Here’s what happened… President Obama is proposing a uniquely and aggressively horrible deal with Iran that would give it – the most anti-American regime currently in existence – hundreds of billions of dollars, for nothing in return. Nothing. Just says “here you go. you use this responsibly though, okay?”. And just like with the lifting of the blocks between the U.S. and Cuba – Obama’s getting the country he represents nothing in the deal. The argument in favor of this ridiculous Iran deal is that it somehow delays instead of hastens Iran getting a nuclear bomb by 15 years, a concept that is wholly unfounded according to the details of the actual agreement signed by the Government of the United States.
“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz said during a round table Tuesday. “Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”
It’s true that the money Iran will get will likely be used to murder people and it’s true that Iran wouldn’t have this money if not for the Obama administrations agreement and it’s true that this was not a helpful thing for Cruz to say.
Mitt Romney, noted as such.
I am opposed to the Iran deal, but @SenTedCruz is way over the line on the Obama terrorism charge. Hurts the cause.
Which is the most sensible commentary a rational mind can have on the topic. Cruz’s comment isn’t wrong but the way it’s stated is so clunky that it hands Obama supporters a gift to turn a bad Obama policy into an opportunity to make Ted Cruz and Republicans the target of scorn. That is friggin horrible strategy but Cruz is notorious for being non-strategical. Which is cool if you want to drum up angst from your base but super horrible if your intention is to win elections. Romney helped his party by voicing his opposition to the deal while also noting that it most obviously hurts that oppositional cause for people like Cruz to be simplifying the dot-connections the way he did.
Cruz, 2016 presidential candidate, fired back at Romney in a Thursday radio interview with KFYO’s Chad Hasty.
“So Mitt Romney’s tweet today said, ‘Gosh, this rhetoric is not helpful,'” Cruz said. “John Adams famously said, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Describing the actual facts is not using rhetoric; it is called speaking the truth.”
The senator recalled what he described as a critical moment during the 2012 presidential race: A back-and-forth over that year’s attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.
“Part of the reason that Mitt Romney got clobbered by Barack Obama is because we all remember that third debate where Barack Obama turned to Mitt and said, ‘I said the Benghazi attack was terrorism and no one is more upset by Benghazi than I am.’ And Mitt, I guess listening to his own advice, said, ‘Well gosh, I don’t want to use any rhetoric. So OK, never mind. I’ll just kind of rearrange the pencil on the podium here,'” Cruz said.
He added that the 2016 presidential candidates need to speak up or they will fail like Romney.
I’ll get to why Cruz doesn’t know what he’s talking about here later in this post, but first a factual correction: Cruz’s claim never actually happened. As I’ve shown before, Romney expertly trapped President Obama on the Benghazi issue in the 2nd debate by going 3 rounds on the subject and giving Obama every inch of rope he needed to hang himself on the issue. Romney noted that Obama not only did not treat the terrorist attacks in Benghazi as such, but actually took great lengths to deceive the American people about the nature of the attacks, instead blaming a Youtube video for them. Obama, knowing that he was getting trapped in having to either lie by claiming he did something he did not do or obfuscate the question merely said “check the transcript” of his rose garden speech on the subject, in where he knew he could point to the word “terrorism” being present and then spin that as having taken responsibility for the attacks as being terrorism (successfully avoiding the messy explanation of the ensuing phony claims about a Youtube video instigation). In an unprecedented move, the debate moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and falsely claimed that Obama was correct in his claim about labeling the act terrorism and even though she walked it back later and the truth was verified by fact checkers, the damage had been done on live tv. To blame Romney for not attacking the issue he actually attacked in the most perfect of strategic ways is nonsense.
However – Republicans are just not smart enough to understand this and many agree with Cruz that Romney’s reason-for-loss was that he wasn’t tough enough on the President.
Here is how Rush Limbaugh summarized the positions of both men:
“Both Obama and Romney have called Cruz’s remarks inappropriate.” What has Cruz done? He’s “maintained that [Obama] would become a leading state-sponsor of terror if the agreement it struck with Iran makes it past Congress. He and others have argued that Iran would use a windfall from sanctions relief to finance terror abroad.” He has said on that basis alone this deal ought not get done! And then Romney piped up and said in a tweet (paraphrased): “Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful. Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful!”
Cruz fired back: “You’re telling me what’s not helpful? You got clobbered by Obama for a reason! You got clobbered because you backed off. You got clobbered because you didn’t have the guts to keep going.” So this is… I like this, folks. Whatever Trump’s responsible for it or not.
The truth is that both Cruz and Romney lost competitions to Obama but in very different ways…
In 2012 Mitt Romney ran for president against Barack Obama and lost.
In 2013 Ted Cruz led a strategy from the Senate against Barack Obama’s signature legislation “Obamacare” and lost.
Romney’s strategy was verifiably better at every level. Victory was in sight – the numbers just didn’t add up at the end since his side was fractured from a year of in-fighting and bad press while Obama’s side was boosted and mobilized during that time (and as I’ve pointed out before: the key to winning elections is to fracture the OTHER side and unite yours).
Cruz’s strategy in the senate was verifiably guaranteed to fail at every level as there was literally just no path to victory outside of President Obama just deciding to become a Republican overnight one day.
Cruz’s tactic of denying funding to Obamacare that caused a deadlock with the Democrats who refused to negotiate on the matter, resulting in a government shutdown that ultimately got Cruz absolutely nothing but scorn from the media and public at large.
So both men lost in their matches with President Obama, but one fought valiantly and one fought irresponsibly with literally no strategy to actually win.
Alternate headline: Defeated-by-Democrats-TedCruz lectures Defeated-by-Democrats-MittRomney on why the GOP gets defeated by Democrats.
Doesn’t sound like such bold talk when you put it that way now does it. Yet that’s exactly the case.
The only difference is that Romney actually had a chance of winning.
I hate to go and ruin the fun in historical acts of genocide, but this seemingly minor detail of a myth is one worth straightening out: victims of the Nazi’s weren’t killed in ovens.
This historical correction comes on the heels of a quote getting buzz by critics of Mike Huckabee who, in a condemnation of the Obama administrations nuclear deal with Iran (a nation dedicated to “wiping Israel off the map” in one way or another).
The actual quote isn’t anything remarkable, but got a lot of coverage because of the specific holocaust reference he used.
“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”
But what no one is mentioning in any of the coverage is the misleading history in the comment. Jews weren’t “marched to the ovens” in the holocaust. Ovens weren’t a method of slaughter.
It’s an easy mix-up to make since the holocaust is known for mass killing and mass body burning, so skipping over the part where the bodies were dead and mashing it with the part where people were murdered in unconventional methods is a common jumble. I used to be one of the mixer-uppers. Around 2008 when I was baking a pizza and I opened the lid, causing the wave of heat to hit me in the face, I had an immediate empathic PTSD-style flashback of how holocaust victims had to have felt dying this way. Everyones worst way to die is burning, and even if you’re not claustrophobic – the addition of being in a casket sized space is a tremendous horror. Everyone who has had a loved one cremated has had their mind go to the morbid “what if” thought of their own death being misdiagnosed somehow and waking up just as they were being put into the crematory oven. *shudder*
Survivors of the Dachau concentration camp demonstrate the operation of the crematorium by preparing a corpse to be placed into one of the ovens. Dachau, Germany, April 29-May 10, 1945. Credit.
But if there’s a bright side to horrific senseless mass murder, there is the comfort that this didn’t happen in the concentration camps of the holocaust. Back when I had my pizza vision, I looked up how many people died this way and could only find one or two instances of a prisoner being put into a crematorium oven alive as a special punishment.
I blame for this myth, the intentionally-offensive joke regarding exactly this connection between the best thing on earth (pizza) and the worst thing on earth (burning alive) that goes “Q: What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A: the pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.” Womp womp. But you’ll be shocked to find out that the normally reliable factually rigorous nature of anti-semitism has, in this instance, failed on accuracy. Idk about you, but I did Nazi that coming.
But for real, guys: Victims murdered by the Nazi’s were shot or gassed to death en masse. Their bodies were carried to crematoriums afterward. Yet a lot of people, evidently a 2016 Presidential candidate included, seem to think mass oven killing went on in the holocaust.
While Huckabee didn’t explicitly state the historical inaccuracy, it’s implied in the term “marching to the door” and he continued the implication that people were murdered by ovens when commenting on the comment afterward:
“When I talked about the oven door, I have stood at that oven door,” he said. “I know exactly what it looks like, 1.1 million people killed. For 6,000 years, Jews have been chased and hunted and killed all over this Earth, and when someone in a government says we’re going to kill them, I think, by gosh, we better take that seriously.”
It’s the Iranians who used the word Holocaust first, Huckabee said, and refused during the negotiations to recognize Israel’s right to exist.”
“They refused to tone down their rhetoric and said the Holocaust did not exist and that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map,” he said. “When people in a government position continue to say they’re going to kill you, I think somebody ought to wake up and take that seriously.”
Not withstanding dopiness of his Appeal to Authority fallacy in saying he saw the ovens in person (and I saw them on a Bing search alongside disturbing juxtapositions of actual ovens. So what?)…
-the rest of what he said is at least accurate. Iran brought up the holocaust first so if someone thinks the Obama deal with Iran empowers the enemy-state (as it does) then it’s not a wildly off base comment – just in-artfully stated (he should have said that it potentially makes such a march, not that it does).
It’s getting hard to respect people who don’t realize that more, not less guns, are the solution to gun murders in America.
In other smaller, less free nations without equivalents to the 2nd amendment there may be different and better ways of going about pursuit of solution. The stats would appear to disagree with that, considering the gun deaths in other nations seem to rise in response to more gun restrictions, but no one seems to want to explore that very much. In England for example, gun deaths went up after more stringent gun laws were put in place, but that stat is ignored by the popular consensus to instead just focus on the fact that England has lower gun deaths than the United States. This is a comparison I’ve never understood the relevancy of when applied to America ever since Michael Moore used it in 2002’s Bowling For Columbine, but it remains appealing to people for whatever reason.
The answer to bad things people do in a free country is more freedom for civilians to police the bad things, not less freedom in attempts to stop bad things.
Did you hippies learn nothing from Star Wars? Lea tells Governor Tarkin that the more he tightens his grip, “the more star systems will slip through your fingers“. Where there is abhorrent speech in a country without government restriction on free speech, the Right answer (coincidentally both the “right” answer as in “correct” but also “right-wing”) is more speech to correct, shame, and ultimately overwhelm it. The Wrong answer is the Left’s answer, which is to remove speech they deem abhorrent, or potentially abhorrent, or just not 100% Leftist (thereby allegedly eliminating the path to potentially abhorrent thought or speech). It’s crazy totalitarianism when it comes to thoughts and speech but it’s downright dangerous when it comes to deadly weapons and self protection.
If your country has a right to firearms, then similarly like a country with a right to free expression – the answer to the bad parts is more good parts. More guns don’t automatically, mathematically equal Less Crime, but in the context of a free firearm owning nation the formula is solid.
Yet consistently, whenever there is a highly covered murder where guns are used, the emotional/politically-Leftist side of the country calls for more restriction on gun rights. The emotional appeal is obvious, but logically bananas (nonsensical).
At the time of this writing, the latest issue to spark this debate is a racially motivated murder of 9 people at a church in Charleston South Carolina. How would more gun laws have stopped this murder?
-By banning “assault rifles”? Nope; An assault rifle was not used in the murder.
-By instituting more strict gun registration laws? Nope; The gun used in the murder was not registered in accordance with the law.
-By outlawing the right to carry a gun? Nope; South Carolina doesn’t have concealed-carry laws or any carrying of a firearm without a permit.
-By banning guns inside churches (where the murder took place)? Nope; guns are already not allowed in churches in South Carolina.
I don’t know why this is shocking to you hippies, but: Murderers break laws. It’s unfortunate, but true. The bumper sticker “if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” is undeniably accurate since laws only affect the people who abide by them. When people break those laws, the knee-jerk reaction to make more laws to break is not intelligent. The proper response is to make breaking laws a horrible risk for lawbreakers in proportion to the crime. When the crime is murder, the risk of your attempt being thwarted by your injury or death should be raised, not lowered. The only way to raise the risk of injury or death to someone using a projectile weapon is to have other projectile weapons ready to be used against that rogue A-hole.
There is only one answer: Restricting the right to firearm ownership all together. This obvious point of mine was even echoed by none other than Karl Rove sparking a whole new debate but the base of it is true: you can’t have a country with an engrained right to firearms and no firearm deaths.
You have to repeal the right or reduce the deaths with safety and a balance of powers from armed law abiding citizens to balance the armed criminals. Those are the only options. Since repeal isn’t in the cards – more, not less guns are the answer to rampage shootings.
In 2012, Republicans had an opportunity to gain a Nixon landslide without the possibility of Nixon corruption or scandal by running a near-perfect man for the job of president and shunned it for petty stupid reasons. That man eventually became their nominee anyway but even his expert handling of the hand he was dealt was no match for an incumbent president who had 4 more years to organize as well as enjoy the comfort of positive press as his opposition party did his job of weakening theirs. The Obama Administrations mobilized base achieved a decisive victory to reelection.
Republicans could rectify this error and re-nominate their still-best-candidate again who has already been vetted and tried and come up clean and instead, powerful voices in the party are destroying their best chance at 2016 yet again.
Instead, the party of idiots will go through a year and a half of bloodying their bodies and creating more ill-will amongst the various factions that comprise it in another completely stupid Primary that will hurt far more than it helps. The reason it won’t help is that the differences between the ideology of the contenders that have an actual shot at the nomination is miniscule. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush administrations would differ little in policy. The question here is electability and marketing. But Republicans are too stupid and petty to see that.
The reason running the guy who lost the last go-around remains their best strategy is simply due to the fact that Mitt Romney remains their best figure in the 3 key categories that matter:
Electability: Might sound odd to say about the guy who lost last time around, but the fact remains that his balance of ideology, background, and approach to issues is the most electable option for the 2nd straight national election cycle.
Purity: The dude is so scandal-free that it is almost inhuman. Which ironically serves as a downside because then he is resented for how impossibly perfect he is and demonized by the other side for exactly that reason.
Representation: If Republicans could make a perfect candidate they would all vote to Frankenstein together a sterling family man with successful business experience who has served in a legislative position but didn’t engrain himself in Washington bureaucracy or corruption.The Republican Party stands for individual liberty outweighing government power, the reduction of government power over individuals lives from laws to regulations to taxes, core founding document principal preservation, American cultural conservation, and a strong national defense. Maybe the party will get a better figure to represent these values in the future, but as of now, there is no more perfect individual for the GOP than the family man who spent a life in the private sector both enriching himself and others as well as charitably improving the lives of his neighbors yet became interested in the direction of the country’s leadership enough to serve in an executive position and remain involved in the national dialog.
Ideological Sensibility: He follows the 3 legs of the Reagan-Conservatism stool while remaining sensible and adaptable. He doesn’t have any extreme positions or baggage to make him legitimately unpalatable, so when the inevitable attacks claiming as such happen, they are much easily dispatched than with less moderate candidates.
Earlier this month a bunch of dumb hippies who have been both ingesting and perpetuating the brainwash that pushes victimhood mentality on dark skinned racial minorities decided that it was about time they did something about race relations between white police officers and people with dark skin so of course they chained themselves to barrels to block traffic on the interstate.
The sarcasm in the “of course” part in that sentence speaks both to the illogic bizarreness of the act and the completely routine and cliche predictableness of hippie protest, which is not so much to argue a point or raise awareness in any kind of constructive manner but rather is to throw a tantrum for attention so the participants feel good about themselves. Tools.
Protesters who said they were trying to call attention to racial oppression blocked traffic on Interstate 93 north and south of Boston Thursday morning. The actions surprised police, snarled the commute for thousands, and forced the diversion of an ambulance rushing a car crash victim to a Boston hospital, State Police said.
The narcissistic tantrum accomplished nothing but the addition of more negativity to people in the areas days but as is the case with all stunts like this, could have gone much worse as it blocked the path of not only innocent civilians commuting and generally trying to just go about their day but also an ambulance trying to save a mans life.
Self absorbed, non-productive, annoying, destructive, and accomplishes nothing.
Could these people be any more cliche? Turns out the answer is yes… They could be dirty looking dreaded white dudes who still live with their enabler parents…
To cleanse the palate, via Joel Pollak, nothing says “blocking ambulances for social justice” like white-guy dreads. This makes twice in the span of four days that our worst stereotypes about liberals were magically vindicated, the other being John Kerry rolling out his favorite hippie troubadour to serenade France with an apology on Friday. As with celebrity deaths, these things tend to happen in threes, which makes me wonder what sort of show Obama might be preparing to put on for us tomorrow night during the SOTU. Maybe he’ll use the speech to dump on “American Sniper”? That’s the bleeding edge of left-wing hot takes at this particular moment.
Recently, President Barack Obama was doing the only thing he seems to be capable of not screwing up (see: getting people to give money) and still managed to step in it with his base of totalitarian hippie supporters somehow.
At a fundraiser outside of San Fransisco, the President included in his remarks that attorney general of California, Kamala Harris was “the best looking attorney general in the country”. The hippies got angry and used it as an opportunity to peddle their speech-policing about what is and isn’t okay.
What isn’t okay about noting that someone is attractive? Nothing, obviously. Which is the only thing that makes this a noteworthy story. The articles and social media praise for those scolding the president don’t even make an attempt at logical arguments. They just forbid and demand and seek to bully and shame those who don’t adhere to their thought and comment codes and it’s gross.
The definition of “political correctness” is forbidding truths inconvenient to the political Left, which is rooted in Marxist ideology seeking “sameness” but usually masking it under the more palatable but flexible term of “equality”. This strive for sameness requires a lot of social engineering that no un-brainwashed person would find at all appealing, so pressure tactics need to be employed under the guise of pleading on behalf of a victim class.
In this case, the social engineering the hippies desire is the 1960s version of “feminism” (the attack of femininity in the pursuit of women being seen, thought of, and treated no different than men in any way) which is the opposite of feminism (embracing the feminine and observing it as different but equal in respect and legal rights to masculinity and other typically male traits). Hippie feminism demands the suppression of the fact that men find women attractive, so thus it demands that references to this fact be banned. Media using attractive women are demonized as “objectifying” women and comments on women’s attractive appearances are labeled as doing the same thing. This is because that under an ideology of sameness-worship, the observation of differences debunks the end goal. So their solution is just to ban it. Call these things offensive.
It doesn’t matter that there is no logical basis behind keeping quiet over obvious observable truths and it doesn’t matter that there is nothing insulting, degrading, inappropriate, or out of context about polite notation of such obvious observable truths. The argument is merely “we said so. the end”.
Harris was already noted by President Obama as being “brilliant” and that “she is dedicated and she is tough” before he added that she was also “the most attractive attorney general in the country” so there is no argument to be made about any kind of denial of her non-physical attributes. Instead, the presidents comments are just being called inappropriate and offensive by the usual suspects of hippies stepping in front of someone who was neither victimized nor offended and broadcasting about victimizaiton and offense.
Mika Brezinski on MSNBC said “It just divides women and it just divides people up to separate them by looks and probably was a little ham-fisted. I just think the whole thing, the whole dynamic about women and their looks puts women under a lot of stress that they don’t need.” I like Mika and don’t want to beat up on her, so i’ll leave it to you to decide if she really believes that hippie talking point and/or if it is congruent with pictorials like this:
Katie J. M. Baker asks in a Jezebel post that uses an unflattering photo of Kamala Harris, “was it wrong of Obama to call Harris “the best looking attorney general” while listing her many other attributes?” and then immediately answers herself with “Yes”, because, she says “Women put up with enough unsolicited attention as it is; the president of our country doesn’t need to legitimize the practice by piling on.”
Robin Abcarian in the LA Times had to admit the statement is “accurate” and “stating the obvious” but still asks if it was “sexist” (inadvertently admitting that truth is sometimes “sexist” which un-defines the word sexism). She concludes that making obvious statements about a womans attractiveness is predatory and problematic by saying “More wolfish than sexist, I’d say. And this may be a little problem he needs to work on.” In an attempt to justify this potential “problem” that needs “working on”, Abcarian says:
As Arlette Saenz of ABC News pointed out, Obama got into some hot water a while back when he addressed a reporter as “sweetie.” That was obnoxious, and demeaning, and Obama rightfully apologized. In 2008, he told Hillary Clinton she was “likeable enough” during one of the primary debates, which turned off God knows how many women, who heard the smug judgment of an arrogant upstart.
2 more bogus examples as the reporter didn’t express any offense at the “sweetie” remark, which isn’t inherently obnoxious or demeaning and the “likeable enough” comment was a joke in response to a question about whether Hillary “is likeable” (so in other words, he was using the language of the question in the debate to make light of the question in her defense – not decreeing to Hillary that he, as an elitist, had dubbed her to be adequate).
Amanda Marcotte at Slate wrote an article titled “Sorry, President Obama, but Complimenting a Colleague’s Looks Isn’t Harmless” but forgot to include in the article, any “harm” inherent in such an action. Instead she just points out that dumb hippies on twitter rebuked the President, and lauds that many were male and dismissed columnists debunking the lunacy as “unsurprising defensive whining”. At least she is unsurprised that when cry-bullying over fake victimization stories in service to illogical dogmas are used as offenses, the defense is expected. Her laughable evidence that complimenting women “isn’t harmless” is a statement by a social scientist who quoted a 1996 paper in where researchers discovered that – gasp – passive-aggressive behaviors exist. Marcotte should get with the 21st century and realize that this isn’t news. Yes, it’s true that people can say nice things in manipulative ways for negative outcomes – thanks for that professional citation to uncover that obvious point literally everyone is already aware of. Sorry, Amanda, but the potential to be negative by paying people compliments doesn’t make the act of making a compliment in itself “harmful”.
Joan Walsh at a Salon.com titled “Kamala Harris deserves better” un-makes her point in nearly every line of the first few paragraph by admitting the details that contradict he phony claim of sexist oppression (Obama and Harris are close allies; the compliment was intended as such and not as an attack; that it was preceded by calling her “brilliant”) and then says “but my stomach turned over anyway”.
And that’s the perfect summary of this situation: “Yes, there was nothing wrong whatsoever about this comment that had good motives, was well received by the person it was directed to and was objectively accurate…but I hated it anyway” – Hippie Feminism in a nutshell.
~~
To review: President Obama says something nice about a friend and supporter at a fundraiser and no one there complains and the friend and supporter expresses no problem at having been publicly complimented by the President of the United states on her brilliance, toughness, dedication, and good looks. Leftist crusaders, however, step in to say that’s not okay in a variety of outlets, but to recap the 5 covered here:
An MSNBC host says that complimenting women on being attractive adds “stress that they don’t need” and “divides” them, even though she adds to the division with 90% more hair and makeup vamping and 100% more leg showing than her male co-anchors.
An LA Times columnist says that it is “wolfish” and “a problem” to compliment a women on her looks, even though she admits herself several times that the woman in question has complimentary looks (ie: a compliment).
A Slate.com columnist claimed that a 1996 paper someone wrote said that nice things could potentially be used in bad ways and dubiously concluded that that is proof that complimenting a womans appearance is “harmful”.
A Jezebel columnist said that the president was “piling on” the plight that women already unjustly suffer when they look attractive by saying so.
And a Salon.com columnist claimed that she became physically sick when she heard that the President had complimented a woman.
2012 should have been a Republican victory election year.
The Democratic incumbent, while personally popular, supported a list of widely unpopular positions including his signature name-bearing achievement that passed through bipartisan opposition with 1 deciding senatorial vote and was noted to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but ruled as constitutional under the grounds that the Administration was lying about it the whole time (the Supreme Court ruled that the cornerstone rule in “Obamacare” that forced citizens to buy a product from a corporation was clearly illegal, but that calling the mandate’s punishment for disobeying it a “tax” was clearly within allowable bounds. Thus, the Obama administration, who had argued that the mandate is not a tax, won the case under the ruling that they were lying and it in fact is a tax).
Twas Systemic Idiocy that Lost the Race
Individual Republicans are just as astute and capable as anyone else, but the Republican party and conservative base as a collective is a band of absolute clueless self destructive idiots.
In no better way has this been on display more radically than the primary for both the 2008 and 2012 elections in where the party did everything possible to bludgeon themselves into a position of weakness and frailty before facing a far more prepared and expert opponent.
This is because Republicans generally are arrogant and clueless to social realities outside their analytical bubbles.
When facing an opponent with the power, organization, media attention, name recognition, financing, bully pulpit, and experience of having already won a presidential campaign – there ain’t no time for dickin around. In an election with no incumbent President or Vice President, such as 2008, the primary to choose a nominee for president can afford a more diverse group of contenders that include longshot candidates, since both political parties are going through the process. However, in an election to unseat an incumbent president or sitting vice president of the opposing party, there is no room for error, time wasting or to indulge longshot candidates or abstract party platforms.
Because of its sheer arrogance and stupidity, an active minority within the Republican party did all of the above and more and lost the election for themselves like the bag of tools they are.
Here are 5 reasons how this group of powerful morons worked hard to accomplish this feat of foolishness and snatch failure from the jaws of victory…
SQUANDERING PRECIOUS PRIMARY TIME ON CANDIDATES WITH NO CHANCE OF WINNING
The rules of history, present electoral climate, and logical analysis reveal that the most likely path to the presidency is from a Governor and secondly, a popular Senator. The path to the presidency from the House of Representatives or from the Private Sector with no political experience is at such longshot odds to make it virtually non-existent.
Thus, logic dictates that the only candidates with a serious chance to win in 2012 and thus the only candidates worthy of serious consideration from voters were:
The entire primary should have been between these 4 men, alone.
Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer would have been welcomed as well until their inevitable exit to seek the nomination of other loser parties after failing to gain any traction. Johnson went on to gain a typical less-than-1% of the vote as the Losertarian Party nominee and Roemer was the nominee of the Reform Party, which got something like 2 dozen votes or so.
Yet the news articles, media interview clips and headlines and most importantly – the debate stages – were also polluted with the likes of the following no-chancers:
-Ron Paul (U.S. Representative from Texas who never won a single primary state in any of his 3 presidential runs) -Michelle Bachmann (U.S. Representative, Minnesota) -Newt Gingrich (former polarizing U.S. House Speaker who hadn’t held political office since resigning from the House amidst controversy in the 1990s) -Rick Santorum (former Pennsylvania Senator who lost his 2006 reelection by 18 points and had remained out of political office since) -Herman Cain (Businessman founder of a regional pizza chain with no political experience)
These 5 candidates should not have run for president in that cycle as they were all vanity candidacies with little shot at the nomination and sure-fire losers in the general election. Although it is the right of any naturally born American citizen over the age of 30 to run for the office of President, it is the collective duty of the citizens that make up the grassroots activists, party leadership and voters themselves to not reward vanity candidacies and instead limit their support to the candidates whom most articulate their beliefs from within the realm of possibility to win, especially in an election against a powerful incumbent.
Instead, for an entire year, these individuals ate up the headlines with reality show style snipes at each other and mostly toward their eventual nominee they would all switch to tacitly supporting.
An entire. friggin. year…
A STUPIDLY LONG PRIMARY WITH AN ABSURD AMOUNT OF USELESS DEBATES
The time for a long primary season to give lesser funded candidates a chance to be heard and considered was 2008 while the Democrats did the same. The 2012 election however, was against a sitting president, which means every single day that the Republicans spent arguing amongst themselves was another day the Democrat had to argue to the American people, for himself and his brand, and against the Republican party. So that means there was a competition to be held in where a lead-up to that competition had one unified force attacking the other side and that other side attacking itself for that same period.
In order to win the 2012 election, the mathematically most-electable candidates needed to have been isolated early in the primary, condensed to a micro period of campaigning to make their case to the public and then boiled down to the one amongst them with the most amount of financing, support, organization, and adherence to party principals in where he should have been fast-tracked to the nomination with a maximum of 7 debates within a maximum period of 9 months (the length of time to gestate a baby should not be exceeded by the length of time to choose a politician you like best from a group of other politicians).
Instead, idiots that they are, the republican party and conservative base sought to achieve the exact opposite: to prevent a “coronation” of their inevitable nominee.
Thanks to RNC Chairman Michael Steele, the Republican primary lasted a grueling year of wasteful and expensive destructive in-fighting with a total of 20 divisive, destructive and ultimately Republican brand-damaging debates.
The first Republican primary debate occurred in May 2011 and the last didn’t happen until February 2012. The nominee wasn’t chosen until another 3 months afterward when on May 29th 2012, Mitt Romney finally crossed the threshold of 1,144 delegates – the number needed to win the GOP nomination. That means that the Republican party had no nominee to face Barack Obama until 5 months and 6 days before election day. But what is worse is that Romney’s campaigning to the public was constricted beyond even that minuscule amount of time because the official nomination for a presidential nominee (freeing up funds that nominee is allowed to spend on their campaign) doesn’t happen until the parties convention and that didn’t happen until August 28, 2012.
That means that Republicans spent 1 entire year wasting time and millions of dollars and resources attacking their own nominee for president, while that nominee had only 2 months and 6 days to spend their resources and targeted messaging attacking the incumbent Democratic president.
The usage of this time is clear: Republicans irresponsibly and stupidly misused the year+ of time in choosing their nominee while that nominee, Mitt Romney, used his 2 months and 6 days spectacularly well. Finally allowed to speak directly to the American people and his opponent, he unequivocally destroyed President Obama in the first debate to epic degrees. He performed similarly on-point in the second debate which was derailed not by Romney’s misstep but by the unprecedented overstep of the debate moderator Candy Crowley’s fraudulent bail-out of Obama amidst Romney calling him out on a major point of dishonesty. He continued strong on the campaign trail and in interviews, remaining cool and in command through and beyond the 3rd and final Presidential debate – which was considered a draw only because most of the points Romney was so presciently correct on didn’t reveal themselves until months later when it was too late.
The Republicans were already facing an uphill battle to unseat Barack Obama and giving Mitt Romney 2 months in which to do it was hard enough, but they needed to send him into that battle strengthened and with power behind him and instead pushed him out there politically broken and bruised to where the mostly uninterested voting majority defaulted to the popular meme about the media on this candidate peddled by the Democrats, their supportive media surrogates, and the Republican primary contestants for the previous year whom had all said Romney was an uncaring out of touch plutocrat who doesn’t care about the poor. Thus, by the time Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Candy hit, the anchor tied around the GOP nominee by his own party was barely too much to overcome.
But why?… Why would Republicans be so irresponsibly stupid as to try so hard to destroy their leading standard bearer?
The following reason is why…
OBSESSIVE “NOT CONSERVATIVE ENOUGH” WITCH HUNTING
Instead of following the William F Buckley rule of choosing “the most conservative candidate who can win”, idiot Republicans sought to choose “the most conservative candidate”, arrogantly expecting the whole winning thing to just fall into place somehow afterward. This is mathematically stupid because the majority of voters do not identify as “conservatives” they identify as “moderates”.
But what is worse is that Romney not only was the most electable candidate in 2012, but he was also the most conservative option.
In 2008 Romney was the “conservative alternative” to the establishment choice of the more moderate John McCain. McCain’s team smeared Romney as a “flip-flopper” and that was the big charge against him (because he dared to join conservatives on the issue of abortion, going from supporting abortion rights in the 90s to becoming pro-life as Massachusetts Governor) but his social, foreign, or economic conservatism was not in question in 2008. National Review lauded him as such, Laura Ingraham introduced him as “the conservatives conservative”, conservative businessman Herman Cain endorsed him, Rick Santorum introduced him at a rally as the only choice for a conservative candidate and Romneys conservative approach to Governing the 2nd most liberal state in the union (after Vermont) was praised as an example of how he was able to change minds and bring people towards the right.
Yet in 2012, these same sources dubiously decided that Romney was not conservative enough despite none of his positions from 2008 having changed at all. Suddenly Romney was being mocked instead of lauded for saying his tax cutting, government shrinking stewardship of Massachusetts was “severely conservative”, conservative magazines and talk radio were skeptical of him, and people like Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich who all endorsed “Romney the conservative” in 2008 were impossibly running against him because he wasn’t a real conservative.
The smears stuck with the ignorant Republican base who bought the smears, seemingly coming from a consensus in Right-wing media, dragging out the primary a half year longer than it needed to be. The self destructive part of this insanity was that the Republican “conservative alternatives” to Romney were anything but. In the 2012 election, the candidates deemed more conservative than Mitt Romney were:
-Rick Perry: A career politician governing the countries 2nd most Conservative state (after Oklahoma) with tax hikes, and a liberal record on illegal immigration.
-Rick Santorum: A former pro-abortion rights politician turned pro-life Statist who consistently supported and voted for big government and the welfare state in the senate including debt ceiling increases, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, long lists of wasteful spending including funding the infamous “bridge to no where”, and supporting Arlen Spector (who later became a Democrat and became the deciding vote for Obamacare) over Pat Toomey (the conservative PA Senator who now resides in Arlen Spectors former seat after running again and winning the election after Santorum’s loss).
These 3 choices were what was falsely portrayed to the conservative base as being more solidly right-wing than one Mitt Romney: A Washington outsider family man without a shred of impropriety in his entire personal and public life who was a successful businessman that ran the nations 2nd most Leftist state conservatively, never supporting a tax increase, and is largely responsible for getting Scott Brown elected as Republican Massachusetts senator nearly exclusively so he could be the deciding vote against Obamacare.
And for all the conservative misinformation about Romney, it amounted to nothing but damage among moderates – not conservatives, thus losing the election. Romney was able to show conservatives he was and would be one of them, but the negative attacks against him proved to be too much for him to overcome among moderates – a destruction achieved with the help of his own party.
Despite a myth being propagated the day after election day (before total counts were tallied) claiming that 3 million conservatives stayed home – Romney won those votes in historic proportions.
In fact, Mitt Romney won more Conservative votes than Conservative demigod Ronald Reagan.
Reagan won a landslide in 1980 with an electorate that, according to exit polls, was 28% conservative. Romney lost in 2012 with an electorate that was 35% conservative. Reagan won 78% of conservatives. Romney won 80% of conservatives.
Yet Reagan landslided to victory and Romney lost decisively. The difference between them is that Reagan won moderates. Romney lost moderates by 16 points.
The reason Romney lost moderates? Because his brand was damaged by his own party.
Romney lost moderates and the election because of the conservative in-fighting by desperate less-conservative challengers that included liberal smears against him that his Republican opponents tarnished him with for a full year before the Democrats did…
ATTACKING THEIR EVENTUAL NOMINEE… FROM THE LEFT
When a candidate in a primary is on track to win and you don’t want them to, it is natural to pull out all the stops in order to defeat them; however, when squabbling within one political party, it is an insane and deranged tactic to confirm all the talking points of the opposing political party during your in-fighting.
The attacks against Mitt Romney by his fellow Republicans were straight out of the Democrats playbook…
Governor Tim Pawlenty led the way in using the Left’s talking point on the Massachusetts healthcare plan Romney presided over being identical to Obamacare, making the term “Obamneycare” go viral before gutlessly backing off that accusation and then joining the Romney campaign without ever explaining any evolution in thinking on the charge.
Governor Rick Perry used the Lefts talking points on Immigration to smear his own party with exactly the emotional appeal fallacies the left leverages on the issue. Championing push for in-state tuition for illegals in Texas, Perry said “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.” To which Romney shut down by noting “I think if you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart. It means that you have a heart and a brain.” A perfect shut down of this Leftist talking point – yet Conservative media analyzers lauded Perry from the Left over Romneys retort from the right.
Former Senator Rick Santorum attacked Romney from the Left on his wealth which Santorum claimed put him out of touch with blue collar families. Santorum attacked Romney for his financial success and his history in the business world, claiming that “America doesn’t need a CEO” (despite conservatives thinking that is exactly what the country needed). Santorum, who is nationally unpopular and has been out of elected office since losing his last election by 18 points, also brazenly attacked Romney as “unelectable” in debates, on Twitter, and through tv commercials attacking the Governor for being awesome in the private sector.
Once again, Romney had the perfect logical and conservative response, noting “If we become one of those societies that attacks success, one outcome is certain – there will be a lot less success.” But instead of lauding this advocacy of the foundation of their economic ideology, right-wing media praised the Leftist attack and buried or criticized Romney’s on-point rebuttal.
Newt Gingrich, the most liberal candidate in the primary, combined Perry and Santorums approaches and attacked Romney from the Left on both economics and immigration. Gingrich smeared Romney from the Left on his work as a businessman and specifically his time at Bain Capital, endorsing a Pro-Gingrich PAC produced documentary titled King of Bain which is a Michael Moore style production filled with emotional appeal fallacies and half truths. Gingrich claimed that Romney “looted” companies while at Bain, with no real deconstruction or argument whatsoever of the practices Bain Capital used while restructuring and turning profits from failing businesses.
Further attacking Romney for saying that he would not go rounding up families to deport them but would rather support legal policies that would cause some illegals to “self deport, Gingrich jumped on the Left-wing smear that this made Romney “anti-immigration”.
Yet again, Romney shut down his leftist attackers with conservative logic and accuracy in one of my favorite debate smackdowns in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFSf0H1gEE
It was obvious to any objective observer that Mitt Romney would and should be the 2012 nominee shortly after the primary season began. Not everyone had to like that, but the destructive tactics used against him weren’t necessary either ended up being total failures by failing in every area possible: They did not stop Romney from being the nominee, but did stop him from winning the election.
Way to go, idiots. It worked like a charm.
In other words: Mitt Romney won on the issues. The reason he lost the election were because Republicans Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum smeared him with Democratic talking points that stuck.
One shouldn’t expect this angle from their own side, but at least these attacks came from competitors of Romney’s for the nomination and thus conservative and center-right media figures could referee and point out their desperate and counterproductive tactics. Except, as alluded to earlier and covered in the next section: they emphatically didn’t.
A STUPIDLY DIVISIVE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA
Regardless of political persuasion, you can’t expect the average citizen to be doing independent research on political matters completely on their own. They turn to their like minded commentators for guidance and in the 2012 election primary, they were wildly misguided.
The top culprits smearing Romney in the 3 major markets of radio, print, and blogging were:
Mark Levin: talk radio show host who smeared Romney on the radio to his grassroots listeners. Phillip Klein: columnist at the Washington Examiner who used foolish and cliche talking points in repeated attacks on Romney. Erik Erikson: founder of RedState.com who perpetuated Romney smears online.
But really, no one else in conservative media helped all that much outside of the astute broadcasters on Salem Radio Network including Dennis Prager (who was fair, despite not initially supporting Romney), Michael Medved (who endorsed Romney early in the primary season) and Hugh Hewitt (a long time Romney supporter who none-the-less was fair to the entire field and refrained from smears and talking points).
With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?
Conclusion…
Mitt Romney was the best candidate Republicans had in decades and the party did everything possible to prevent him from winning the election. These conservative grass rooters succeeding in failing.
The Republican base lost the 2012 election. Not Mitt Romney.
Individual Republicans are just as astute and capable as anyone else, but the Republican party and conservative base as a collective is a band of absolute clueless self destructive idiots.
In no better way has this been on display more radically than the primary for both the 2008 and 2012 elections in where the party did everything possible to bludgeon themselves into a position of weakness and frailty before facing a far more prepared and expert opponent.
This is because Republicans generally are arrogant and clueless to social realities outside their analytical bubbles.
When facing an opponent with the power, organization, media attention, name recognition, financing, bully pulpit, and experience of having already won a presidential campaign – there ain’t no time for dickin around.
In an election with no incumbent President or Vice President, such as 2008, the primary to choose a nominee for president can afford a more diverse group of contenders that include longshot candidates, since both political parties are going through the process. However, in an election to unseat an incumbent president or sitting vice president of the opposing party, there is no room for error, time wasting or to indulge longshot candidates or abstract party platforms. Because of its sheer arrogance and stupidity, an active minority within the Republican party did all of the above and more and lost the election for themselves like the bag of tools they are.
Here are 5 reasons how they worked hard to accomplish this feat of foolishness…
SQUANDERING PRECIOUS TIME ON CANDIDATES WITH NO CHANCE OF WINNING The rules of history, present electoral climate, and logical analysis reveal that the most likely path to the presidency is from a Governor and secondly, a popular Senator. The path to the presidency from the House of Representatives or from the Private Sector with no political experience is at such longshot odds to make it virtually non-existent.
Thus, logic dictates that the only candidates with a serious chance to win in 2012 and thus the only candidates worthy of serious consideration from voters were:
The entire primary should have been between these 4 men, alone. Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer would have been welcomed as well until their inevitable exit to seek the nomination of other loser parties after failing to gain any traction (Johnson went on to gain a typical less-than-1% of the vote as the Losertarian Party nominee and Roemer was the nominee of the Reform Party, which got something like 2 dozen votes or so).
Yet the news articles, media interview clips and headlines and most importantly – the debate stages – were also polluted with the likes of the following no-chancers:
-Ron Paul (U.S. Representative from Texas who never won a single primary state in any of his 3 presidential runs)
-Michelle Bachmann (U.S. Representative, Minnesota)
-Newt Gingrich (former polarizing U.S. House Speaker who hadn’t held political office since resigning from the House amidst controversy in the 1990s)
-Rick Santorum (former Pennsylvania Senator who lost his 2006 reelection by 18 points and had remained out of politics since)
-Herman Cain (founder of a pizza chain with no political experience)
These 5 candidates should not have run for president in that cycle as they were all vanity candidacies with little shot at the nomination and sure-fire losers in the general election. Although it is the right of any naturally born American citizen over the age of 30 to run for the office of President, it is the collective duty of the citizens that make up the grassroots activists, party leadership and voters themselves to not reward vanity candidacies and instead limit their support to the candidates whom most articulate their beliefs from within the realm of possibility to win, especially in an election against a powerful incumbent.
A STUPIDLY LONG PRIMARY WITH AN ABSURD AMOUNT OF DEBATES
The time for a long primary season to give lesser funded candidates a chance to be heard and considered was 2008 while the Democrats did the same. The 2012 election however, was against a sitting president, which means every single day that the Republicans spent arguing amongst themselves was another day the Democrat had to argue to the American people, for himself and his brand, and against the Republican party.
In order to win the 2012 election, the mathematically most-electable candidates needed to have been isolated early in the primary, condensed to a micro period of campaigning to make their case to the public and then boiled down to the one amongst them with the most amount of financing, support, organization, and adherence to party principals in where he should have been fast-tracked to the nomination with a maximum of 7 debates within a maximum period of 9 months (the length of time to gestate a baby should not be exceeded by the length of time to choose a politician you like best from a group of other politicians).
Instead, idiots that they are, the republican party and conservative base sought to achieve the exact opposite: to prevent a “coronation” of their inevitable nominee.
Thanks to RNC Chairman Michael Steele, the Republican primary lasted a grueling year of wasteful and expensive destructive in-fighting with a total of 20 divisive, destructive and ultimately Republican brand-damaging debates.
The first Republican primary debate occurred in May 2011 and the last didn’t happen until February 2012. The nominee wasn’t chosen until another 3 months afterward when on May 29th 2012, Mitt Romney finally crossed the threshold of 1,144 delegates – the number needed to win the GOP nomination. That means that the Republican party had no nominee to face Barack Obama until 5 months and 6 days before election day. But what is worse is that Romney’s campaigning to the public was constricted beyond even that minuscule amount of time because the official nomination for a presidential nominee (freeing up funds that nominee is allowed to spend on their campaign) doesn’t happen until the parties convention and that didn’t happen until August 28, 2012.
That means that Republicans spent 1 entire year wasting time and millions of dollars and resources attacking their own nominee for president, while that nominee had only 2 months and 6 days to spend their resources and targeted messaging attacking the incumbent Democratic president.
The usage of this time is clear: Republicans irresponsibly and stupidly misused the year+ of time in choosing their nominee while that nominee, Mitt Romney, used his 2 months and 6 days spectacularly well. Finally allowed to speak directly to the American people and his opponent, he unequivocally destroyed President Obama in the first debate to epic degrees. He performed similarly on-point in the second debate which was derailed not by Romney’s misstep but by the unprecedented overstep of the debate moderator Candy Crowley’s fraudulent bail-out of Obama amidst Romney calling him out on a major point of dishonesty. He continued strong on the campaign trail and in interviews, remaining cool and in command through and beyond the 3rd and final Presidential debate – which was considered a draw only because most of the points Romney was so presciently correct on didn’t reveal themselves until months later when it was too late.
The Republicans were already facing an uphill battle to unseat Barack Obama and giving Mitt Romney 2 months in which to do it was hard enough, but they needed to send him into that battle strengthened and with power behind him and instead pushed him out there politically broken and bruised to where the mostly uninterested voting majority defaulted to the popular meme about the media on this candidate peddled by the Democrats, their supportive media surrogates, and the Republican primary contestants for the previous year whom had all said Romney was an uncaring out of touch plutocrat who doesn’t care about the poor. Thus, by the time Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Candy hit, the anchor tied around the GOP nominee by his own party was barely too much to overcome.
But why?… Why would Republicans be so irresponsibly stupid as to try so hard to destroy their leading standard bearer? The following reason is why…
OBSESSIVE “NOT CONSERVATIVE ENOUGH” WITCH HUNTING
Instead of following the William F Buckley rule of choosing “the most conservative candidate who can win”, idiot Republicans sought to choose “the most conservative candidate”, arrogantly expecting the whole winning thing to just fall into place somehow afterward. This is mathematically stupid because the majority of voters do not identify as “conservatives” they identify as “moderates”.
But what is worse is that Romney not only was the most electable candidate in 2012, but he was also the most conservative option.
In 2008 Romney was the “conservative alternative” to the establishment choice of the more moderate John McCain. McCain’s team smeared Romney as a “flip-flopper” and that was the big charge against him (because he dared to join conservatives on the issue of abortion, going from supporting abortion rights in the 90s to becoming pro-life as Massachusetts Governor) but his social, foreign, or economic conservatism was not in question in 2008. National Review lauded him as such, Laura Ingraham introduced him as “the conservatives conservative”, businessman Herman Cain endorsed him, Rick Santorum introduced him at a rally as the only choice for a conservative candidate and Romneys conservative approach to Governing the 2nd most liberal state in the union (after Vermont) was praised as an example of how he was able to change minds and bring people towards the right.
Yet in 2012, these same sources magically decided that Romney was not conservative enough despite none of his positions from 2008 having changed at all. Suddenly Romney was being mocked instead of lauded for saying his tax cutting, government shrinking stewardship of Massachusetts was “severely conservative”, conservative magazines and talk radio were skeptical of him, and people like Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich who all endorsed “Romney the conservative” in 2008 were impossibly running against him because he wasn’t a real conservative.
The smears stuck with the ignorant Republican base who bought the smears, seemingly coming from a consensus in Right-wing media, dragging out the primary a half year longer than it needed to be. The self destructive part of this insanity was that the Republican “conservative alternatives” to Romney were anything but. In the 2012 election, the candidates deemed more conservative than Mitt Romney were:
-Newt Gingrich: A twice divorced liberal Republican.
-Rick Perry: A career politician governing the countries 2nd most Conservative state (after Oklahoma) with tax hikes, and a liberal record on illegal immigration.
-Rick Santorum: A former pro-abortion rights politician turned pro-life statist who consistently supported and voted for big government and the welfare state in the senate including debt ceiling increases, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, funding the “bridge to no where”, and supporting Arlen Spector (who later became a Democrat and became the deciding vote for Obamacare) over Pat Toomey (the conservative PA senator who now resides in Arlen Spectors former seat).
These 3 choices were what was falsely portrayed to the conservative base as being more solidly right-wing than one Mitt Romney: A Washington outsider family man without a shred of impropriety in his entire personal and public life who was a successful businessman that ran the nations 2nd most Leftist state conservatively, never supporting a tax increase, and is largely responsible for getting Scott Brown elected as Republican Massachusetts senator nearly exclusively so he could be the deciding vote against Obamacare.
And for all the conservative misinformation about Romney, it amounted to nothing but damage among moderates – not conservatives, thus losing the election. Romney was able to show conservatives he was and would be one of them, but the negative attacks against him proved to be too much for him to overcome among moderates.
Despite a myth being propagated the day after election day (before total counts were tallied) claiming that 3 million conservatives stayed home – Romney won those votes in historic proportions.
Romney won more conservatives than Conservative demigod Ronald Reagan.
Reagan won a landslide in 1980 with an electorate that was 28% conservative. Romney lost in 2012 with an electorate that was 35% conservative.
Reagan won 78% of conservatives.
Romney won 80% of conservatives.
The difference is that Reagan won moderates.
Romney lost moderates by 16 points.
The reason Romney lost moderates? Because his brand was damaged by his own party. Romney lost moderates and the election because of the conservative in-fighting by desperate less-conservative challengers that included liberal smears against him that his Republican opponents tarnished him with for a full year before the Democrats did…
ATTACKING THEIR EVENTUAL NOMINEE…FROM THE LEFT When a candidate in a primary is on track to win and you don’t want them to, it is natural to pull out all the stops in order to defeat them; however, when squabbling within one political party, it is an insane and deranged tactic to confirm all the talking points of the opposing political party during your in-fighting.
The attacks against Mitt Romney by his fellow Republicans were straight out of the Democrats playbook…
Governor Tim Pawlenty led the way in using the Left’s talking point on the Massachusetts healthcare plan Romney presided over being identical to Obamacare.
Governor Rick Perry used the Lefts talking points on Immigration to smear his own party with exactly the emotional appeal fallacies the left leverages on the issue. Championing push for in-state tuition for illegals in Texas, Perry said “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.” To which Romney shut down by noting “I think if you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart. It means that you have a heart and a brain.”
Former Senator Rick Santorum attacked Romney from the Left on his wealth which Santorum claimed put him out of touch with blue collar families. Santorum attacked Romney for his financial success and his history in the business world, claiming that “America doesn’t need a CEO” (despite conservatives thinking that is exactly what the country needed). Santorum, who is nationally unpopular and has been out of elected office since losing his last election by 18 points, also brazenly attacked Romney as “unelectable” in debates, on Twitter, and through tv commercials attacking the Governor for being awesome in the private sector.
Once again, Romney had the perfect logical and conservative response, noting “If we become one of those societies that attacks success, one outcome is certain – there will be a lot less success.”
Newt Gingrich, the most liberal candidate in the primary, combined Perry and Santorums approaches and attacked Romney from the Left on both economics and immigration. Gingrich smeared Romney from the Left on his work as a businessman and specifically his time at Bain Capital, endorsing a Pro-Gingrich PAC produced documentary titled King of Bain which is a Michael Moore style production filled with emotional appeal fallacies and half truths. Attacking Romney for saying that he would not go rounding up families to deport them but would rather support legal policies that would cause some illegals to “self deport, Gingrich jumped on the Left-wing smear that this made Romney “anti-immigration”. Yet again, Romney shut down his leftist attackers with conservative logic and accuracy in one of my favorite debate smackdowns in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFSf0H1gEE
It was obvious to any objective observer that Mitt Romney would and should be the 2012 nominee shortly after the primary season began. Not everyone had to like that, but the destructive tactics used against him weren’t necessary either ended up being total failures by failing in every area possible: They did not stop Romney from being the nominee, but did stop him from winning the election. Way to go, idiots. It worked like a charm.
In other words: Mitt Romney won on the issues. The reason he lost the election were because Republicans Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum smeared him with Democratic talking points that stuck.
A STUPIDLY DIVISIVE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA Regardless of political persuasion, you can’t expect the average citizen to be doing independent research on political matters completely on their own. They turn to their like minded commentators for guidance and they were wildly misguided.
The top culprits smearing Romney in the 3 major markets of radio, print, and blogging were:
Mark Levin: talk radio show host who smeared Romney on the radio to his grassroots listeners.
Phillip Klein: columnist at the Washington Examiner who used foolish and cliche talking points in repeated attacks on Romney.
Erik Erikson: founder of RedState.com who perpetuated Romney smears online.
But really, no one else in conservative media helped all that much outside of the astute broadcasters on Salem Radio Network including Dennis Prager (who was fair, despite not initially supporting Romney), Michael Medved (who endorsed Romney early in the primary season) and Hugh Hewitt (a long time Romney supporter who none-the-less was fair to the entire field and refrained from smears and talking points).
With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?
Mitt Romney was the best candidate Republicans had in decades and the party did everything possible to prevent him from winning the election. These conservative grass rooters succeeding in failing.
Pew polls also confirm that as of now at least, it’s down to the wire.
As the general election campaign gets underway, Obama’s slim 49% to 45% edge over Mitt Romney is based on his continued support among women, college graduates, blacks, Latinos and lower-income voters. Obama leads Romney by 13 points among women, which is identical to his victory margin over McCain among women four years ago, according to National Election Pool exit polls. Men, who split their vote between Obama (49%) and McCain (48%), are leaning slightly toward Romney today, by a 50% to 44% margin…
Obama has lost support among several groups: Obama carried the independent vote by a margin of 52% to 44% in 2008. Today, 42% of independents favor him, while 48% back Romney. Obama also is faring worse among lower-income voters and those with less education than he did in 2008.
The problem here that it seems no one but me is either aware of or willing to talk about is the racial minority vote and the emotional appeals the Obama campaign uses to drive that voter turnout. Sorry, but a majority of Barack Obama’s appeal as a politician is race-based and that shiz translates to votes. Romney can counter if, and only if he puts the brakes on that appeal by choosing a non-white-male running mate. My pick is son-of-Cuban immigrants, Florida Senator Marco Rubio but there are plenty of acceptable options. This is an issue of marketing and optics. The point is not that the Repbulicans should play the same bogus identity-politics game that the Democrats are but rather merely to slow the dishonest attacks on their own brand. In other words: the strategy in my plan is not to try and get Republican votes by making people say of someone on the voting ticket “they are just like me regarding ethnic or racial makeup and I would like to have what I ignorantly feel is ‘one of my own’ in positions of power” in the way that skyrocketed black votes for Obama in 2008 to 96% which became 13% of the voting electorate (and my pick of Rubio should be evidence of that, since Cuban Americans are already solid Republican voting blocks and have little to no ethnic identity crossover appeal to Blacks or other Latino segments) – but rather its merely to debunk that very notion. Obama is going to try to win not by ideas and arguments and honest appraisals of Republican policies and how they may or may not benefit society – he’s going to try to win with smearing his opponents as elitists that don’t understand or care about the struggle of the underclass, which is to many minority voters, a dog whistle for “the other side is racist and you can’t trust them”. Romney can’t merely rely on his life history of helping those in need to end the effectiveness of those attacks. He needs a running mate that can show the key demographic of voters (of all races and ethnicities) that don’t follow the specifics of politics and aren’t terribly informed on policy, that he and his party are not the stuffy white-guys coming in to take down the first half-black President of the nation and, unfortunately, the only way to earn the listenership of that demographic is to match the optics of the opponent in some way and then make the argument from there. The argument will be made regardless, obviously, but if that argument comes from 2 white guys against a half-black guy and old white guy, the team with the half-black guy will get enough votes from non-politic followers across the board and especially in racial minority demographics and it will be enough to tip the election.
Romney is halfway there…
Obama trails Romney by a wide margin among white voters (54% Romney, 39% Obama), though that is little changed from 2008. But Obama has lost ground among certain groups of white voters. In 2008, whites with household incomes under $50,000 favored McCain over Obama by a slim 51% to 47% margin. Today, lower-income whites favor Romney over Obama by a 16-point margin (54% to 38%).
To sow up a victory in November, it all hinges on this decision.
Yet Gingrich also pioneered the politics of personal destruction, as well as the politics of personal pique. Once again, he feels that his proper seat on Air Force One has been denied. So he attacks Romney from the right on abortion and from the left on Bain Capital. The only unifying principle — the only cause that is clearly served — is the emotional impulses of the man himself. He fights not for any brand of conservatism but for Newtism, which is more important to him than any party or ideology.
Gingrich recalls another impressive, flawed political figure. I have in mind a Southerner, attracted to big ideas, fascinated by management theories and scientific paradigms, prone to grandiosity and moralism, capable of both insight and bullying, leading through the cultivation of constant alarm. Al Gore was also transformed by defeat, which coincided with an “assault on reason,” a failure of “rational analysis” and the “shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.” The political failure of a figure so large required cosmic explanation. Gore’s opponents became “digital brown shirts” and “un-American” and a “renegade band of right-wing extremists” who had “betrayed the country.” Grievance merged with self-importance. It is easy to imagine Gore delivering Gingrich’s words: “If you want to smear people who are trying to think, fine.”
Newt Gingrich is becoming the Al Gore of the Republican Party — but with one large difference. By accepting the role of vindictive prophet, Gore appeals to a subset of the progressive coalition — the sort of people who find Keith Olbermann fair and balanced. (Gore, in fact, employs him.) Whatever Gore’s flaws, he is the leader of a cause.
It is currently difficult to discern any cause in the Gingrich campaign apart from Gingrich himself. He is the party of one — one world-historic leader, supported primarily by one billionaire. This is not a movement; it is the prosecution of a feud. Like Samson, Gingrich is willing to pull down the temple around him. But, in this case, it is not the Philistines who suffer. It is Republicans in the rubble.
