Posted on 11/15/2012 6:34:51 AM PST by Reaganite Republican
“this is not about Adelsons money, this is about Roves influence, which dwarfs Adelsons”
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EXACTLY
Karl Rove doesn’t have near this kind of power. Most of these candidates did themselves in with a good pile on by the media. Rove may have contributed as he could, but he was not the prime instigator.
No, Romney did not give us the best chance to win.
If you get off the conservative boards and start looking around other places (like the comments on newspaper stories), you’ll see a lot of comments like”
“I didn’t think there was that much difference between Obama and Romney, so I just stayed with what I knew and voted Obama.”
That may seem shocking to us here, but consider the typical swing voter. They don’t spend much time gathering information on candidates, their understanding of issues is shallow, they get most of their information from TV commercials, and they make up their mind in the last couple of months.
Romney’s pitch to these voters was “Obama’s doing a bad job, I’ll do better.” Never really explaining why he would do better; he just trusted swing voters to believe he would do better. Meanwhile, Obama painted Romney as a guy that might screw things up again.
Swing voters ended up voting for the devil they knew, instead of taking a risk on the devil they didn’t know. By not explaining why swing voters should vote FOR him (instead of just against Obama) Romney doomed his campaign.
Had we run Newt Gingrich, we wouldn’t have done any worse, but because Gingrich could explain why swing voters should vote FOR him, there would have been a chance to win.
Reagan’s greatest asset was his ability to explain conservative principles so that everyone understood them, and understood how they and the country would benefit from them. That’s the candidate we need to find (and coalesce around) next time. Holding all the right positions isn’t enough, we need someone that can communicate those positions.
The only two GOP candidates in that last election that fit that description would have been Cain or Gingrich. Looking back, we should probably have backed Gingrich.
Eventually we’ll have to stop the historical revisionism and actually deal with the issues that we need to deal with to get back to winning elections.
But for now, these fanciful postings are always entertaining.
One nice thing of the election being over is that most of the site has gone back to acknowledging that Newt Gingrich is no friend of conservatives, or if he is in some ways, he’s a very flawed one.
I’d be surprised to find any serious number of people who think Gingrich would have actually won the election, or done any better than Romney did in losing pretty convincingly.
I certainly don’t think Santorum would have won either, but he would have run a much different campaign at least.
Of course, neither Gingrich nor Santorum would have had any money to compete against Obama, so if nothing else the loss would have been cheaper.
And I don’t see how Santorum had anything to do with Rick Perry’s downfall. I happen to think Rick Perry was the only candidate that actually entered the primary contest who could have won the election, but his failures were his own.
Karl Rove didn’t make Rick Perry into an incoherent babbler in a national debate. And Karl didn’t convince conservatives to make the primaries about Gardasil rather than the economy, or to get into prolonged battles about whether we should try to put a fence in the middle of the Rio Grande. Karl didn’t decide the number one problem facing the country was Texas deciding in 2001 to make money on children of illegals by giving them incentives to attend undercrowded state colleges.
I guess we could blame Karl Rove for Romney, although I think there are a LOT of people we can blame for Romney (I’ve decided to blame everybody who opposed him in 2008, for example. If we had picked him as our nominee back then, either he would have WON, in which case we’d be marginally better off than we are now, or he would have likely LOST, in which case he would have been DONE, and we wouldn’t have had him as our nominee this year).
Actuall, I’m not really “blaming” them, I’m just illustrating how you can use history to assign blame for things.
As I said then, with FL the writing was on the wall: it was going to be Romney. And it was.
Santorum supporters can continue to spin and deny and demagogue all they like but that's the history.
And Ms. I-Am-Not-A-Witch is still the canonical example.
And, tone down the fantasizing about Mrs. Grizzly.
He’s a sneaky moderate. I think he ruined GWB with bad advice. GWB’s natural instincts were much like his mother’s: fight back and speak your mind. But no. Rove put a stop to that. Huge mistake.
The constant whining about the evil machinations of Rove is a serious symptom of denial.
Gingrich wouldn’t have even gotten 40% of the vote. His un-erasable negatives are through the roof. It would have been one of the biggest wipeouts ever, if not the biggest. You and I would have voted for him, but not enough other people would.
There's the money quote. Go Rubio!
Rick Perry lost because of his debate performances. My how quickly we forget. Could have been his back surgery rendered him not really ready to enter at the time. Who knows?
Really, what is the point of rewriting history?
The Bushes were the worst thing to ever happen to the Republican Party, just about all the RINOS out there can be traced back to them.
I can't disagree with you on that.
Yes and no. Rick Perry had a steep learning curve, it’s true. There’s no denying that. However, the “racial epithet” rock came out of no place and got traction in the media due to someone’s intervention.
Also, Perry was the best-funded conservative, so the attacks on his immigration ideas by Bachmann, Santorum, and Romney killed both him and, eventually, Romney.
Without the viciousness of the early attacks, Perry might have recovered once he figured out the ropes in terms of a presidential campaign. And he did figure it out.
Not only did Rove largely handle the backstabbing of Akin, but he piled on with Murdoch, and then he turned around and lost with his own moderate candidates.
In short, he ruined it for everybody. Almost as much as with Dick Morris, it makes you wonder whose side he’s really on.
I don't think you can deny that that was the case, although you may not call it "fantasizing"....I do.
And I plan to disregard the possibility of a Palin candidacy unless and until she says "I am a candidate", and in that case if she's the most conservative candidate in the field I will support her too.
You mean Gingrich would have lost...which is exactly what Romney did.
The difference between the two is that Gingrich had the ability to overcome his negatives with voters, because he could explain to swing voters why they should vote for him.
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