Since we probably could use a little pick-me-up, here's some fodder. Buzzfeed has collected what they suggest are the
most embarrassing recent Republican youth outreach fails. Hmm.
Hmm.
All right, I'm gonna give you the Mitt Romney "who let the dogs out" moment. Ain't no argument possible on that one. That one is a classic; that one is what happens when a very, very rich lily-white conservative man who has never felt the need to appeal to anyone meets a bunch of black Americans and feels, for electoral reasons, that he needs to "relate" to them by awkwardly breaking into the only apparent Black Person song he knows. It will be the gold standard for lily-white rich conservative outreach efforts for decades to come.
What about when RNC chair Michael Steele "said in 2009 that his 'urban-suburban hip-hop' outreach would be 'off the hook'"? We laughed at it then, but after seeing the wreck that is Reince Priebus, Michael Steele seems a political grand master in comparison. At least Steele had some life in him. Reince Priebus comes across as the ne'er-do-well offspring of some Disney villain, a young scion forced to get a real job after his mom's villainy empire collapsed. Sure, thanks to his mom's old connections with the Republican Party he has a sweet gig, but you can tell that in the back of his mind, he's still imagining setting fire to the audience with giant lasers or a catapult that shoots flaming pandas or something.
Was Kid Rock becoming the de facto musical accompaniment to Mitt Romney's campaign a plea for youth votes, or merely the product of a desperate campaign whose playlist had gotten very, very short after all the cease-and-desist letters from better musicians? Kid Rock appeared to inherit the job for keeps only after Meatloaf died onstage still singing the national anthem (those last few verses were just gas escaping). This implies that someone, somewhere perhaps thought that Meatloaf singing the national anthem was the way to bring the young kids out these days. But does Kid Rock really speak to the youth either? I don't know. I admit it—I am not hep to todays hip yuut culturez.
Myself, I would have to peg the most embarrassing Republican outreach failure to be the point when they started selling Rand Paul and Paul Ryan as the new "young" face of the party—people who could really relate to the young folks. In addition to being for The Pot, gateway drug to tedious dorm-room political philosophizing, Rand Paul is, I believe, the youngest you are allowed to be and still be considered a true Republican. It goes fetus, College Republican-In-Training, Middle Aged Supposed Heartthrob Republican, Interchangeable Elderly White Guy Republican. There's nothing in between. The metamorphosis from College Republican-in-Training to Middle Aged Supposed Heartthrob Republican takes place when the young college-aged larva, just out of school, enters a conservative think tank. After a long period of hibernation in a chrysalis made primarily of dull and poorly sourced white papers, the subject will emerge in middle age either as a Supposed Heartthrob Republican or, the more usual case, as a bitter and ignored libertarian.
As for the Republican rap efforts, I'm not touching those. That was hard enough to live through the first time around.