Posted on 11/13/2012 2:14:59 AM PST by Fred
Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment— nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have.
The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman. Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting specifics. Since then, there have been many re-runs of this same scenario, featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and, when he ran for reelection, George H.W. Bush.
Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another Ronald Reagan ("Read my lips, no new taxes"), but then lost when he ran for reelection as himself— "kinder and gentler," disdainful of "the vision thing" and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been counter-attacking against the foolish things being said.
This year, Barack Obama had the hard-hitting specifics— such as ending "tax cuts for the rich" who should pay "their fair share," government "investing" in "the industries of the future" and the like. He had a coherent vision, however warped.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
The author makes a good point - political right seems very often to put up Martin Milquetoast for election, when they should be fielding savvy, articulate, hard-headed and hard-hitting candidates.
I, personally, don’t know why this is true, but with America drifting inexorably and seemingly irresistably ever Leftward, one wonders at this point whether real conservatism, bedrock conservatism, can ever rise again.
Oh No!! Say it aint so !!! I really liked Romney—and I am a right winger. Maybe it was because he was sooo much better that Zero. I can’t believe he lost. I didn’t like everything about him, but he was a few steps in the right direction.
It is always who is next in line, deserving of the honor. Loud mouth Gov. Sununu, NH is part of the problem in my state, [NH] along with a list of others. Sununu has not shown his face since the elections
I think the Republican candidates speak in generalities because they are caught in a quandry: if they state specific conservative goals which they cannot meet, the conservative electorate will be disappointed. Then again, some of the conservative goals, like downsizing government, gives a large sector of business the willies!
Damned if they do - damned if they don’t!
Very few.
Here in MA, I have watched three Republicans fail - one at the state level and Brown and Romney nationally - because they wanted to play nice.
BTW - he was chief of staff for Bush Sr. , he is the fool that talked Bush into raising taxes and going along with the dems.. Because of violating his famous ‘read my lips’ comment, he was picked off by Bubba Clinton in 1992. (with Perot nutjob giving him a big push)
In the face of the impending calamity of an Obama reelection, a take-no-prisoners fighter was the only logical option.
From the article:
Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on election day in 2012.
It was not a time for half measures.
Romney did not have the voting record to back it up either, made it difficult to etch-a-sketch
He was also, incidentally, the fool that talked Bush into putting Souter on the court over Ken Starr and Edith Jones....
I voted for Romney reluctantly.
He was a self-avowed Progressive, a national socialist. When Anne Romney stated that the only friends her family had in Massachusetts were Liberals, I knew it was an impossible situation.
The best determination of what a politician will do if elected is what he did after being elected in the past. Romney was no conservative though I came to believe he was a nice guy with basically conservative family-oriented principles who passionately believed in compromise and consensus, which is always a losing situation for rock-ribbed Conservatives.
The Republican Party cannot win nationally by compromising our principles and pretending to be liberal Democrats.
A significant part of the problem is the collection of States with early primaries that let anyone from any party vote in the Republican primaries.
That needs to be stopped.
Let’s don’t excuse either Bush president for their policies and the damage they did to the Republic. The advisors they were listening to they appointed. It was their job to sift through the advice and make the right decision. They must held accountable for their decisions.
Pappy Bush turned his back on conservatives and did what he could to undermine what Reagan accomplished. Higher taxes, bailout of the S&L’s, loose border enforcement, NAFTA, Souter Supreme Court appointment, and putting China on the path to gutting the US manufacturing base were some of his accomplishments. Boy George the son couldn’t find his veto pen, blinked when China downed and captured a US spy plane early in his administration, tried to appoint Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court (Souter II), irresponsibly allowed the national debt to double after inheriting a balanced budget, set us on the road to a police state by establishing the Department of Homeland security and getting the Patriot Act passed, continued loose immigration and supported amnesty, added an unfunded, Medicare prescription drug program, exploded education spending at the federal level, turned over management of the finacial crisis of 2008 to ex Goldman CEO Paulson who bailed out the banks at the expense of the middle class taxpayer, began the federal auto bailout Obama finished, passed TARP, and never defend himself when attacked by the Dems.
Pappy set the stage for Clinton and Boy George paved the road for Obama. Now we are hearing noises about running Jeb in 2016. When future historians write about the fall of the American Republic, the Bush family should figure prominently.
“The Republican Party cannot win nationally by compromising our principles and pretending to be liberal Democrats.”
AND those principles need to be articulated clearly and concisely, not in long essays that a “sound byte” culture won’t take the time to read!
We need a passionate visionary who does not back down. Not even many people on the right take notice of the flimsy soft republicans. We’ve simply reached a point in history where Americans are feeling passionately about our desire not to be destroyed. Weakness doesn’t touch a heart afire.
This is where the Romney campaign really found itself in a difficult position. Obama spent the entire campaign criticizing the "Bush tax cuts for the rich." Meanwhile, an objective look at the facts will show that those tax cuts remained in place throughout Obama's entire first term in office. For that matter, Obama has been "complaining" about them since he arrived in Washington as a U.S. Senator in 2005 -- seven years ago.
Something tells me we're never going to see the end of "the Bush tax cuts."
I dream nightly about a country with Thomas Sowell as President.
My theory on this is that Republicans who are "savvy, articulate, hard-headed and hard-hitting candidates" are likely to be very successful in other walks of life and have no interest in taking on a job in Washington dealing with so many misfits and losers.
This is why it's made very clear in Plato's Republic that the ideal "philosopher king" is someone who has to be apprehended against his will to serve in that role. Socrates and Plato rightly concluded that anyone who wants the job should automatically be disqualified from ever holding it.
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