Since the 2012 election, a number of prominent Republicans — Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, and so on — have given speeches that tiptoe toward new ideas, new policies, new visions of what their party might stand for and support. But ultimately they’ve all stopped short of actually breaking with the policy consensus that sent Romney down to defeat.
Paul, by contrast, has actually challenged that consensus in a substantive and constructive way. And far from being excommunicated for it, he’s been rewarded with greater prominence and increased conservative support.
For those with ears, let them hear.
Lead, you timid conformists. Lead!
stef 
JonF 
Noah172 
Thomas, we don’t need to get the people who voted for Obama to switch their vote; we need to get the people who didn’t vote to vote for the Republican.
…this was the absolute best the Republicans could ever hope to do, as the demographics were clearly on the side of:
Women’s dominion over their own bodies
Equal pay for Equal Work
Immigration reform
Health care reform
SSM
Uh – certainly the GOP needs to find a way to neutralize the contraceptive issue, but there are plenty of ways that it could do so that would avoid forcing a mandate on Catholic institutions. If they for example, agreed to some sort of a program where everyone who wanted free birth control could get it from the government, that would likely make their abortion stance much less problematic. They could sell it to socons by associating it with welfare mothers not having kids.
As for immigration reform, the GOP would have done a lot better had it run on a platform of reduced immigration to help Americans get jobs. If they pointed out that for every increase of four jobs, three are taken by immigrants, strongly opposed Obama’s refusal to enforce immigration laws, exposed his lies about his superior enforcement (mainly created by re-classifying border apprehensions as deportations), etc., they could get a lot of populist anger going.
As for Romney getting more unemployed white people to vote for him, yes, JonF, it is true that Romney had nothing to say to them, but that is because he took liberal stands on several issues where he could have attracted them if he had been more conservative. If he had opposed affirmative action “disparate impact” hiring, pointed out stupid rulings by the EEOC, like the one that now makes doing criminal background checks a possible basis for a discrimination lawsuit, etc., he could have gotten a lot of their votes.
Honestly, I doubt that the GOP position on same-sex marriage impacts that many votes. Most people who would not vote for the GOP unless it supported SSM almost certainly would not support it even if it did.
I think “Equal Pay for Equal work” is a nice slogan, but I don’t think that the majority of people would actually support what the Democrats really mean when they say that (which is “Equal pay for more time off, equal time for equal hours regardless of effectiveness, etc.). I doubt that this is an insurmountable obstacle for the Republicans if they got their act together on economic issues in general.
As for health care reform, the GOP definitely needs something to offer in place of what we have now, but I don’t think it needs to be the same thing the Democrats are offering or something along the same vein.
Put another way, I do agree that the GOP needs to get its act together if it wants to win more elections, and that if it keeps on where it was in 2012, Romney is as good as it can do. Where I disagree with you is the implication that the GOP simply needs to cave in and join the Democrats on these issues.