Posted on 03/30/2012 4:17:44 PM PDT by SoConPubbie
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.
Sorry, that should be ‘if Romney gets selected’, not elected.
Who says it has to be a guy?
Don't think anyone will notice how old these articles you are posting are?
Go a little farther back and you can find articles saying Newt, Santorum, and Romney would not not beat Cain or Perry.
This article states things that were interesting and important back in December when it was written.
Now, not so much.
If there is some way for someone other than Romney to win the GOP nomination I don’t know what it is and this article doesn’t help.
If there is some reason to vote for Obama or not vote at all in November regardless of who is the GOP nominee I don’t know what it is and this article doesn’t help.
Not being a Catholic myself, I can't really speak for them, but I don't see a lot of them voting for Romney either.
Catholics and Evangelicals have been voting for Romney in the primaries. Not all of them but many of them. Like it or don't like it but that is what has happened.
99% of the people on this board know that this is a nonsense suggestion that has absolutely no chance of working.
How did you arrive at the jackass assumption that anyone was promoting that nonsense?...
...well, probably by reading the comments on this thread...
of course, if we were to ‘gold’ our noses for anybody, Mitt would be the one...
How did you arrive at the jackass assumption that anyone was promoting that nonsense?...
...well, probably by reading the comments on this thread...
of course, if we were to ‘gold’ our noses for anybody, Mitt would be the one...
stay vocal, don’t just vote for the “inevitable” .. and we can have Palin rock an open convention!!!...
...sure we can, bud, sure we can...
This progressive republican illness seems to be the RNC problem for many years. Why, I ask, does the RNC have to move to the middle when Obama is the most radically left President in history. No one seems to notice Mitt’s impressive wins in states he will lose in the general. Maine. Massachusetts, Vermont, Michigan, Illnois, are not Republican hotbeds, now are they? MCCain, Dole, BushI, Jerry Ford, all moderate republicans. When asked to tell a funny story about his dad, Mittens recalls how daddy was President of American Motors, and closed a plant in Detroit and moved it to Wisconsin, and was worried how that might affect his chances to be Michigans Governor???? I don’t blame him for being rich, but Obama will kill him on the class warfare issue. With a stacked media, I fear the RNC has sold out once again to the moderates and has rejected his base...because he is NO CONSERVATIVE!
I will not vote for Romney. I hate Obama with every fiber of my being, but I will not vote for Romney. Period...
...and Barack Obama thanks every fiber of your body for your support...
X Romney and the horse he rode in on
Think of our great Country, my FRiend, without Rush, Fox News, Free Republic, a First Amendment, a Second Amendment, a capable defense or a significant military.
These are just some of my fears for an Obama second term.
Romney is not my choice in the primary, but if he wins the GOP nod, I'll support him with all that I have (within legal and ethical boundaries, of course).
It's not as though we would be able to pick up after four more years of Obama and start fresh.
The damage to our system of government and our way of life would be simply too great, I do fear.
.
Some of us are just plain sick and tired of being sold the RINO bill of goods, they DO NOT WIN and we are sick of holding our noses and
pulling the lever for GOP-E because we have no where else to go!! SO
BEHAVE like good little boys and girls and fall in line!!! WELL NOT THIS TIME, NOT NO BUT HELL NO!!!! We have had many wonderful conservative candidates the MSM & GOP-E have ripped to shreds. The
GOP-E have not waved one finger to help defend one of these candidates
or for that matter our patriotic tea party members!!!!! I WILL NEVER VOTE
FOR ROMNEY!!!!! Frankly my dear I just don’t give a damn any longer!!!!
Agreed just really tired of plugging my nose while voting because the RNC refuses to listen to anyone. Between the RNC, Fox news, they have been practically throwing Romney at us while forgeting McCain just 4 years ago, and he was actually a war hero before he spent his career running back and forth between the parties like a rat in a maze.
I will plug again, but how much longer do we have to be ignored by the RNC, who has done their fair share of screwing up this country. Look at the Impact of Senator Lee from Utah. He has been a bulldog since his election. God help us.
...acually, I didn’t make the statement you’re referencing...the poster I was reponding to is whom you should address your remarks to...
Hopefully after he gets the nomination, and focuses on Obama, the new , new, new, Romney will appear and you will be able to hold your nose and vote for him; to keep Obama from appointing Supreme court justices, and Obama turning his present appointees to the highest levels of Government loose and unrestrained for 4 years to further wreck this country. - Tom
Conservatives not automatically voting for the Republican is a foreign concept to the party-line worldview.
Many “conservatives” here and elsewhere have a great deal of maturing to do before they come to grips with the full scope of the GOP establishment’s corruption, including the talking points that keep gullible voters coming back for their rotten liberals over and over again.
If you’ll vote for an avowed progressive because of the letter in front of his name, you’ll vote for anyone.
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