Barbour: GOP needs “proctology exam” to explore White House election loss

How painful is the GOP’s examination of the Republican White House loss to President Barack Obama?

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour compared it to the need for a “proctology exam” on Wednesday during the opening day of the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas.

Barbour, speaking on a panel about the 2012 election, said Republicans need to improve their ground game to compete better in the next presidential election after Mitt Romney lost to Obama by only a couple of points nationwide and in several battleground states that decided the election.

"The ground game is really important, and we have to be, I mean we've got to give our political organizational activity a very serious proctology exam,” Barbour said, pausing before describing the remedy and drawing laughs from the audience. “We need to look everywhere."

The Republican Governors Association was meeting at the Encore hotel-casino in Las Vegas for two days. Barbour was on a panel with several other GOP governors, who all agreed the party needs to do a better job of reaching out to minorities and especially Latinos.

Barbour called for immigration reform, saying the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States mostly came here to find jobs and they ought to be able to work legally. He said that goes for farm laborers and high-tech workers in demand by U.S. companies.

“They come here to work and we need them,” Barbour said.

Obama won re-election on Nov. 6 largely because he ran up the score among key Democratic constituencies, from young voters to minorities, including African-Americans and Hispanics in states such as Nevada, where he won more than seven in 10 Latino voters. Romney, on Wednesday, told donors in a conference call that Obama won by offering gifts to various constituency groups whose members then backed him at the polls.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Romney said, according to the New York Times account of the call. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

At the Republican Governors Conference, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal rejected Romney’s assessment. Jindal, who is of Indian heritage, said the GOP needs to reach out to 100 percent of American voters and convince them that the party’s policies will help them achieve the American dream.

Asked about Romney’s comments at a press conference, Jindal said, “I think that’s absolutely wrong.”

“We have got to stop dividing the American voters,” Jindal said. “We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent. We need to go after every single vote.”

“Secondly,” he added, “we need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American Dream, which is to be in the middle class, which is to be able to give their children an opportunity to be able to get a great education.”

Jindal’s future political hopes may depend on the Republican Party’s efforts to reach beyond older, white voters. In his second term, Jindal is considered a top prospect to run for president in 2016 when demographic shifts may again favor Democrats.

Jindal said the GOP’s “most fundamental takeaways from this election” should be that Republicans need to broaden their appeal to all voters regardless of who they are.

“If we’re going to continue to be a competitive party and win elections on the national stage and continue to fight for our conservative principles, we need two messages to get out loudly and clearly,” Jindal said. “One, we are fighting for 100 percent of the votes, and secondly, our policies benefit every American who wants to pursue the American dream – period, no exceptions.”