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7 REASONS WHY MITT ROMNEY'S ELECTABILITY IS A MYTH
TownHall.com ^
| Dec 27, 2011
| John Hawkins
Posted on 12/27/2011 4:34:03 AM PST by Yosemitest
7 Reasons Why Mitt Romney's Electability Is A Myth
Dec 27, 2011. by John Hawkins
Mitt Romney was a moderate governor in Massachusetts with an unimpressive record of governance, who left office with an approval rating in the thirties,
and whose signature achievement was a Hurricane Katrina style disaster for the state.
Since that's the case, it's fair to ask what a Republican who's not conservative
and can't even carry his own state brings to the table for GOP primary voters.
The answer is always the same; Mitt Romney is supposed to be "the most electable" candidate.
This is a baffling argument because many people just seem to assume it's true, despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary.
1) People just don't like Mitt Romney: The entire GOP primary process so far has consisted of Republican voters desperately trying to find an alternative to Mitt Romney.
Doesn't it say something that GOP primary voters have, at one time or another, preferred
Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and now even Ron Paul (In Iowa) to Mitt Romney?
To some people, this is a plus.
They think that if conservatives don't like Mitt Romney, that means moderates will like him.
This misunderstands how the process of attracting independent voters works in a presidential race.While it's true the swayable moderates don't want to support a candidate they view as an extremist,
they also don't just automatically gravitate towards the most "moderate" candidate.
To the contrary, independent voters tend to be moved by the excitement of the candidate's base(See John McCain vs. Barack Obama for an example of how this works).
This is how a very conservative candidate like Ronald Reagan could win landslide victories.
He avoided being labeled an extremist as Goldwater was, yet his supporters were incredibly enthusiastic and moderates responded to it.
Let's be perfectly honest; Mitt Romney excites no one except for Mormons, political consultants, and Jennifer Rubin.
To everybody else, Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama is a "lesser of two evils" election where we'll grudgingly back Mitt
because we won't lose as badly with him in the White House as we would with Obama.
That's not the sort of thing that gets anyone fired up to make phone calls, canvass neighborhoods, or even put up "I heart Mitt" signs in their yards.
2) He's a proven political loser: There's a reason Mitt Romney has been able to say that he's "not career politician."It's because he's not very good at politics.
He lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994.
Although he did win the governorship of Massachussetts in 2002, he did it without cracking 50% of vote.
Worse yet, he left office as the 48th most popular governor in America and would have lost if he had run again in 2006.
Then, to top that off, he failed to capture the GOP nomination in 2008.
This time around, despite having almost every advantage over what many people consider to be a weak field of candidates, Romney is still desperately struggling.
Choosing Romney as the GOP nominee after running up that sort of track record
would be like promoting a first baseman hitting .225 in AAA to the majors.
3) He'll run weak in the Southern States: Barack Obama won North Carolina, Virginia, & Florida in 2008and you can be sure that Obama will be targeting all three of those states again.
This is a problem for Romney because he would certainly be less likely than either Gingrich or Perry to carry any of those states.
Moderate Northern Republicans have consistently performed poorly in the South and Romney won't be any exception.
That was certainly the case in 2008 when both McCain and Huckabee dominated Romney in primaries across the South.
Mitt didn't win a single primary in a Southern state
and although he finished second in Florida, he wasn't even competitive in North Carolina or Virgina.
Since losing any one of those states could be enough to hand the election to Obama in a close race,
Mitt's weakness there is no small matter.
4) All of Mitt's primary advantages disappear in a general election: It's actually amazingthat Mitt Romney isn't lapping the whole field by 50 points because he has every advantage.
Mitt has been running for President longer than the other contenders.
He has more money and a better organization than the other candidates.
The party establishment and inside the beltway media is firmly in his corner.
That's why the other contenders have been absolutely savaged while Romney,
like John McCain before him, has been allowed to skate through the primaries without receiving serious scrutiny.
Yet, every one of those advantages disappears if he becomes the nominee.
Suddenly Obama will be the more experienced candidate in the race for the presidency.
He will also have more money and a better organization than Mitt.
Moreover, in a general election, the establishment and beltway media will be aligned against Romney, not for him.
Suddenly, Romney will go from getting a free pass to being public enemy #1 for the entire mainstream media.
If you took all those advantages away from Romney in the GOP primary, he'd be fighting with Jon Huntsman for last place.
So, what happens when if he's the nominee and suddenly, all the pillars that have barely kept him propped up in SECOND place so far are suddenly removed?
It may not be pretty.
5) Bain Capital: Mitt Romney became rich working for Bain Capital.This has been a plus for Romney in the Republican primaries,
where the grassroots tends to be dominated by people who love capitalism and the free market.
However, in a year when Obama will be running a populist campaign and Occupy Wall Street is demonizing the "1%,"
Mitt Romney will be a TAILOR MADE villain for them.
Did you know that Bain Capital gutted companies and made a lot of money, in part, by putting a lot of poor and middle class Americans out-of-work?
Do you know that Bain Capital got a federal bailout and Mitt Romney made lots of money off of it?
The way the company was rescued was with a federal bailout of $10 million, the ad says.
The rest of us had to absorb the loss
Romney?
He and others made $4 million in this deal.
Mitt Romney: Maybe hes just against government when it helps working men and women.
The facts of the Bain & Co. turnaround are a little more complicated,
but a Boston Globe report from 1994 confirms that Bain saw several million dollars in loans forgiven by the FDIC,
which had taken over Bains failed creditor, the Bank of New England.
Did you know Ted Kennedy beat Romney in 1994 by hammering Mitt relentlessly on his time at Bain Capital?
The ads write themselves.
They show pictures of dilapidated, long since closed factories.
They trot out scruffy looking workers talking about how bad life has been since Mitt Romney crushed their dreams and cost them their jobs.
Then they show a clip of Mitt making his $10,000 bet and posing with money in his clothes.
All Mitt needs is a monocle and a sniveling Waylon Smithers type character to follow him around
shining his shoes to make him into the prototypical bad guy the Democrats are trying to create.
Now, the point of this isn't to say that what Mitt did at Bain Capital was dishonorable. It certainly wasn't.
To the contrary, as a conservative, I find his work in the private sector to be just about the only thing he has going for him.
But, people should realize that in a general election, Mitt's time at Bain Capital will probably end up
being somewhere between a small asset and a large liability, depending on which side does a better job of defining it.
6) The Mormon Factor: This is a sensitive topic, so I am going to handle it much, much more gentlythan Hollywood and the Mainstream Media will if Mitt gets the nomination.
Mormons do believe in Jesus Christ, the Mormon church does a lot of good work,
the one I've met seem to be good people, and two of my best friends are Mormons.
That being said, Mormons are not considered to be a mainstream Christian religion in a large swathes of the country.
There will be protestants who will have deep reservations about voting a Mormon into the White House
because they'll be afraid it will help promote what they believe to be a false religion.
There have also been a number of polls that show that significant numbers of Americans won't vote for a Mormon as President.
Just look at a couple of the more recent polls and consider
how much of an impact this issue could have in a close election.
The poll found 67 percent of Americans want the president to be Christian and 52 percent said they consider Mormons to be Christian.
Twenty-two percent of those polled said they don't think Mormons are Christians and 26 percent are unsure.
"I do believe they are moral people, but again there is a difference between being moral and being saved," Linda Dameron,
an evangelical Republican in Independence, Mo., told the Tribune.
More than 40 percent of Americans would be uncomfortable with a Mormon as president, according to a new survey that also suggests
that as more white evangelical voters have learned White House hopeful Mitt Romney is Mormon, the less they like him.
A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute released late Monday also shows
that nearly half of white evangelical Protestant voters a key demographic in the Republican primary race
dont believe that Mormonism is a Christian faith, and about two-thirds of adults say the LDS faith is somewhat or very different than their own.
You should also keep in mind that if Mitt Romney gets the nomination,
Hollywood and the mainstream media will conduct a vicious, months long hate campaign against the Mormon church.
They will take every opportunity to make Mormons look weird, racist, kooky, scary, and different that they can.
Would this be decisive factor?
I'd like to say no, but by the time all is said and done,
it's very easy to see Romney potentially losing hundreds of thousands of votes across the country because of his religion.
7) He's a flip-flopper. Is it just me ordidn't George Bush beat John Kerry's brains inwith the "flip flopper" charge back in 2004?
So now, just eight years later, the GOP is going to run someone that even our own side agrees is a flip-flopper right out of the gate?
Romney doesn't even handle the charge well.
When Brett Baier at Fox pointed out the obvious, Romney's response was
to get huffy and deny that he was flip flopping, which is kind of like Lady Gaga denying that she likes to get attention.
If Mitt can't even handle run-of-the-mill questions from FOX NEWS about his flip flopping,
what makes anyone think he can deal with the rest of the press in a general election?
There are lot of issues with trying to run a candidate who doesn't seem to have any core principles.
It makes it impossible for his supporters to get excited about him,
because you can't fall in love with a weathervane.
It also makes hard for independents to take anything he says on faith.
Additionally, since politicians tend to be such liars anyway
and you know Romney has no firm beliefs, it's very easy for everyone to assume the worst.
Democrats will assume Romney will be a right wing deathbeast.
Republicans will assume that Romney will screw them over.
Independents won't know what to believe,which will make the hundreds of millions that Obama will spend on attack ads particularly effective.
Ronald Reagan famously said the GOP needed "a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors."
That's particularly relevant when it comes to Mitt Romney,
who has proven to be a pasty, grey pile of formless mush.
TOPICS: Business/Economy; Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Extended News; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: backstabberromney; badgovromney; benedictromney; carpetbaggerromney; dncplantromney; dncwantsromney; establishmentrepub; ineligibleromney; loserromney; rinoromney; romney; romneybigdig; romneycare; romneycoverup; romneydeathpanels; saboteurromney; soroswantsromney; weakromney
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To: Ex-Democrat Dean
I am not voting for Romney either. If worst come to worst - we have a chance at getting a real conservative in there in four years rather than waiting for eight years if Romney gets in there.
It’s not to late - nominate a conservative and we won’t have to re-elect Obama.
21
posted on
12/27/2011 2:19:41 PM PST
by
ClarenceThomasfan
(If Romney is the nominee, say hello to four more years of Obama!)
To: xzins
****Thats not the free market system. Its the insider manipulated market system.****
Beware: From a distance a vulture may appear as an eagle.
22
posted on
12/27/2011 2:51:42 PM PST
by
sodpoodle
( Newt - God has tested him for a reason..)
To: Yosemitest
(Article)
......Mitt Romney, ... has proven to be a pasty, grey pile of formless mush. Well, that's fine, but what do you really think? .... LOL
To: xzins
That’s not “the free market system”. It’s the insider “manipulated market system”. It's the kind of thing Jay Gould used to do ... and Ken Lay .... and both were reviled by the real marketarians of their respective generations.
To: Yosemitest
To: Impy
2)The Mormon thing. Bias against Mormons exists.
Bias against the Mormon church. Plenty of Mormons are good folks, but the Mormon church...
To: Ex-Democrat Dean
"they would vote for Romney to save our country from another four years of Obama.
You have to know that a write in is just another vote for Obama"
You have to know that a vote for Romney is exactly what
"Establishment Republicans" are counting on.
"Establishment Republicans" are the enemy!!!
"Establishment Republicans" ENABLE
Democrats Communists to CONTINUE their march towards
Fabian Socialism.
I refer you back to
post #6 so you can re-read
A Fabian Socialist Dream Come True,
The gradual revolution of the Fabian Socialists is quickly becoming a reality in America.
Let me remind you:
"You Americans are so gullible. No, you wont accept Communism outright.
But we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism
until you finally wake up and realize you already have communism.
We wont have to fight you; well so weaken your economy
that you will fall like over ripe fruit into our hands. "
Nikita Kruschev, Former Soviet Premier
How much longer will you allow these
"Establishment Republicans" that suck our life blood out of "Liberty" to
USE AND ABUSE YOU ?
When will you wake up and smell the coffee, and show these stinking
"Establishment Republicans" that "WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY" ?
Like I've
posted so many times before:
A Tea Partier who refrains from voting for a Republican candidate who shares few if any of his beliefs
can no more be accused of holding out for an ideal candidate
than can someone who refuses to marry a person with whom he has little to anything in common
be accused of holding out for an ideal spouse.
In other words, the object of the argument against purism is the most glaring of straw men:I will not vote for a thoroughly flawed candidate is one thing;
I will only vote for a perfect candidate is something else entirely.
As for the second objection against the Tea Partiers rejection of those Republican candidates who eschew his values and convictions,
it can be dispensed with just as effortlessly as the first.
Every election seasonand at no time more so than this past seasonRepublicans pledge to reform Washington, trim down the federal government, and so forth.
Once, however, they get elected and they conduct themselves with none of the confidence and enthusiasm with which they expressed themselves on the campaign trail,
those who placed them in office are treated to one lecture after the other on the need for compromise and patience.
Well, when the Tea Partiers impatience with establishment Republican candidates intimates a Democratic victory,
he can use this same line of reasoning against his Republican critics.
My dislike for the Democratic Party is second to none, he can insist.
But in order to advance in the long run my conservative or Constitutionalist values, it may be necessary to compromise some in the short term.
For example,
as Glenn Beck once correctly noted in an interview with Katie Couric,
had John McCain been elected in 2008, it is not at all improbable that, in the final analysis,
the country would have been worse off than it is under a President Obama.
McCain would have furthered the countrys leftward drift,
but because this movement would have been slower,
and because McCain is a Republican, it is not likely that the apparent awakening that occurred under Obama would have occurred under McCain.
It may be worth it, the Tea Partier can tell Republicans, for the GOP to lose some elections if it means that conservativesand the countrywill ultimately win.
If he didnt know it before, the Tea Partier now knows that accepting short-term loss in exchange for long-term gain is the essence of compromise, the essence of politics.
Ironically, he can thank the Republican for impressing this so indelibly upon him.
No, I will NOT vote for Romney!!!/font
27
posted on
12/28/2011 2:42:41 AM PST
by
Yosemitest
(It's simple, fight or die!)
To: Yosemitest
This is a baffling argument because many people just seem to assume it's true, despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary.HMMmmm...
Sounds just like MORMONism.
28
posted on
12/28/2011 5:07:51 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Caipirabob; Impy
2)The Mormon thing. Bias against Mormons exists.That's what MORMONism likes to SHOUT; but the BIAS is 'against' the ISM!
MORMONs are the ones DECEIVED by MORMONism!
29
posted on
12/28/2011 5:10:26 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Caipirabob; Impy
2)The Mormon thing. Bias against Mormons exists.That's what MORMONism likes to SHOUT; but the BIAS is 'against' the ISM!
MORMONs are the ones DECEIVED by MORMONism!
As a sixth-generation member of , Romney is descended from a genealogically interconnected sometimes known as the .
30
posted on
12/28/2011 5:11:36 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Lady Lucky
The love don't fit! I'll MAKE it fit!!
31
posted on
12/28/2011 5:13:27 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Attention Surplus Disorder
Beware: From a distance a vulture may appear as an eagle.
32
posted on
12/28/2011 5:18:52 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: af_vet_rr
Plenty of Mormons are good folks, but the Mormon church... HERESY.
33
posted on
12/28/2011 5:19:49 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Elsie
(That didn't come out right)
34
posted on
12/28/2011 5:24:24 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Elsie
Just imagine......McConnell, Boehner and Romney as the leadership of the Party. Somehow, I’m not instilled with the thought that this team could stop the “runaway train” Obama has started.
35
posted on
12/28/2011 5:48:35 AM PST
by
radioone
("2012 can't come soon enough")
To: Impy
36
posted on
12/28/2011 9:11:05 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Elsie
37
posted on
12/28/2011 9:19:04 AM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Elsie
I think being boring could actually be a plus for him electorally speaking. Boring seems safe and steady compared to President O-Hype and other personality driven candidates.
38
posted on
12/29/2011 2:36:55 PM PST
by
Impy
(Don't call me red.)
To: Godzilla; Tennessee Nana; aMorePerfectUnion; caww; SZonian
Meanwhile; back at the Word of Wisdom...
39
posted on
12/29/2011 2:54:24 PM PST
by
Elsie
(Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going)
To: Yosemitest
40
posted on
12/29/2011 4:41:40 PM PST
by
neverdem
(Xin loi minh oi)
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