a new generation of Republican leaders – largely younger and more ethnically diverse – to help broaden the party’s appeal among women and minorities, groups that overwhelmingly supported President Barack Obama in the last election. The program supplements an ongoing effort to expand Republican outreach among minority communities across the country.
Women voted for Obama by an 11-point margin in 2012, and they have not backed a GOP candidate for president since Ronald Reagan’s successful bid for re-election in 1984. Although last year’s nominee, Mitt Romney, improved on John McCain’s margin of victory among whites in 2008, Romney fared worse than McCain among Hispanic and Asian voters, who make up a growing share of the U.S. population.
The RNC on Thursday was introducing the first four members of its “Rising Stars” program:
via GOP pushes rising stars amid calls for solutions | AccessNorthGa.
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