Why Romney Lost

[Geee]

National Review:

About a month ago I jotted down some notes on an index card and wrote across the top “Why Romney Lost.” It was not that I was certain he was going to lose. In fact I had talked myself into believing he had a real shot. However, I thought that, if he lost, we would be able to look back at some things that had already been baked into the cake and that he simply was not able to overcome. They were as follows (and I paraphrase a bit):

“Being a businessman worked against him.” It seemed to me that, although Romney was the kind of guy you’d want to “fix” the economy, Obama persuaded a lot of people that Mitt was also the kind of guy who caused the problem in the first place: the Wall Street fat cat. And Romney never properly explained how turning a private business around improved our national economy.

[Draggingtree]

National Review:

About a month ago I jotted down some notes on an index card and wrote across the top “Why Romney Lost.” It was not that I was certain he was going to lose. In fact I had talked myself into believing he had a real shot. However, I thought that, if he lost, we would be able to look back at some things that had already been baked into the cake and that he simply was not able to overcome. They were as follows (and I paraphrase a bit):

“Being a businessman worked against him.” It seemed to me that, although Romney was the kind of guy you’d want to “fix” the economy, Obama persuaded a lot of people that Mitt was also the kind of guy who caused the problem in the first place: the Wall Street fat cat. And Romney never properly explained how turning a private business around improved our national economy.

 

Over three million Republicans stay home to teach Obama a lesson

 

 

 

Elections 2012

November 10, 2012

By: Dustin Koellhoffer

 

There’s no way to know if the election would have been overturned had some three million plus Republicans cast their ballots on Nov. 6. But the fact that millions who could have turned the election around chose not to vote is a disturbing trend in the thinking of Americans. The corrupt spending and policies of moderates and liberals are spending the country into bankruptcy either at fifty miles an hour or two hundred mph. Only conservatives will stop the collapse and balance the federal budget.

 

Rush Limbuagh’s take on why they stayed home

 

Many are outraged at moderates like Speaker Boehner who attempts to marginalize conservatives. They won’t support anyone who says they will work with Democrats because there is nothing of Democrat policies that they want. They wanted the “perfect candidate” and don’t understand that first the liberals of the Democrat Party must be defeated and then http://www.examiner.com/article/over-three-million-republicans-stay-home-to-teach-obama-a-lesson

[Draggingtree]

Conrad Black: The Obama Disaster: Part II

 

Barack Obama’s victory this week was hoped for, and celebrated, in Canada as a triumph of Canadian-style Americanism. Here in Toronto, for example, the writers group PEN Canada invited a wide range of people to a public-speaking event titled, “Democracy in the Year of Election” that amounted, at least in its advance notice, to an election-eve secular prayer meeting for an Obama victory. (It was explained in the invitation that it was a contest between an incumbent who wished to extend medical care to the disadvantaged and an opponent who wished to lower the taxes of the rich.)

 

Writers always hold themselves out as torch-bearers for truth, intellectual integrity and rigorous analysis of the complex. Likewise broadcasters: The election results, on Tuesday night and in days following, were presented on the CBC as an uplifting victory of a deserving winner and a crushing defeat of an evangelical, Zionist, misogynist, fat-cat reactionary.

 

This was an historic election, but not in ways that Americans or the Canadian left will celebrate. Mitt Romney was never a strong candidate, and any serious incumbent would have sent him to the proverbial dust-bin of history decisively, as Roosevelt did with Landon, Johnson did with Goldwater, Nixon with McGovern, Reagan with Mondale. If Romney had been a thoroughly credible challenger, he would have thrown Obama out of the White House like a dead mouse, as Roosevelt did to Hoover and Reagan did to Carter.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/11/10/conrad-black-the-obama-disaster-part-ii/

[Draggingtree]

November 11, 2012, 5:50 p.m. ET

 

Sarah Westwood: Advice From a Lonely College Republican

 

The GOP is like a supermodel who's been doing photo shoots under fluorescent bulbs without any makeup.

 

By SARAH WESTWOOD

 

If the election results told us anything, it's that the GOP has some serious soul searching to do. On paper, Mitt Romney's history of accomplishment towered over President Obama's train wreck of a record, so his loss seemed nearly inexplicable. But Mr. Obama carried his key groups so easily that Republicans should give him props for such a feat— and start taking notes.

 

Though it may be painful, though it may be costly at the polls in the short run, Republicans don't have a future unless they break up with the religious right and the gay-bashing, Bible-thumping fringe that gives the party such a bad rap with every young voter. By fighting to legally ban abortion, the party undercuts the potential to paint itself as a rebel against the governmental-control machine.

 

Embracing a more liberal social agenda doesn't require anyone to abandon her own personal values; it's possible to keep faith and the party too. But the evangelical set essentially hijacked the Republican Party in the 1970s;

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578107410973408952.html

 

Rant is this what we have come to – HOG WASH

[pollyannaish]

I don't understand staying home because the perfect candidate is not available. And given the size of Mitt's crowds this is still a number that makes absolutely no sense to me.

[Rokke]

Mitt's crowds really weren't that big. Sarah Palin pulled in more in Colorado in 2008. Gore and Kerry pulled in huge crowds in liberal enclaves and lost. So did Walter Mondale. Crowd size is a bit like counting yard signs. Kind of like a photo still of a 2 hour movie. With that in mind, I keep thinking about the bumper sticker count I took at the Denver airport a few weeks before the election. Hundreds of cars, 2 Romney stickers, 1 Obama sticker and 1 Bush/Cheney 2012. And my Bush/Cheney 2004. If bumper sticker counts mean anything...that result might say it all.

[pollyannaish]

Mitt's crowds really weren't that big. Sarah Palin pulled in more in Colorado in 2008. Gore and Kerry pulled in huge crowds in liberal enclaves and lost. So did Walter Mondale. Crowd size is a bit like counting yard signs. Kind of like a photo still of a 2 hour movie. With that in mind, I keep thinking about the bumper sticker count I took at the Denver airport a few weeks before the election. Hundreds of cars, 2 Romney stickers, 1 Obama sticker and 1 Bush/Cheney 2012. And my Bush/Cheney 2004. If bumper sticker counts mean anything...that result might say it all.

 

Good point. Crowds were just a head fake.

 

Edited to add: In Washington State I didn't count signs because for the first time ever you had to pay for them. We were told that you had to do that because we were not a swing state and that saved resources for the bigger states.

 

I think that may be symptomatic of some of the shortsighted ways campaigns think.