Romneycare - too similar to Obama Care
Bain Capital -easy to exploit as Vulture Capital
UAW opposition especially important in some swing states
Unacceptable to the base especially social conservatives
Inability to articulate the conservative message
Romney won the primary not by crafting a positive vision or explanation, but by running very negative, inflammatory ads of questionable veracity. His claim to fixing the economy was: I ran a successful company and I know what to do.
He allowed Obama to define his plan as the same old policies that got us here to begin with. He allowed Obama to define him in the Swing states as a vulture capitalist, unfriendly to the Auto Industry, and concerned only about avoiding taxes on the 1%.
Given the importance of the economy, he needed to articulate in simple terms what his economic policy would be, why it would work better than Obama, and how it was different from Bush(or at least why Bush's policies were not to blame).
The Pubbies in Congress are partly to blame for allowing the Democrats to get by with laying this blame on Bush for the melt down. They need to take a page from Pelosi.
As soon as the market crashed, she hopped on it like a junk yard dog - this is the fault of Bush's policies. That should have been refuted on a daily basis.
Obama gets by with claiming that rich people like Romney and Buffet only pay Federal taxes based on Capital Gains of 15%; It is actually more like 45%, because his share of the corporate rate is around 30%.
No one explained that the Buffet Rule would not have caused Buffet to pay more taxes: Buffet keeps his individual salary at $100,000 and usually less than $75,000 for director fees.(less than $200,000).
He would still be calculating his rate as less than his secretary, because he assigns the employer part of payroll tax to her, and ignores his share of the corporate tax.
No one in the National leadership ever gets out there and explains effectively the truth or counter the Democrats lies, and Romney didn't do it either.
Sure, he's not an idiot, though I presume on Medicare, he doesn't want to pay the taxes to support it. Though I disagree politically, I wish Jobs had lived a long life, he was a asset to the nation (ours and China), but his salary was $1. He paid 12.5 cents for medicare, Apple matched it. For all his whining about taxes, perhaps Warren would like to pay capital gains taxed on his deductabile donations to his foundation. Don't know the numbers, but simplisticly if Warren donates $1 million, and deducts $1 million, which cost him $1,000, why not pay on the capital gains? Liberals know not just which side their bread is buttered on, but how to butter it.