The National Football League (NFL) playoffs are in full swing as the teams fortunate enough to make the post season vie to win the Super Bowl and victoriously hoist the coveted Lombardi Trophy in Glendale, Arizona in early February.
For the teams that didn’t make the playoffs it is time to evaluate what went wrong and make the necessary changes so they can compete better next year.
And for the billionaire owners that involves firing coaches who didn’t get the job done and hiring new coaches with the promise that they can.
The NFL is about winning.
Coaches are fired when they don’t.
Losing a close game or being blown out is still a loss. There are no participation trophies.
When it comes to winning, politics is a lot like the NFL.
Losing in a landslide or by only a few hundred votes is still a loss.
The bitter taste of defeat can linger long after the last ballot is counted, which nowadays is weeks after Election Day.
And just like the NFL it is a long time before the next election so you can try again to secure the victory that eluded you last cycle.
The Republican Party didn’t lose everything in 2022 but they fell far short of the massive "red wave" their leadership had predicted. While they barely won a House majority, they lost the Senate in a year, and did so with many winnable Senate seats in play.
To again use the NFL analogy that’s like winning a first round playoff game and then getting trounced in the second round by a team you were favored to beat.
It serves no purpose to rehash the reasons for the losses; its time to move on and prepare for the next election season.
This week the Republican National Committee (RNC) will convene in California and evaluate what went wrong in the 2022 election cycle and decide whether they should retain Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel or fire her and hire Republican activist and lawyer Harmeet Dhillon as the new chair.
McDaniel is the coach.
She bears the responsibility for the poor performance of the RNC.
But Ronna McDaniel’s supporters say she should not be judged by just one election cycle.
Fair enough. Let’s judge her by the body of her work.
She has had three consecutive losing seasons.
She made the playoffs but not to the championships.
In 2018 Democrats took control of the House.
In 2020, Democrats took the White House, secured a Senate majority by virtue of a newly elected Vice President Kamala as the tiebreaker in a 50-50 Senate and maintained their House Majority. And in 2022, the "red wave" barely reached the shore as Republicans narrowly won the House.
In a recent statement, Ms. McDaniel defended herself as a grassroots activist and then listed a whole bunch of useless statistics about how many voter contacts and phone calls the RNC did in 2022, how many volunteers they put in the field, and how many advisory committees she had formed on outreach to young folks and minorities.
Reciting this litany of actions is like the NFL coach who is in danger of being fired and desperate to hang on to his job telling his owner that the team led the league in every statistical category for three seasons like Ronna McDaniel, but didn’t win any championships.
Legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, someone who knew how to win championships and for whom the Super Bowl Trophy is named, said, "Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing."
Under Ronna McDaniel Republicans have made losing a habit.
It is time to break the habit and hire a new coach.
Patrick Dorinson is a writer and commentator who has worked in the political arena as a participant and observer for 35 years-plus. He as been a columnist for the Fox News.com Opinion section. For eight years he hosted his own radio show, "The Cowboy Libertarian" on iHeart media. Patrick currently can be seen as a guest on numerous shows on Newsmax TV. Usually you’ll find him riding "Beamer," his horse. Patrick Dorinson's Reports — Here.
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