Conservative commentator George Will argued Sunday on ABC’s “This Week that the GOP has become “too southern” and that this could hurt the party’s election strategy.
“There’s also the problem that the Republican Party has been in recent years too southern,” Will said, raising questions about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry is the right presidential candidate for the party to nominate. “In the last five presidential cycles, they’ve got 79 percent of their electoral votes from the South. It’s too much.”
“The Republican strategy for years,” Will explained, “has been [to] carry the 11 states of the Confederacy, and Oklahoma and Kentucky, carry the eight states of Mountain West — Arizona and New Mexico to the Canadian border — then spend a sum equal to the gross national product of the Brazil to carry Ohio, and then you get to be president. That won’t work anymore, partly because Barack Obama did extend the battlefield. And that’s another question about Gov. Perry.” (RELATED: George Will: Obama ultimately blames ‘James Madison for giving us separation of powers’)
Will also criticized Perry for his weak and unsuccessful attacks on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during Thursday’s GOP primary debate in Orlando, Fla.
“Yes, it’s painful,” Will said of Perry’s debate performance last week. “Donna [Brazile] said it’s still early. It could be late in the sense that we know the field that we’re going to pick from. And long before the Iowa caucuses, we may be down to one, effectively. Tim Pawlenty got into trouble when he had a chance to attack Romney and he didn’t. Perry is in trouble because he attacked Romney and he did it so incompetently.”
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