Excellent analysis! My only disagreement is re Romeny v Obama. What we have witnessed is the typical pattern for the GOP establishment. Namely, to aggressively - even viciously - go after Tea Party conservatives but be timid whimpering puppies when it comes to the general election race against the Dems. Witness McCain: he refused to enter the fray vs Obama, yet was a vicious attack dog in his AZ reelection primary. Same thing will happen this time. In fact, GOP establishment has already telegraphed this - remember a month or 2 ago when the mavens of the stupid party released their advice that Obama should not “be criticized” because he was personally “too popular”!
So, what we’ll have, if Romney prevails, is a NE liberal republican (think Susan Collins with a bank account) who has - in his single only tenure as a government official - a record not too dissimilar from Obama going up against a seasoned, effective, $1B funded Dem political attack machine. I don’t believe that Axelrod et al will have the organizational ineptitude that Newt has shown in responding to Romney’s many deathbed political conversions. They’ll throw up his pro-Abortion, pro-gun control, pro-union, pro-govt-mandated-health care record ad nauseum so that the public will not buy into Mitt’s claims that he’s “changed”. They will effectively and repeatedly remind us that Romney gleefully claimed (as a candidate for MA sen) that he was not supportive of the Reagan-Bush agenda/era, that he had distanced himself from them, and that he considered himself a “progressive”.
So, when Romney tries to run against Obama, what is he going to tout? He cannot claim the mantle of Reagan, conservatives and the Tea Party. Obamacare? How is Romney going to really differentiate his signature program (which he has never criticized or debunked) from O? Sure, he’ll try to split hairs, but Obama’s a much better and vicious campaign opponent than Newt and, with the inherent and enthusiastic support of the MSM, Obama will very easily and successfully convince the American people that Romney’s plan was, in fact, the progenitor of his plan. Therefore, nominating Romney immediately neuters 2 of conservatives’ most significant campaign themes: (1) govt-mandated-and-controlled health care and (2) reintroducing a true Reagan conservative governance philosophy.
Furthermore, there are 2 other Romney vulnerabilities, major areas that simply have not (maybe they really could not effectively) been brought up during this GOP primary. First, consider the overall environment of the last 18 months. The #1 liberal thrust to push their agenda against the mountain of bad governing data over the last 3 years has been the OWS movement. “1% vs 99%” “big banks & Wall St screwing the average American”. In the bowels of the DNC HQ and Obama reelect war room, could the Dems themselves have picked a better candidate to run an OWS-themed campaign against than Romney? $42M in investments from Wall St in just 2 years! Cayman Is and Swiss Bank accounts! Mind you, nothing wrong with these, but - in this climate (in which the OWSers have been elevated to near sainthood by the MSM), Romney is a true target-rich-enviornment!! He and the GOP will spend the entire election season defending his corporate largesse, corporate raiding, “obscene” profiteering, etc. In fact, many (including me) believe that the OWS movement was concocted by Axelrod, the unions, et al with Romney as the eventual GOP opponent in mind. Think about it: they know they can’t run on Obama’s record, so they have created a cultural movement that would be the absolute antithesis of everything the putative GOP nominee would stand for and would greatly enable them to negatively pummel the GOPer for an eventual Obama reelection (which is what they desperately need to cement in the true socialist/Marxist agenda). I noted that, on many occasions this week, Rush brought up just this scenario.
The final area that will be used against Romney in the general is his Mormonism. It won’t be “fair”, but O/Axelrod/Alinsky never play fair - the ends always justify the means. Most Americans know very little about the Mormon church. In the “popular culture” it will be easy fodder for skepticism and ridicule - witness the infamous South Park Mormon episode and the “Book of Mormon” on Bway. The pop-culture mavens of the MSM will only be all too willing to skewer Romney by bringing up questions about the “peculiarities” of his religion. The rumored peculiarities pertaining to the Romney family have already been quietly raised by the MSM. Namely, that his family fled to Mexico in order to establish a polygamy compound and also that they crossed illegally many times from Mexico into the US.
So, we have a candidate in Mitt Romney who has no governmental accomplishments, save those that are decidedly liberal/progressive and certainly cannot give him significant experiential grounds to use against Obama. His candidacy immediately neuters the single issue that drove the Tea Party and the GOP in 2010, namely Obamacare. His governmental record and his public pronouncements when running for office in MA jibe more with the DNC political platform and Axelrod will quickly cement in that fact with the public. They will not allow him to get away with claiming that, since leaving MA office, he’s done a complete 180 on all these critical issues. Romney is perhaps the best caricature of the bogeyman created by the OWS movement and he will be immediately and very easily painted into this picture. And, Axelrod will certainly have Obama’s acolytes in the MSM running piece after piece after piece about Mormonism and the Mormon Romney family history.
All in all, in 2012, I could not think of a single worse candidate for the GOP to put up against Obama than Mitt Romney. And, with no governmental record to run on, with his personal business success becoming the poster child for the OWS dartboard, with his publicly proclaimed past embracing of progressive/liberal programs and philosophies, all Romney could do in an Obama election would be to run heavy negative. Now, this has certainly worked against Newt and the other conservatives. But, he won’t have the MSM supporting his attacks (as they do now against other GOPers) and the GOP poohbahs have already nixed that approach. Guess they don’t call them the “stupid party” for nothing!!
(sorry about the long post, but I had to vent out all my frustrations that have built up in this primary season)
I wasn’t going to read your post because lengthy posts seem to drone-on. However, after reading your post in its entirety, I was left asking, “Who was that Masked Man?”