Posted on 07/28/2016 2:13:39 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Via Red State, Romney already said he’d take a look at Johnson in an interview with CNN last month (excerpted in the clip below) but that was hypothetical and qualified by concerns over libertarian support for legal weed. Johnson and Weld are telling you now that things are in motion. Does Romney have anything to lose at this point by going the whole nine yards and endorsing a third-party candidate? He’s already gone eight yards in refusing to back Trump, and he saw what sort of reception Ted Cruz got for the lesser offense of politely avoiding an endorsement. Any Republican bridges that Romney might burn by backing Johnson have probably already been burned. And if anyone has the money and connections to rebuild them later, after hard feelings have softened, it’s Mitt.
The calculus for Romney at this point is simple: What would backing Johnson achieve? It would be a forceful rejection of Trump, of course, but Romney’s already criticized Trump about as forcefully as one can. His feelings about the Republican nominee aren’t in doubt. An endorsement would be a nice one-day headline for Johnson to help raise his name recognition, but any Republican who might be open to hearing Romney out on this has probably already thought through the possibility of voting third-party. If you’re a Republican or a conservative who’s decided that you can’t in good conscience support Trump, you know your choices — Johnson, Hillary, a write-in, or no vote. Romney doesn’t add anything to that. On the contrary, backing Johnson would leave him on the hook if, against all odds, Johnson piles up enough votes to damage Trump in a decisive way somehow this fall. Trump’s fans would spend every day until Election Day laughing in Romney’s face and taunting him that his support for the libertarian hasn’t moved a single voter, which would be more or less true, but if Johnson then surprised everyone with a larger than expected share of the popular vote, Romney would instantly become the GOP’s scapegoat-in-chief, the man who singlehandedly wrecked Republicans’ chances. I don’t know if even Mitt’s dough could unburn those bridges.
The real value to Romney in backing Johnson, I think, would be the personal satisfaction he’d get from supporting a candidate who stands for small(er) government while most of the “true conservatives” who jeered him as a flip-flopping RINO go face-first into the tank for a center-left nationalist authoritarian. And that satisfaction, I’d bet, would be considerable. If he really is done with running for office and feels he can afford to piss off Republicans — until they come crawling to him for donations in 2018, I mean — then why not do it? He’d be making the same basic bet (albeit with much lower career stakes) as Cruz, that in time Trump will come to be seen as anathema within the party. If that happens, the payoff for Cruz will be anointment as the leader of a newly reinvigorated conservative Republican Party. The payoff for Romney will be a political legacy that he was, in the end, more of a principled conservative than nearly all of his harshest right-wing critics. Nothing to lose at this point.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Isn’t HotAir connected to Erik Erickson somehow? I know it’s anti-Trump at least.
Romney actually trying to make himself more irrelevant?
What a loser! LLLLLLLLLLL!
So Romney is going to take a look at someone’s Johnson??!!
Now, that’s a game changer ...LOL
I think Michelle Malkin used to own it, but she sold it.
I’ll set out across the country tonight to find someone that cares about Romney’s endorsement.
I’ll bring food and water enough for three weeks.
I’ll get back to you.
Good. An automatic “death knell” to Johnson...
Three leftist losers. Still, should take more votes from Hillary.
Unreadable, never misses an opportunity to use 50 sentences when one would do. Worst writer on the inter webs.
Ooooooh, you’re BAD.
Oh, you can call me johnny, and you can call me Jim
but DON’T call me Johnson!
“Via Red State...”
Mr. Trump doesn’t need the endorsement
from a dog-abusing, chronically-lying,
grubering, backstabber like the RAT Willard Romney.
This just in! Romney likes Johnson
Hot Air belongs to Salem Media. That should be ‘nuff said.
It’s called “wandering off into the fever swamp”.
Mitt Romney never had all that much faith in the regular party apparatus of the Republicans in the first place, he just used it to leverage himself into a perch from which he could not be dislodged until he had assured the continued presence in the Oval Office of the Current Occupant.
Benghazi was a GIFT he never bothered to glance at, let alone unwrap and expose it for the massive fraud that was being pulled on the American people.
Bong hits for Joseph Smith?
So Johnson will take away Colorado, the pot state from Hillary? Or maybe give Utah to Hillary, that’s it.
If you have to ponder for 10 minutes on whether anybody cares about Romney’s endorsement, then guess what? Nobody really cares. Mitt has made himself a Backstabber Extrodinaire, persona non grata this election cycle. A year ago, who would have ever predicted that Chris Christie would be better thought of by conservatives compared to Mitt?
The GOP-e has lost sight of the fact that life will continue after NOV 2016.
Clearly, they don’t want to be a part of it.
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