Exactly. In my opinion, too many conservatives where I live sat on their butts and did very little to help Newt or Rick Santorum and both of those campaigns were literally running on a shoestring budget while Romney’s campaign had a bunch of workers, signs, phone banks, etc. and they won pretty easily. We had so few campaign workers to walk the precincts for Newt and because there was so little money many times we had to call voters on our own cellphones to get them to go out while the Romney machine had dozens of workers walking the pavement and phone banks with voter rolls to get out the vote on primary day. Conservatives can whine about being stuck with the establishment candidate but the plain fact is not enough of us did the grunt and leg work needed to get a conservative the nomination, nor did we give them enough financial support. That’s the bottom line. The Tea Party sprang entirely from grassroots supporters. They bucked the establishment and they were responsible for the big congressional gains of 2010. The GOP establishment is already talking about pushing their guys like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie for the next presidential election. If we’re going to get a conservative nominee in 2016 it’s going to be a grassroots operation and we need to work our butts off so we don’t have another repeat of 2008 and 2012.
“If we’re going to get a conservative nominee in 2016 it’s going to be a grassroots operation and we need to work our butts off so we don’t have another repeat of 2008 and 2012.”
Would also bring the GOP back to the center.
You've said it perfectly!
Karl Rove is out there explaining that Romney would have won if the Democrats hadn't criticized him and depressed the vote. Can you imagine someone feigning surprise that his candidate was criticized by the his opponents?
I guess the lesson is that next time we'll just pick a candidate that the Democrats won't badmouth - maybe Michelle Obama! That'll work!