Romney,
McCain
Dole
Bush I
Dewey
ALL deserved to lose. The GOP establishment likes candidates like them, who have no vision and stand for little.
Heck, Romney chose “Believe in America” as his campaign theme. Obama could have chosen that. Most of the rest of Romney’s campaign had cutting edge messages, like “I’ll create more jobs.” “The President is a good man who tried, but didn’t get it done” “There should be fish in the rivers” “Your future is ahead of you” [oh, wait, the last two were Dewey].
Reagan ran on important themes. Romney tried not to make mistakes or offend anyone by not taking risks.
Reagan stood for things. Romney wanted to be POTUS.
I take no delight in Zero winning, but Romney didn’t deserve to win with such a lousy campaign - conducted by people HE chose and supported.
You don’t win on a platform of “Vote For Me, Because I Suck Less Than the Other Guy.”
Anyone can cherry pick weak places to criticize. Mitt needed to put more energy into his strong places. Sure, Barack could have said “believe in America” too, but it was clear to anyone who bothered to listen for a while that the kind of America that ought to be believed in differed between the two.
ALL deserved to lose. The GOP establishment likes candidates like them, who have no vision and stand for little.
You can add the 1960 version of Nixon, who completely snubbed the the rapidly growing conservative faction of the GOP. In 1968, he learned his lesson and won the presidency by pretending to be a conservative.