*** PING ***
The Santorum folks on here don’t want to hear this, but this is exactly what did happen.
Rick Perry took himself out.
Rove had nothing to do with it.
Good report on Doughnut Boy, RR. We have to neutralize him in future primaries if we ever hope to get a conservative nominee.
As to Rubio, I will never support him as long as he remains an amnesty/open-borders advocate.
I will not support any candidate so stupid that they want us to go along with giving away our own country.
This is beyond stupid. Rove is a convenient idiot to dogpile on but conservatives who supported santorum or newt (and the candidates themselves) and refused to budge shoulder the blame for splitting the vote. If conservatives themselves can’t unite behind a single candidate then how could they amass enough votes to win a presidential election?
I have no problem with putting a bullseye on Rove but recriminations against various primary candidates at this point is just stupid.
And none of the aforementioned will be the nominee in 2016. (You can throw Palin in there, too.) At this point, my guess would be McDonnell, Kasich, or Rubio--maybe Walker or Jindal, possibly Ryan.
These people are master manipulators. They choose who the nominee will be ahead of time then work the donors of the other candidates to make them win.
The Tea Party rose up in 2009 and 2010 and the establishment manipulators went full force in ensuring that the most moderate person they could find would be nominated. The fact that Romnney created Universal Healthcare in MA undermined the Tea Party’s main issue. They made sure Cain and Gingrich were destroyed so Romney could win Iowa, then New Hampshire, then went ballistic on Gingrich in Florida. The powers that be wanted Romney and Romney it was going to be. And their man lost, which was probably also the intent.
A real conservative could have won in a sweep and both parties knew it so they did everything possible and conspired to prevent that from happening.
Excellent job, Reaganite Republican.
Rove and his American Crossroads won’t go away on their own.
We’re going to have to defeat Rove by eliminating his “moderate” candidates by exposing them straight away, before the first primaries.
Like Jim is suggesting, we’re going to have to narrow our choices to three and preferably two, early on and stick with them.
I will no longer watch Fox ad long as Rove is a contributor. Same goes for Dick Morris any of those other shills for the GOP establishment RINO’s. I’ve lost all trust in the GOP.
Rove does more to hurt our cause than help it.
I think that Rove is a good tactician. The problem is that he’s not a strategist. He thinks he is, but he’s a tactician. Rove and the Republican Party’s focus on tactics elected Bush....twice. It also elected Obama....twice. Rove would be good as part of a Republican election team, but not as the leader of a team. I don’t think that his ego will let him subordinate himself to be a team player.
Altho this election was flat out stolen from us, and altho NOTHING will be done by the Stupid Party to go after the filthy bastards that stole it, I personally have had enough of Rove (the “Architect” as Hannity continually calls him . . . and I’ve had enough of Hannity).
This election was stolen with dramatic finesse right out from under our noses, and the powers-to-be in the Repub Party stood there like morons and let it happen.
There was no way we could’ve won this election:
* Airplane crash with hundreds of thousand military ballots gone
* Ballots found in trunks of cars, in warehouses, under desks, in filing cabinets, in graveyards
* Repubs being refused entry into voting precincts by the lawless bastards on the left, and nothing was done about it
* States being prohibited from removing felons and dead people from the rosters
Everything smells to holy high heaven, and the Stupid Party will do nothing.
Karl Rowe = James Carville
Both past their prime talking heads...and both are cockroaches that need to be stumped out!
Weakest field ever in a primary.
This points to my biggest revulsion towards Rove... his going on FoxNews and pretending to be an ‘unbiased’ political analyst while taking massive amounts of money and utilizing his platform to deliberately prop-up or deep-six candidates, according to who fills his wallet.
Of course, this invariably leads to the support of big-moneyed GOP-E Rino candidates of the ruling-class, and the slitting-the-throats of grassroots tea-party types. I despise Rove as much as any sleazoid Dem operative. Maybe even more.
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.
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.
There's the money quote. Go Rubio!