Free Republic

In 1980, George H.W. Bush was making much the same argument against Ronald Reagan that Mitt Romney is making this year. Bush argued that he was the most electable against hapless Jimmy Carter. The big money Republican establishment was behind Bush because they feared that Reagan was too radical to win, and would carry the entire party down to historic defeat, like Goldwater did. Reagan even lost Iowa to Bush on that argument. But Reagan carried forward the pro-growth economic message that ultimately swept him to the nomination, and then to landslide victory in the fall, his coattails handing the...

Are you sick and tired yet of hearing about Mitt Romney being the "most electable" candidate? I am. Lately, via the media and our own RNC elites, we have been fed this constant drivel about the electability of Mitt Romney. The same tired story goes that, because Romney was the centrist Republican governor of a blue state, he has the widest voter appeal, and thus the best chance to win in a general election. This is a bad joke. Now, I'm no beltway "expert." However, I've had the opportunity to work on campaigns ranging from U.S. Senate down to City...

If Texas Gov. Rick Perry isn’t the un-Romney that the Republican base craves, who, oh who, will it be? If Perry cedes the un-Romney label – and the nomination – you can carbon-date the moment when his campaign’s decomposition began: Sept. 22, 2011, between 9-11 p.m. EDT. That’s when the Texas governor stumbled through one of the worst debate performances in memory. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol called Perry’s flubs close to “disqualifying.” Red State blogger Erick Erickson said he was a “train wreck.” The New York Post’s John Podhoretz deemed Perry’s performance: “Awful. Just awful.” Brit Hume of Fox...