Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
In the last few weeks, as some of you may have noticed, I have written very few blog posts. In part, this is due to the rhythm of the semester. Once the grading begins, one's free time shrinks. Part of it is due to the fact that I am maniacally trying to finish a polished draft of a book on ancient Sparta that I had hoped, before my extended sojourn in the hospital at the National Institutes of Health took place, to finish this summer. In part, however, it was because I had some thinking to do.
As some of you are no doubt acutely aware, the election results came to me as a shock. Given the emergence of the Tea Party Movement in 2009, the Republicans' discovery in the last months of that year that there is such a thing as a backbone, and their magnificent victory in the midterms in 2010, I figured that the Republicans had a real shot in 2012 at repeating what they had achieved against Jimmy Carter in 1980. And when Mitt Romney put Paul Ryan on the ticket, it looked to me as if he was going to fully capitalize on the opportunity that Barack Obama's mismanagement of the economy had afforded the Republicans.
But, of course, the Republicans did not achieve again what they had accomplished in 1980. I have no doubt that they could have won handily, and I believe that they would have done so had Mitt Romney not, in the end, opted to run a largely non-ideological, non-partisan, personal campaign against Barack Obama, eschewing appeals to first principles and intimating by his silence in this regard that Barack Obama is a perfectly decent fellow with perfectly respectable ideas and intentions and that there was nothing more at issue in the election than the unfortunate managerial failings of the President.
Instead of seeking a partisan victory by uniting the candidates of his party on a single, clearly spelled-out platform like Newt Gringrich's Contract with America, Romney orphaned the Republican Senatorial candidates in such a manner as to localize the Senatorial campaigns. This enabled the Democratic nominees in states such as Montana, Missouri, and Indiana to distance themselves from the President, to run as independents of a sort highly critical of Barack Obama, to capitalize on errors made by their opponents, and to win. It also meant that there was no real clash of visions in the national race. When Romney put Paul Ryan on the ticket, I persuaded myself that he was an old dog capable of learning new tricks and that he was going to grasp the bull by the horns and run a principled campaign. But in the end he chose not to do so, and he ran for the Presidency in the manner he had run for the Senate and for the Governorship in Massachusetts: as a man almost ashamed of the party that had nominated him and of the ideological principles that it had embraced. You can never win an argument you do not make, and Romney, by his silence regarding the nature and ends of government, conceded the argument.
Even then, of course, Romney himself might have won the personal victory he sought had the women and men he hired run a competent campaign. But this they did not do. To begin with, in the primaries, especially when challenged by Governor Rick Perry of Texas (where the Republicans have done well with the Hispanic vote) Romney acted in such a manner as to alienate Mexican-Americans. Then, in the general election, he simply conceded the Hispanic vote. I have a colleague who is fluent in Spanish and who regularly watches Univision. He tells me that, in the course of the campaign, he saw not a single television advertisement on Univision touting Mitt Romney.
I am not arguing here that Romney could have persuaded a majority of Mexican-American voters to side with him. That would have been beyond the reach of any Republican this year. I am merely suggesting that he could have done much better and that, in the circumstances, had he done so, it might well have made a real difference.
The other area in which the Romney campaign was simply incompetent had to do with getting out the vote. I live in a battleground state. We were inundated with robocalls for weeks prior to the election. The Romney people clearly had money to burn, and this money they wasted in such a manner as to infuriate potential supporters. Never once was I contacted by a real human being. In Michigan -- at least in the corner of Michigan in which I live -- the Romney campaign had no ground game to speak of.
To this, we can add that his campaign spent considerable sums on software designed to support the ground game that he apparently tried to mount elsewhere, and on election day that software crashed. So much for Mitt Romney's competence as a technocrat!
One of the reasons that I did not see this coming was that I did not pay adequate attention to the campaign as it unfolded. Lacking a television, I missed the advertisements aimed at demonizing Romney, and I did not fully appreciate the significance of Romney's abysmal performance at the Republican National Convention -- where it became clear that he intended to eschew principles and run a personal campaign, inviting people to vote for him solely because he is a nice fellow and an experienced manager.
I did watch the debates (all of the first, and most of the others). I was overly impressed by Romney's magnificent victory in the first debate. I thought that it put him in the lead, and my suspicions were confirmed by the Gallup poll and, some of the time, by Rasmussen. What I did not adequately appreciate in the following weeks was Romney's folly in trying to sit on that lead and run out the clock. When he should have been audacious, he was almost timid; and, especially on Benghazi, he allowed President Obama to get away with outright lies. Instead of going for a decisive victory, Romney aimed at eking out a win -- which is the way a challenger is very much apt to lose. All that it took to tip the balance against him was a hurricane and a Republican governor, in need of help from FEMA, willing to heap effusive praise on the President.
I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was a better candidate than any of those who ran against him for the Republican nomination. He lost a squeaker. The others, apart from Rick Perry, had no business being in the race. Every one of them would have lost by a landslide.
I also have no doubt that we would be much better off now had Romney won. For the time being, Barack Obama has the whip hand; and, in the next few years, he is going to do the country a great deal of harm -- all for the purpose of expanding further the administrative entitlements state. The consequences in foreign affairs could be exceedingly grim -- especially with regard to Iran and China -- and the damage done the economy will hurt Americans grievously for a long time to come.
But I also suspect that, had he won election, Mitt Romney would soon have left his party and its supporters demoralized.This, as you may remember, I worried about from the start. Back in May, 2011, I post a piece entitled The Last Man Standing. In it, I restated in brief the conclusion reached in my recent book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift that "there is built into liberal democracy a natural tendency to drift in the direction of the administrative state with its concentration of power in the executive branch of the central government and its entitlement programs," and I added the following:
This propensity can only be successfully resisted if we understand its origins and if we take cognizance of the manner in which the American regime, as envisaged by the Founding generation, was designed to stand in its way. This propensity has been systematically and quite effectively exploited by the Progressives and their heirs now for something like a century. What they understand that we need to understand is that a reversal of the trend is well nigh impossible – well nigh, let me add, but not quite. Well nigh because those in possession of entitlements will scream bloody murder if they are threatened. And not quite because, thanks in part to our unwitting benefactor Barack Obama, we no longer have the resources to support the entitlements state. We can certainly raise taxes, as President Obama and the Democrats intend to do, but that does not mean that in the long run we will take in more revenue – and it is massively increased revenue that the entitlement state needs. The Progressives are banking on the unwillingness of a considerable part of the electorate to give up the subsidies on which they live, and on this they have always to date successfully banked. Right now, however, the fiscal crisis of the welfare state offers us an opening, and I am confident that Mitt Romney will miss it. He is the sort of man who never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Since 1928, when Calvin Coolidge relinquished the Presidency, the office has been held by a number of Republicans – Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Only one of these has displayed an understanding of the problem we face, and he was, for understandable reasons, too preoccupied with wining the Cold War, to confront that problem with all of his energy. Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush père, and Bush fils were all what I call managerial progressives. Their claim over against the liberals was that they could manage the administrative state more efficiently and effectively than their counterparts. Rarely if ever did any of them mention the Founders. Rarely if ever did they appeal to the first principles of our form of government as they are expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Rarely if ever did they appeal to the Constitution in opposition to the jurisprudential drift of the Supreme Court. Limited government was not part of their vocabulary. They were without clue.
The reasons are simple enough. Not one of these men was properly educated in the principles of American government. They had their virtues. They were practical men, can-do sorts with a pretty good understanding of how to get from here to there. In terms of moral understanding, as it is applied to political matters, however, they were bankrupt or pretty nearly so. The ordinary senior at Hillsdale College these days has a better grasp of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the conditions of freedom than did any of these men.
The same is true of nearly all Republicans. They come into Congress, the Senate, and state government from the Chambers of Commerce. Few of them have any sort of political education. Most are businessmen. If they have something more than an undergraduate education, it is reflected by their possessing a law degree or an MBA – which is to say, they have been trained to be managerial progressives. Our law schools and our business schools owe their origins to the Progressives. They were created for the purpose of encouraging what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “rational administration.”
The reason why I oppose Mitt Romney is simple, He was born to destroy everything that we have accomplished since the Tea-Party Movement emerged in the Spring of 2009. Romney is the very model of a managerial progressive. He has one great virtue. He knows how to run things; he knows how to organize things. He would make a good Secretary of Commerce. He has no understanding of the principles that underpin our government. And, in fact, like most businessmen, he is a man almost devoid of political principles. Give him a problem, and he will make a highly intelligent attempt to solve it. Ask him to identify which problems should be left to ordinary people and what are the proper limits to government’s reach, and he would not understand the question. He is what you might call a social engineer; and, in his estimation, we are little more than the cogs and wheels that need to be engineered. . . .
Romney’s political instincts are disastrous. He will betray the friends of liberty and limited government at the first opportunity. If he is nominated, the people who joined the Tea Party and turned out in 2010 to give the Republicans an historic victory are likely to stay home. If, by some miracle, the progenitor of Romneycare actually defeats the progenitor of Obamacare, he will quickly embrace the entitlement state and present himself as the man who can make it hum, as he did in Massachusetts. He is not better than Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush père, and Bush fils. He is cut from the same cloth, and in practice he is apt to be far, far worse. The consequence will be the death in American life or at least the decay of the impulse embodied within the Tea-Party Movement.
What I wrote at that time was harsh, and I came to think -- or, rather, hope -- that I had been unjust. I wanted to believe that time and circumstance had given Romney the education that he did not receive at Stanford, Brigham Young University, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Law School, and I wanted to believe that his choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate was not just a sop thrown to the Tea Party Movement but a sign that Romney himself had outgrown managerial progressivism. Had I spent less time thinking about Sparta this Fall and more time following the Republican campaign, had I read and re-read Romney's acceptance speech at the convention, I would have known better.
I do not now believe that Mitt Romney was ever serious about repealing Obamacare. Had he been serious, he would have run a campaign designed to nationalize the Senatorial elections in every state. What he seemed to want was to be elected President and to have Democratic control in the Senate as an excuse for a failure on his part to keep his campaign promises. It was as if he wanted to win but did not want the ideas he had been forced to espouse in order to get the Republican nomination to be victorious with him. He wanted to win an office, not an argument. In that particular, he was typical of nearly all Republican presidential nominees in the past. He had no desire to change the direction in which we are tending. He merely wanted to manage its progress in that direction more prudently.
That may never have been good enough. It is certainly not good enough now. Let's hope that Mitt Romney turns out to be the last managerial progressive nominated for the Presidency by the Republican Party. What we need is a woman or man intent on radically correcting our course and a party intent on achieving the same end.
The last thing that we need to do is to take the advice proffered to us by Mike Murphy -- tellingly, not in a conservative journal but in the pages of Time Magazine, where such advice is most welcome -- that, to succeed, we must surrender to the Zeitgeist. Why just think how much good Arnold Schwarzenegger did the Republican Party and the people of California! Barry Goldwater was right about one thing long ago. We need to offer Americans a choice, not an echo. We need to do more than re-arrange the deck chairs on our political Titanic.
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Comments:
Oct '10
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Black Prince
dittoheadadt: It's communication, folks. Doesn't matter what our message is - whether from a moderate managerial or a trueblue conservative or anyone else - if we don't control our message, it's not our message, it's the media's.
Until we address the means of communication, as was attempted here and here, we're wasting our collective analyses and time. · 43 minutes ago
I agree that we're wasting our time and energy. We might as well be discussing why some donuts have cream filling inside and others don't...it's completely irrelevant. We don't just need more or better communication...what we need is deprogramming. We need to counteract the Marxist propaganda that has been pumped into our soft heads over the past 50 years. We're a brainwashed country and we're experiencing the inevitable consequences. I have no idea where to begin this monumental deprogramming task...it's probably too late.
I agree on the deprogramming, DP, and I think that's what's proposed in the 2 links I provided. But too many on the Right spend more time trying to affix blame than to identify and fix the problem.
Jun '10
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
First, I don't see how Rick Perry was anything but a less sharp version of Romney with a Texas accent. Given his dismal performance in the Republican debates I think he would have proven disastrous against Obama.
I am trying to reconcile what was articulated in the Blaze video with the severe criticism of Romney, who I think everyone would agree was at least the most articulate, decent, charitable and successful business and political executive that Republicans could have chosen. I am not as convinced that Romney doesn't embrace the Founders principles as Dr. Rahe and others seem to think.
Getting back to the Blaze video and Charles Murray's work - could it be that American society having already undergone a fundamental transformation even before Obama's promise/threat to do so, that any Republican would have found it nigh impossible to be elected? The Tea Party movement did not put forth a viable candidate but even had it done so, aren't the majority of Americans already behaving irresponsibly and willfully relinquishing their responsibility to the state? We haven't witnessed a real second Depression as yet. Perhaps only that will begin to change hearts and minds.
Apr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Don't count on it.
Apr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Paul A. Rahe
I was gobsmacked myself. · 15 hours ago
You should have been surprised by the anecdotal evidence from your friend. You should then have checked the facts, and you would have discovered that Romney's spending on spanish language media was about half Obama's, which is roughly what it should be (vote suppression and persuasion is less cost effective than gotv and Mitt had fewer hispanic media allies to enhance the ad campaigns).
If there had been a real hook for hispanic votes (like, say, a VP nomination for Portman or another effective Spanish speaker, or a Bush/ McCain like push for amnesty), then things might have been different, but assuming Mitt's belief in the rule of law and magnets was in place and Ryan picked, the Hispanic vote was more a threat to be mitigated than an opportunity.
Apr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Paul A. Rahe
Vice-Potentate
Obama in 2008 ran a contentless campaign and proceeded to pass Obamacare and two stimulus bills. In 2012 he again ran a contentless campaign with no signs of a contentless presidency.
The content was there in 2008. You just had to look for it. I knew what he intended, and my bet is that you did as well. ·
What was Obama's signature promise in the 2008 Democratic primaries as communicated to the public at large? He would pass healthcare reform without a mandate.
What was Obama's signature promise to the unions that brought him over Clinton? That his bipartisanship would be what it took to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed.
What was his biggest promise in the general election? Closing Guantanamo and ending the Bush War on Terror.
Obviously, none of this happened.
The general tenor of the presidency was predictable, the specifics not. The specifics matter; in my view, the EFCA remains Obama's biggest threat to the republic, and we appear to have overly relaxed out guard.
Apr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Albert Arthur
I thought Romney talked about principles from the very beginning.....--were we following the same campaign?
It's the same reason that Prof. Rahe talks about it being a contentless campaign. Mitt had a more detailed labor platform than any presidential nominee in either party in history and a more radical one than any Republican since Goldwater. Likewise, he had a more detailed entitlement reform plan than anyone before, and more radical than anyone since LBJ. He gave keynotes and policy papers and spoke on the stump about the need for a strong American defense. He spoke early and often about the moral catastrophe that is the federal deficit.
And the conservative media ignored it or nit picked. His trade policy, for example, saw strong efforts to expand free trade and open markets combined with efforts to induce the Chinese to reduce abuses of American investors in China. The conservative media ignored 90% of the policy and complained, absurdly, that Mitt's concern about IP thefts, de facto expropriations were cover for protectionism.
Too many pundits failed to read the Romney campaign papers, and the conservative media didn't tell him what they said.
Edited on December 2, 2012 at 6:19pmApr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
I should note that the liberal media did not make the same mistake. Conservative pundits focused on "holding Romney's feet to the fire" and engaging in contentless non-falsifiable attacks. How does one rationally debate the claim that Romney "was born to destroy everything that we have accomplished since the Tea-Party Movement emerged in the Spring of 2009"? Who could read claims like that and walk away with a greater sum of knowledge?
The liberal media, meanwhile, paid attention to what he said and alerted the relevant interest groups. If you didn't know that Romney planned to reduce union's ability to engage in political activity with money collected from members opposed to that political activity, or that he aimed to repeal Davis-Bacon, then you're clearly not involved in union circles, where Romney's papers and statements were widely circulated.
One of the most frequently heard complaints is that "Romney didn't talk about x", where x is a topic he talked about endlessly. In general, on questioning, the speaker will tell you that he didn't read MittRomney.com or watch speeches, but National Review/ The Weekly Standard didn't describe his relevant positions.
Jun '12
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Exactly.
Because Mitt wasn't perfect in every respect, he was considered "not good enough" to actively support or vote for by many people.
The perfect has become the enemy of the good. Until and unless conservatives learn to control that response, we'll never win.
Of course, the nation is doomed anyway. Some of us tried sounding the alarm about steering away from the iceberg, but in the wheelhouse they were more interested in who is the purest, not who would at least grab the wheel and start to make the turn.
Apr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
ConservativeWanderer
Exactly.
Because Mitt wasn't perfect in every respect, he was considered "not good enough" to actively support or vote for by many people.
The perfect has become the enemy of the good. Until and unless conservatives learn to control that response, we'll never win.
I should note that this was not confined to his opponents. The "feet to the fire" line was repeated most often by Rob Long. National Review supported Mitt. Most of the employees of the Weekly Standard were on board, but we spent far more of our time on gaffe stories and far less on the substance. The horribly dishonest, and hugely impactful, Tax Policy Center study on Romney made a critical difference, particularly to Ohio, in part because conservative/ libertarian think tanks like the Heritage Center CATO were almost totally uninterested in the details of policies that they had supported for years. No one put in the work to make a half decent study until long after the TPC had framed the debate, and even then produced nothing as polished.
Kaus pointed out the other day that Romney had to devote significant amounts of time shoring up NR, but that's separate.
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Jeff: IMHO, The Republican Party should become more like the Tea Party, acoalition of social conservatives and libertarians that focuses almost exclusively on fiscal and limited government issues.
Mr. Rahe, if you were so wrong about the election - I wasn't, btw - could you be wrong about which candidate we should have nominated? Wasn't it obvious that a guy who implemented single payer healthcare in Massachusetts, Romney, was the least qualified person to repeal Obamacare? Why were swing voters smart enough to know this, even if conservative pundits were not? Why did we lose the swing vote? · 15 hours ago
Edited 15 hours ago
Your argument against Romney is sound. I made it myself. But what alternative was there? Not Newt.
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Michael and I looked to the fundamentals -- unemployment, etc. We noticed Romney's victory in the first debate, and we relied on Gallup and, to a degree, Rasmussen. We missed the get-out-the-vote effort. We underestimated the impact of Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie, and I, anyway, could not believe that the "Sluts Vote" campaign mounted by the Democratic Party would work.
Jun '12
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Paul A. Rahe
I, anyway, could not believe that the "Sluts Vote" campaign mounted by the Democratic Party would work. · 1 minute ago
I'm with you on that one, Professor.
I've been following politics since I was in high school (in the early 1980s), and nothing I'd seen or heard in those three decades of watching told me that such a campaign would be successful.
Maybe we both missed something?
Edited on December 2, 2012 at 7:39pmMay '12
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Very fair criticism and I agree with you and consider myself an unabashed supporter of Rick Perry for President.
Gov. Perry was weeks out of very serious back surgery and was cajoled into getting into the race, both of which proved disastrous. Gov. Perry up until 2012 had always been very firm he was not motivated to seek the office, but he agreed to try. No way that works. I think somebody has to want the office so bad they will die for it and Gov. Perry wasn't there.
I think Gov. Perry feels different now and I think he will run again. He is no Mitt Romney and has the record and credibility to prove it.
I would encourage anyone that is looking forward to 2016 to do two things: Read Gov. Perry's book - Fed Up and watch Peter's Uncommon Knowledge interview with Gov. Perry. I think federalism is the conservative way forward.
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Matthew K. Tabor: What I don't understand is how one can openly admit how wrong and how shocked one was when the election results came in, and then tell us how certain one is that A, B and C would have been successful instead.
If an author said, "Remember the last book I wrote? The one where I got everything wrong? Well, me being so abysmally wrong actuallymakes me more of an authority on my next book, which is on the exact same topic," I'd say, "Neat trick," and walk away. · 14 hours ago
When you blunder, the trick is to try to see what it was that you missed. It is not to give up thinking altogether. Or is that what you would prefer?
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Scott Reusser
Paul A. Rahe
Scott Reusser: Prof. Rahe:
Every single Senate candidate who ran to the right of Mitt Romney got a lower share of the vote in his state than did Romney. No exceptions. The couple candidates who got higher shares ran to his left.
This would suggest that our current predicament is considerably more complicated than "run a truer, bluer conservative campaign and then, finally, Americans will embrace us."
Man, how I wish it were that simple. But. It. Isn't. · 2 hours ago
When the guy at the top of the ticket is not articulating the argument, it undercuts those running for lower office who try to do so. · 1 hour ago
So glib! -- but with respect, this is the same sort of casual dismissal of contrary evidence that caused you -- and, blush, me -- to be so blind to the discouraging reality in the last weeks of the election. · 13 hours ago
Not glib, Scott. True. The standard-bearer matters. He is the one with the bully pulpit, and when he does not really believe in the cause those downstream suffer. This is how the Catholic bishops undercut the anti-abortion movement.
Mar '12
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
First, I read every post.
Second, I did vote for Newt in the primaries. I did not ask permission to vote for him, and felt no need to ask for that permission. I still have the impression that Newt was the only Republican who was conservative, had delivered conservative legislative victories, and able to make an argument that would define O for what he is and what he represents. Importantly he would have given everyone who needs a reason to fight for votes to step out. Compare that to Romney's tepid support.
Third, it was the inclusion of a conservative that permitted me to vote for a moderate of questionable moral positions. That is identical to 2008 when the inclusion of a conservative permitted me to vote for an otherwise unpalatable candidate.
Fourth, as a Catholic convert, I am aware of the damage done to the Church by Bernardin and his progeny. I was also aware that white Catholics voted for the R/R ticket, and Hispanic Catholics did not. 50/48 anyone?
Five, several Republicans had addressed illegal immigration in a way not to drive out those votes. Romney is not one of those people.
More?
Apr '11
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
Paul A. Rahe
Scott Reusser
Paul A. Rahe
Scott Reusser: Prof. Rahe:
Every single Senate candidate who ran to the right of Mitt Romney got a lower share of the vote in his state than did Romney. No exceptions. The couple candidates who got higher shares ran to his left.
This would suggest that our current predicament is considerably more complicated than "run a truer, bluer conservative campaign and then, finally, Americans will embrace us."
When the guy at the top of the ticket is not articulating the argument, it undercuts those running for lower office who try to do so. ·
So glib! -- but with respect, this is the same sort of casual dismissal of contrary evidence that caused you -- and, blush, me -- to be so blind to the discouraging reality in the last weeks of the election. ·
Not glib, Scott. True. The standard-bearer matters. He is the one with the bully pulpit, and when he does not really believe in the cause those downstream suffer. This is how the Catholic bishops undercut the anti-abortion movement. ·
Are you saying Romney disagreed with conservative senators on policy, as some Catholic bishops do with pro-lifers? Can you give details?
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
James Of England
I'm very pleasantly surprised to hear this. I recall so many posts of yours recommending the apathy that led to our defeat (either on the grounds that Romney was worthless and we should focus on hindering him or on the grounds that he was dominating) that it means a great deal to me that you did something positive to offset them. What did you do? · 3 hours ago
James, I never wrote any post recommending apathy. During the primary season, I was fiercely critical of Romney and rightly so, as it turns out. Even then, I always insisted that he was superior to the available alternatives.
And when he chose Ryan as his running mate, I was publicly and positively ecstatic on this site -- too much so, as it turned out. I even went out on a limb and suggested that he would win a landslide -- for which I am now being justly roasted. Had I not indulged in wishful thinking, I would have criticized Romney at the time for his acceptance speech.
You might go back and re-read my posts. If anything, I recommended an enthusiasm for your beau ideal that was unjustified.
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
ConservativeWanderer
Paul A. Rahe
I, anyway, could not believe that the "Sluts Vote" campaign mounted by the Democratic Party would work. · 1 minute ago
I'm with you on that one, Professor.
I've been following politics since I was in high school (in the early 1980s), and nothing I'd seen or heard in those three decades of watching told me that such a campaign would be successful.
Maybe we both missed something? · 24 minutes ago
Edited 24 minutes ago
I fear as much. I have something written that I will post today or tomorrow on this very subject.
Re: Mitt Romney's Failure – and Mine
James of England may be right that Romney had this position paper and that one, which one could read if one went looking. What he fails to address is the fact that, when he had the nation's attention, when he gave his acceptance speech, when he had the opportunity to articulate the themes of his campaign, Mitt Romney said nothing of substance. From the convention, quite properly, he got no bounce at all. That is exceedingly telling.
I notice that James is silent on Romney's failure vis-a-vis GOTV and on his willful alienation of Hispanic voters during the primary season. If Romney lost, he seems to be saying, it is because of those of us who, during the primary season, were critical of his record as Governor of Massachusetts. I regard that as a real stretch. The conservatives and, yes, the evangelicals turned out for Romney. His failure in November was his.
Edited on December 2, 2012 at 8:20pm