Ben Shapiro: “Democrats have for years been questioning the decency of Republicans as human beings. During the Obamacare rollout, President Obama accused Republicans of wanting to deprive people of healthcare; he openly accused President George W. Bush of being ‘unpatriotic’ for raising the national debt. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that Republicans are ‘indifferent’ to hungry and poor children. Anyone who opposes any aspect of President Obama’s agenda has been deemed a racist. The point here is not the media’s double standard, which is egregious but unchangeable. The point is that this perception of Republicans has pervaded the public arena. Republicans’ fundamental burden is not explaining to the American people that Democrats are great people, but wrong on policy. Their great burden is overcoming the generalized perception that they are money-grubbing Snidely Whiplashes bent on strapping widows and orphans to the train tracks. You cannot overcome that perception by ardently pleading that the very folks who call you racist, sexist, homophobic bigots are well-intentioned but incompetent. If someone calls you a racist, and you respond by stating that they are a reasonable human being with policy differences, you grant their premise: A reasonable person has called you a racist, which means it is reasonable to call you racist. You lose. And Republicans have been losing, at least in large part, because they grant the fundamental premise of the left: Democrats are well-meaning, even when they are wrong, and Republicans have evil intentions, even when they are right. That is a recipe for disaster in a country where intentions matter more than actions.”