Posted on 11/08/2012 4:53:04 AM PST by Kaslin
We spent billions of dollars and billions of words on an election to switch from President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House to President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House.
Every election predictor was wrong, except one: Incumbents usually win.
Republicans have taken out a sitting president only once in the last century, and that was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Sadly, Reagan's record remains secure.
The Democrats ran up against the incumbency problem in 2004. The landslide election for Democrats in 2006 suggests that Americans were not thrilled with Republicans around the middle of the last decade. And yet in 2004, President George W. Bush beat John Kerry more handily than Obama edged past Romney this week.
Democratic candidate John Kerry won 8 million more votes than Al Gore did in 2000, and he still couldn't win. All the Democrats' money, media, Bush Derangement Syndrome and even a demoralized conservative base couldn't trump the power of incumbency in 2004.
After supporting Mitt Romney in 2008, some of you may recall, I ran off with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie midway through Obama's first term for precisely that reason: The near-impossibility of beating an incumbent president. Christie seemed like the kind of once-in-a-lifetime star who could pull a Reagan upset against an incumbent president.
But I was wrong. Romney was the perfect candidate, and he was the president this country needed right now. It's less disheartening that a president who wrecked American health care, quadrupled gas prices, added $6 trillion to the national debt and gave us an 8 percent unemployment rate can squeak out re-election than that America will never have Romney as our president.
Indeed, Romney is one of the best presidential candidates the Republicans have ever fielded. Blaming the candidate may be fun, but it's delusional and won't help us avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Part of the reason incumbents win is that they aren't forced to spend half the election year being battered in primaries. Obama started running anti-Romney ads in Ohio before the Republican primaries were even over. Noticeably, Romney's negatives were sky-high in Ohio, but not in demographically similar states like Pennsylvania.
One of Obama's first acts in office was to bail out the auto industry to help him in states he'd need in the upper Midwest, such as Michigan and Ohio. He visited Ohio nearly 50 times, while not visiting lots of other states even once. Obama was working Ohio from the moment he became president. Meanwhile, Romney didn't wrap up the primaries until the end of May.
A little less time beating up our candidate in the primaries so that he could have started campaigning earlier would have helped. In this regard, please remember that no mere House member is ever going to be elected president. Most of them harm their political careers by running. (Where's Thaddeus McCotter these days? Michele Bachmann is fighting for her political life.)
Please stop running. You're distracting us from settling on an actual nominee.
No one can be blamed for the hurricane that took the news off the election, abruptly halting Romney's momentum, but Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock can be blamed on two very specific people: Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.
The last two weeks of the campaign were consumed with discussions of women's "reproductive rights," not because of anything Romney did, but because these two idiots decided to come out against abortion in the case of rape and incest.
After all the hard work intelligent pro-lifers have done in changing the public's mind about a subject the public would rather not think about at all, these purist grandstanders came along and announced insane positions with no practical purpose whatsoever, other than showing off.
While pro-lifers in the trenches have been pushing the abortion positions where 90 percent of the country agrees with us -- such as bans on partial birth abortion, and parental and spousal notification laws -- Akin and Mourdock decided to leap straight to the other end of the spectrum and argue for abortion positions that less than 1 percent of the nation agrees with.
In order to be pro-life badasses, they gave up two easy-win Republican Senate seats.
No law is ever going to require a woman to bear the child of her rapist. Yes, it's every bit as much a life as an unborn child that is not the product of rape. But sentient human beings are capable of drawing gradations along a line.
Just because I need iron to live doesn't mean I have to accept 100,000 milligrams, which will kill me. If we give the guy who passed bad checks a prison furlough, that doesn't mean we have to give one to Willie Horton. I like a tablespoon of sugar in my coffee, but not a pound.
The overwhelming majority of people -- including me -- are going to say the law shouldn't force someone who has been raped to carry the child. On the other hand, abortion should be illegal in most other cases.
Is that so hard for Republicans to say?
Purist conservatives are like idiot hipsters who can't like a band that's popular. They believe that a group with any kind of a following can't be a good band, just as show-off social conservatives consider it a mark of integrity that their candidates -- Akin, Mourdock, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell -- take wildly unpopular positions and lose elections.
It was the same thing with purist libertarian Barry Goldwater, who -- as you will read in my book, "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama" -- nearly destroyed the Republican Party with his pointless pursuit of libertarian perfection in his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I like a band that sells NO albums because it proves they have too much integrity to sell out.
We have a country to save. And just as the laws of elections generally mean the incumbent president wins, they also mean the party out of the White House typically stages a big comeback in midterm elections. BIG. Don't blow it with purist showoffs next time, Republicans.
I gotta disagree about Romney not being willing to go on the attack. He showed no such inhibitions during the primary. I would chalk it up to a flawed strategy of thinking all they had to do was let Obama lose and they would win, along with a deliberate plan by the GOP-E to ignore the grassroots lessons of 2010. I really think they would rather lose without us than win with us - even though many Tea Party groups did try to help out in the end - but the Romney camp refused to co-opt the core Tea Party values that made them attractive to crossovers in 2010.
She’s trying to cover her a** because the bottom line is she pushed a loser.
Half the country voted for Obama because they believed he would insure their Social Security and entitlements they may need for things like Hurricanes and job losses.
The other half of the country voted for Romeny because we need jobs to support ourselves and our families. We are struggling.
Sadly the two are related. What pays for the entitlements? Taxes from people working or jobs.
To some extent people did not vote against Obama or against Romney. One worried about security and the other worried about having money to take care of their families. So sad.
Tho it doesn’t help that voter fraud happened, that the Hurricane hit many East side States (most of electorals e.g. CA is West). East side states that Romney needed votes from. It didn’t help that Obama pushed his people for early voteing whereas post Hurricase votes, absentees and election day votes, were suppressed (by the act of God), that military ballots did not show up until after the election, and we can go on.
Would it make sense that we lie, cheat, and steal for an election? Is having values more important than fighting a war with your opponent? I have no answers. I think things will have to become more bad (hitting rock bottom) before America decides it wants a change to the other party. Unfortunately for many of us. No jobs, no entitlements, and everyone loses.
If I believed in faith I would have loved to see somone like Romney appointed to economic development. Obama’s people do not understand the US economics and how to make things grow. That is the side that he is lacking. Yet we all want a great America. In the real world we work in it is believed that people get together, work together, and make it all happen. Such is life.
Taxing the “very” upper class (250K above includes many struggling small businesses) e.g. large corporations and Hollywood, music moguls etc would help. Bohener wants to look into fixing tax loop holes. That is equivalent without using the formerly dirty words “raising taxes”. But at the same time if government gets more money we need some insurance as to how the money should not be spent too. Money going to foreign countries to grow their economies even tho they did not ask for it (think Brazil), money for bailouts without promises to create jobs or to not lay people off (BofA got bailouts then laid off 40,000 people) should be on the table. The two parties need to make a deal with these in mind — my opinion.
While I agree that O’Donnell was a terrible candidate (she did, however, a great service by knocking off the RINO), she was running in a deep Blue State!
The points Ann makes aren’t relevant. She jumped the shark the day she came out defending Romneycare! Ann has NO CLUE what conservatism is. To her it’s all about GOP power at the expense of our values.
She, Drudge, Rove and the rest of those RINO clowns are NO BETTER THAN THE LEFT in this country. They prefer a slow decay of our society over a fast one. WE prefer to stop it altogether.
Ann and her ilk have successfully blurred the lines between left and right. Fortunately FREE REPUBLIC fights on!
“She is right - the 10/10 voters hoping for a perfect candidate are killing us vs the hoardes of locusts, parasites, and welfare thugs marchin to the polls.”
Romney was beyond “not the perfect candidate.” He was THE WORST POSSIBLE CANDIDATE WE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY ENDED UP WITH.
Who better to denounce Obamacare than the man who invented Romneycare!?!? Who better to rail against tax increases than the man who raised corporate taxes over and over and over again? Who better to fight for the rights of the unborn, to fight for the 2nd amendment, to fight for the sanctity of marriage than a man who has ATTACKED all 3 as governor?!?!?!
Until you people wake up and take a stand against your own party we are destined to continue the downward spiral.
If you’re willing to watch the country go down in flames while comforting yourself with the thought that “at least a republican is running things...” then I don’t know what you tell you.
Romney did stink and in retrospect I think we would have done better w santorum or newt.
And i agree w you - he was the worst possible person to make the case vs o-THUG
We don’t have to change our views on abortion. We just need to be better at hiding our more controversial views the same way democrats do with their stupid ideas.
In other words, when asked about abortion we need to say “it’s up to the states” and be done with it. The media is consciously trying to get something controversial out of tea party candidates. When will we learn?
“Romney did stink and in retrospect I think we would have done better w santorum or newt.”
Oh Newt, what could have been...
I remember Newt promising that he’d follow Obama around the country and attack attack attack! I was so looking forward to that. But we ended up with kid-gloves Romney.
Oh well. We can always just blame the tea party, right Ann?
Actually, compromise of principle is the exact opposite of what any true movement wants to do. Make no mistake, appearing to be a compromiser is the same as compromising.
You have just sent the message that your position is not defendable.
In fact, I’d argue that that movement is strongest which insists on using its most uncompromising language.
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