Written By : John Hawkins Posted on 01/14/2012 2:37:06 PM PST by xzins
Written By : John Hawkins Mitt Romney was a moderate governor in Massachusetts with an unimpressive record of governance. He left office with an approval rating in the thirties and his signature achievement, Romneycare, was a Hurricane Katrina style disaster for the state. Since that’s the case, it’s fair to ask what a Republican who’s not conservative and can’t even carry his own state brings to the table for GOP primary voters. The answer is always the same: Mitt Romney is supposed to be “the most electable” candidate. This is a baffling argument because many people just seem to assume it’s true, despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary.
1) People just don’t like Mitt: The entire GOP primary process so far has consisted of Republican voters desperately trying to find an alternative to Mitt Romney. Doesn’t it say something that GOP primary voters have, at one time or another, preferred Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and now even Ron Paul (In Iowa) to Mitt Romney?
To some people, this is a plus. They think that if conservatives don’t like Mitt Romney, that means moderates will like him. This misunderstands how the process of attracting independent voters works in a presidential race. While it’s true the swayable moderates don’t want to support a candidate they view as an extremist, they also don’t just automatically gravitate towards the most “moderate” candidate. To the contrary, independent voters tend to be moved by the excitement of the candidate’s base (See John McCain vs. Barack Obama for an example of how this works). This is how a very conservative candidate like Ronald Reagan could win landslide victories. He avoided being labeled an extremist as Goldwater was; yet his supporters were incredibly enthusiastic and moderates responded to it.
Let’s be perfectly honest: Mitt Romney excites no one except for Mormons, political consultants, and Jennifer Rubin. To everybody else on the right, Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama would be a “lesser of two evils” election where we’d grudgingly back Mitt because we wouldn’t lose as badly with him in the White House as we would with Obama. That’s not the sort of thing that gets people fired up to make phone calls, canvass neighborhoods, or even put up “I heart Mitt” signs in their yards.
2) He’s a proven political loser: There’s a reason Mitt Romney has been able to say that he’s “not a career politician.” It’s because he’s not very good at politics. He lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994. Although he did win the governorship of Massachusetts in 2002, he did it without cracking 50% of the vote. Worse yet, he left office as the 48th most popular governor in America and would have lost if he had run again in 2006. Then, to top that off, he failed to capture the GOP nomination in 2008. This time around, despite having almost every advantage over what many people consider to be a weak field of candidates, Romney is still desperately struggling. Choosing Romney as the GOP nominee after running up that sort of track record would be like promoting a first baseman hitting .225 in AAA to the majors.
3) Running weak in the southern states: Barack Obama won North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida in 2008 and you can be sure that he will be targeting all three of those states again. This is a problem for Romney because he would be much less likely than either Gingrich or Perry to carry any of those states. Moderate northern Republicans have consistently performed poorly in the south and Romney won’t be any exception. That was certainly the case in 2008 when both McCain and Huckabee dominated Romney in primaries across the south. Mitt didn’t win a single primary in a southern state and although he finished second in Florida, he wasn’t even competitive in North Carolina or Virginia. Since losing any one of those states could be enough to hand the election to Obama in a close race, Mitt’s weakness there is no small matter.
4) His advantages disappear in a general election: It’s actually amazing that Mitt Romney isn’t lapping the whole field by 50 points because he has every advantage. Mitt has been running for President longer than the other contenders. He has more money and a better organization than the other candidates. The party establishment and inside the beltway media are firmly in his corner. That’s why the other nominees have been absolutely savaged while Romney, like John McCain before him, has been allowed to skate through the primaries without receiving serious scrutiny.
Yet, every one of those advantages disappears if he becomes the nominee. Suddenly Obama will be the more experienced candidate in the race for the presidency. He will also have more money and a better organization than Mitt. Moreover, in a general election, the establishment and beltway media will be aligned against Romney, not for him. Suddenly, Romney will go from getting a free pass to being public enemy #1 for the entire mainstream media.
If you took all those advantages away from Romney in the GOP primary, he’d be fighting with Jon Huntsman to stay out of last place. So, what happens when he’s the nominee and suddenly, all the pillars that have barely kept him propped up in SECOND place so far are suddenly removed? It may not be pretty.
5) Bain Capital: Mitt Romney became rich working for Bain Capital. This has been a plus for Romney in the Republican primaries where the grassroots tend to be dominated by people who love capitalism and the free market. However, in a year when Obama will be running a populist campaign and Occupy Wall Street is demonizing the “1%,” Mitt Romney will be a TAILOR MADE villain for them. Did you know that Bain Capital gutted companies and made a lot of money, in part, by laying off a lot of poor and middle class Americans? Do you know that Bain Capital got a federal bailout and Mitt Romney made lots of money off of it?
“The way the company was rescued was with a federal bailout of $10 million,” the ad says. “The rest of us had to absorb the loss … Romney? He and others made $4 million in this deal. … Mitt Romney: Maybe he’s just against government when it helps working men and women.”
The facts of the Bain & Co. turnaround are a little more complicated, but a Boston Globe report from 1994 confirms that Bain saw several million dollars in loans forgiven by the FDIC, which had taken over Bain’s failed creditor, the Bank of New England.
Did you know Ted Kennedy beat Romney in 1994 by hammering Mitt relentlessly on his time at Bain Capital? No wonder. The ads write themselves.
Imagine pictures of dilapidated, long since closed factories. They trot out scruffy looking workers talking about how bad life has been since Mitt Romney crushed their dreams and cost them their jobs. Then they show a clip of Mitt making his $10,000 bet and posing with money in his clothes. All Mitt needs is a monocle and a sniveling Waylon Smithers type character to follow him around shining his shoes to make him into the prototypical bad guy the Democrats are trying to create.
Now, the point of this isn’t to say that what Mitt did at Bain Capital was dishonorable. It certainly wasn’t. To the contrary, as a conservative, I find his work in the private sector to be just about the only thing he has going for him. But, people should realize that in a general election, Mitt’s time at Bain Capital will probably end up being somewhere between a small asset and a large liability, depending on which side does a better job of defining it.
6) The Mormon Factor: This is a sensitive topic; so I am going to handle it much, much more gently than Hollywood and the mainstream media will if Mitt gets the nomination. Mormons do believe in Jesus Christ, the Mormon Church does a lot of good work, the ones I’ve met seem to be good people, and two of my best friends are Mormons. That being said, Mormons are not considered to be a mainstream Christian religion in large swathes of the country. There will be Protestants who will have deep reservations about voting a Mormon into the White House because they’ll be afraid it will help promote what they believe to be a false religion. There have also been a number of polls that show that significant numbers of Americans won’t vote for a Mormon as President.
Just look at a couple of the more recent polls and consider how much of an impact this issue could have in a close election.
The poll found 67 percent of Americans want the president to be Christian and 52 percent said they consider Mormons to be Christian. Twenty-two percent of those polled said they don’t think Mormons are Christians and 26 percent are unsure.
“I do believe they are moral people, but again there is a difference between being moral and being saved,” Linda Dameron, an evangelical Republican in Independence, Mo., told the Tribune.
More than 40 percent of Americans would be uncomfortable with a Mormon as president, according to a new survey that also suggests that as more white evangelical voters have learned White House hopeful Mitt Romney is Mormon, the less they like him.
A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute released late Monday also shows that nearly half of white evangelical Protestant voters — a key demographic in the Republican primary race — don’t believe that Mormonism is a Christian faith, and about two-thirds of adults say the LDS faith is somewhat or very different than their own.
You should also keep in mind that if Mitt Romney gets the nomination, Hollywood and the mainstream media will conduct a vicious, months’ long hate campaign against the Mormon Church. They will take every opportunity to make Mormons look weird, racist, kooky, scary, and different. Would this be a decisive factor? I’d like to say no, but by the time all is said and done, it’s very easy to see Romney potentially losing hundreds of thousands of votes across the country because of his religion.
7) He’s a flip-flopper. Maybe my memory is failing me, but didn’t George Bush beat John Kerry’s brains in with the “flip flopper” charge back in 2004? So now, just eight years later, the GOP is going to run someone that even our own side agrees is a flip-flopper right out of the gate? Romney doesn’t even handle the charge well. When Brett Baier at Fox pointed out the obvious, Romney’s response was to get huffy and deny that he was flip flopping, which is kind of like Lady Gaga denying that she likes to get attention. If Mitt can’t even handle run-of-the-mill questions from FOX NEWS about his flip flopping, what makes anyone think he can deal with the rest of the press in a general election?
There are a lot of issues with trying to run a candidate who doesn’t seem to have any core principles. It makes it impossible for his supporters to get excited about him because you can’t fall in love with a weathervane. Even worse, since politicians tend to be such liars anyway and you know Romney has no firm beliefs, it’s very easy for everyone to assume the worst. Democrats will feel that Romney will be a right wing death-beast. Republicans will think that Romney will screw them over. Independents won’t know what to believe, which will make the hundreds of millions that Obama will spend on attack ads particularly effective. Ronald Reagan famously said the GOP needed “a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors.” That’s particularly relevant when it comes to Mitt Romney who has proven to be a pasty grey pile of formless mush.
Out of the thousands of "experts" out there, this article is the absolute, defining opinion on Romney's electibility? I'm impressed......
Imagine a campaign with Obama having a billion of his own money, not counting super-PAC money or free airtime by the media in myriad kinds of ways.
Now imagine those above 7 points in their hands.
Yes, it is defining.
Ad-MITT Romney will lose!
Sorry it’s completely true. Fraud is always a factor (it was why Reid “beat” Ensign in 1998) but if it was the be all end all then Republicans would never win. The race didn’t even end up that close, almost a 6 point loss. And notice how Reid’s bouncing baby boy was crushed in the gubernatorial election despite being on the same ballot, Reid Jr. even lost Clark county.
Angle is a flake and poor campaigner, witness her behavior in 2006 after losing a US House primary (most freepers myself included backed her in that election), she demanded a revote, not a recount, a revote.
And then in 2008 she was unable to defeat a despicable RINO State Senator.
Come 2010 she won the primary by crowning herself Queen of the Tea Party.
I maintain, Sue Lowden or Danny Tarkanian would have beaten Reid.
Hawkins was also a vocal and written supporter of Duncan Hunter and we all know how well that went.........
He's just another "expert" in the long line of experts being paid to give their opinions and I don't give credence to any of them.
The public will decide this spring and whoever they decide on will likely defeat Obama............
That's just my unpaid opinion since I'm not a paid expert......
As a side note, I'm not trashing any of them since whoever is elected is going to get my vote in November......
I don’t think the expert status impressed me with Hawkins. If he support Hunter, then more power to him. Duncan is a real conservative in my book.
However, that is irrelevant in terms of the article.
Hawkins points out 7 weaknesses of Romney. They are real. They will be used against him.
As for me, I am a conservative and not a Republican. Romney is not a conservative. I will oppose him in both primary and general. I will do my darnest to turn my precinct (at least) here in Ohio against him and Obama both.
He’s just another liberal.
Since Ohio is a “swing state” maybe my precinct is important. Who knows?
Fraud is a very big factor.
I’ve met Angle, she makes you look like Forrest Gump.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
“There were several Mormon freepers purged from FR, but they were outspoken Romneybots and FR has made it clear that people who constantly pimp Romney are not welcome here. Their faith has nothing to do with it.”
I stopped reading your post at that point because what you said there is NOT TRUE. There were Mormon FReepers who were banned simply because they were Mormons, with Jim Robinson’s blessing. Mormons are trashed every day on this site. It’s sad but true. Had to point out your mistake.
I agree with most everything you wrote in your post, but must disagree about the 1928 elections. Sure, Hoover would have won easily even had the Democrats had nominated a Protestant, but Smith being Catholic was a great boon to Hoover in most states. For example, not only did Hoover carry TX, FL and NC (which cannot be explained merely by pointing out that the economy had been good over the prior 8 years), but he got 48% in über-Democrat Alabama.
But if it was the be all end all then Republicans would never win any election.
A 6 point margin can’t be blamed on just fraud. Nope. How did Feingold lose? Fraud is just as big in Wisconsin as it is in Nevada. How did Rory Reid get slaughtered and democrat congresswoman Dina Titus lose on the same ballot as Harry Reid?
Sorry editor-surveyor to diss your apparent home girl but 100% of election watching freepers I know agree that Angle was bad candidate and blew it. That you met her and were impressed is immaterial, I’m sure Christine O’Donnell impressed a few people too.
No, that is Republican echo-chamber delusional talk.
Sharon Angle was a severely flawed candidate who lost an un-loseable race
She said on camera something like: “The unemployed are soft on unemployment comp and not taking the available jobs”. In the state that had the highest unemployment in the nation you don't tell voters that you need support from that they are lazy.
A few days before the election Angle was in a public school on camera and some Hispanic kid asked her a question about her immigration proposals and Hispanics and she replied : “I didn't think you were hispanic, I thought you were Asians”
My sister and her husband live in NV and they hate Reid and liberals but they told me they were too ashamed to tell anyone there they voted for Angle. The talk around town was that she was a complete nutbag.
As Impy said: Sue Lowden would have beaten Reid and been a fine Senator..If the Angles are the best we have to offer we might as well quit politics now and just form a cult.
Well Sanudra, you’re still here and everyone knows you’re a Mormon. You make no attempt to hide it and are open about your faith. Why did FR choose to ban other people “simply for being Mormon” but not you?
The Dems post-civil war iron grip on the south was loosening by the 1920s and the GOP had made inroads in the south before. For example, Warren Harding carried Missouri, Tennessee, and Oklahoma -- all traditionally southern Democrat states -- in 1920. Clear they weren't voting against Democrat Cox in that election due to "anti-Catholic bigotry". He was a protestant RAT.
>> but he got 48% in über-Democrat Alabama. <<
Barry Goldwater could make an even better claim than that. He got an astonishing 69% of the vote in "über-Democrat Alabama", and in 1964 it was still indeed a one party Democrat state in virutally all local, state, and federal elections. And his opponent was a southern Democrat. Yet the southern Dems in that state voted GOP. I doubt it because of religious bigotry against LBJ, a good protestant RAT.
Also, Alabama is nearly 30% black and blacks were almost 100% Republican in the pre-FDR era. It's not hard to figure where most of Hoover's voters were coming from in 1928 Alabama and they weren't from anti-Catholic bigots. Coalition of black voters and sane white southerners who didn't care about the civil war. By contrast, the KKK, like most the bigoted WASPs in the state, was solidly RAT and would simply vote for another RAT (preferably "uncommitted" or a local segregationist RAT favorite) if they REALLY couldn't stand the RAT the party put up nationally (hence "unpledged Democrat electors" beat pro-civil rights New England Catholic JFK in Mississippi in 1960, with Nixon only getting 24%) . Under no circumstances would be they be willing to pull the level for a Republican. Moderate southerners might occassionally be convinced to vote GOP, the hard-core bigots and segregationists certainly wouldn't. The claim that all the WASP bigots "switched sides" and joined the GOP is one of the media's biggest lies. Aside from Strom Thurmond, most of them remained yellow dog Dem to their dying days.
I'm a Catholic and I'm simply not going to buy the media spin that the RATs got "merely" 70% of the votes down there than their usual 80% because of "anti-Catholic bigotry". If so many southerners were vehemently anti-Catholic, the election results would have been reversed and Protestant Hoover would have swept the bible belt states with only a few southern states have more mixed religious demographics -- like Texas and Florida -- voting for the Catholic Cox.
Bottom line is voters nationwide were enormously happy with the Republicans in power and even a few moderate southern Dems wanted to maintain that because money in their pocketbooks was the biggest issue, so they were persuaded to vote GOP. As a result, the GOP did SLIGHTLY better in the "solid south" than usual, and even won a southern state or too, as Harding had been in the aftermath of Woodrow Wilson and WWI in 1920 when southern voters were also leery of RATs. There's nothing insidious about it. Even quite a few Catholics were holding elective office in the "anti-Catholic" south back then.
KY, TN and MO (and to a lesser extent, OK and NC) had deep pockets of pro-Union Republicanism that made them competitive in presidential elections until 1932. AL did not, apart from Winston County, and it voted heavily Democrat in every presidential election after the end of Reconstruction until 1960 (when most of its Democrat presidential electors selected by voters in the Democrat primary were unpledged, and lTer voted for segregationist Harry Byrd over JFK; and in 1964. LBJ’s support for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act convinced nearly allwhite Alabamians to vote for Goldwater (which eventually led to the state becoming rock-ribbed Republican in presidential elections).
In the three presidential elections prior to 1928, the GOP candidate got 21.92%, 31.37% and 27.01%, the latter two in the midst of national landslides for Harding and Hoover. In FDR’s first three elections, the GOP candidate got below 15% each time. You may think it’s a coincidence that Hoover got 48.49% in AL in 1928, a huge increase from prior GOP efforts in the state, when the Democrats happened to elect a Catholic, but it seems odd that Alabamians suddenly became Republicans and promptly forgot about it and went back to being Democrats unless there was something particularly objectionable in their eyes about Al Smith.
I would be willing to wager two things about the 1928 elections in AL: that blacks comprised less than the 30% of votes that you claim, and that Hoover did far worse in heavily Catholic Mobile than in the Protestant rest of the state.
>> “ I’m sure Christine O’Donnell impressed a few people too.” <<
.
You’ve shown yourself for what you are with that comment, about three notches below Karl Rove.
While I agree that, in retrospect, Lowden would have been a better bet, we should not deny that the unions were an important factor. I even read posts by some NRA freepers defending Reid.
Angle might have survived the "I thought you were asians" remark, (although it was a dumb thing for a politician to say), but insulting the unemployed made her the GOP's Martha Coakley (Rick Perry also comes to mind) WRT foot-in-mouth remarks. I rather have Perry replacing Obama and Angle replacing Reid, but they would have to be elected to do that, and we should expect the media to pounce on GOP gaffes.
>>>You, too, better do some praying.<<<
Normally I’d end my post with the words, “God help us.” It’s all I’ve got here.
Yes, I simplified it a bit with a couple examples of Angles difficult to defend on camera behavior.
You are right, the unions came out in full force to get out the Hispanic vote for Reid. Hispanics were not happy with Reid given their unemployment of about 50% in NV, but three things worked out for Reid:
1) Angles immigration video included 2 or 3 actors posing as illegals(young Hispanics), Democrats played that up as an attack on all Hispanics.
2) Some organization ran commercials attacking Reid from the left. That might have worked but they made the mistake of specifically telling hispanics to not vote in protest.(they should have left that conclusion implied.) Democrats raised a stink about that.
3) In response to #1 Angle told the Hispanic child “I thought you were Asians” shooting her campaign in the foot, much like Newt did with the press on AF1 in late 1995 complaining about the bad seat, That was the final kiss of death,
In a state like NV Republicans need an effective strategy to make it hard for Democrats to rally Hispanics against them, again Reid was not popular there. But the Angle campaign seemed completely unprepared.
Bingo, you see...
It's NOT always this simple as the following, but many times I watch MSNBC and watch Democrats plotting their attacks there then I see Republicans just walk into the traps as if they are blind. It's like being a little kid watching a scary movie yelling “Get out of there... cant you see ?...Go...” except I am thinking of counter arguments that Republicans never think of using that Democrats won't expect, But No! Republicans will continue to repeat failed over-used lines.
A year ago Obama and Dems really stepped up the Demands for taxes on the rich and that combined with proposed cuts by Republicans Dems were able to put them on the defensive. So I kept telling Republicans to throw it in Democrats faces that Obama and Democrats refused to raise taxes when they had complete power 2009 to 2010, then after losing the House Dems demand that Republicans do what they refused to do when they were in power. If tax increase ‘the rich’ is such a good idea, keep asking them why Obama didn't do it. They cannot answer. But Republicans are programed for failure.
I actually try these arguments (in the form of questions) on Democrats here when they repeat the standard points to me and they are stopped in their tracks. They don't expect it.
If I said "Low taxes on the rich help us all" they would give me 100 arguments why they think that has been disproved.
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