Posted on 09/18/2012 1:26:50 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
One of Romney’s great skills is the ability to turn around failing enterprises. He did it with private firms while he ran Bain Capital, he did it for an indebted Massachusetts, and he did it for the Olympics. He needs to do it for his campaign now.
Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, attempted to soothe worried Republicans last week by stressing that the race remains extremely close. But the fact that Romney’s pollster isn’t worried is itself worrying. By rights, Romney should be ten points ahead. His campaign seems to think the bad economy will automatically win this race for the Republican.
It isn’t as if voters are unaware that the economy stinks. Yet the morning after the Democratic convention, the dismal jobs report did not prevent Democrats from getting a bigger bounce than Republicans had received. Reflect that three and a half years of miserably high unemployment, slow growth, increasing poverty, falling labor-force participation, record-setting food-stamp dependence, and an average 5 percent decline in household income has not persuaded most voters to support Mitt Romney.
On the contrary, the Gallup job-approval rating for Obama topped 50 percent after the jobs report for the first time since 2010. Job approval tends to be a good predictor of an incumbent’s share of the vote. By contrast, George H. W. Bush, the last incumbent to lose reelection, stood at 39 percent approval at this stage in 1992. And Bush’s economy wasn’t nearly as dismal.
The Romney campaign has failed to make the case that Obama is responsible for the economy, whereas Clinton/Obama have made a spurious but perhaps effective argument that Republicans got us “into this mess” and will pursue policies that will be no better and may be worse. The Democrats argue that Republicans want only to help their rich friends, not the middle class.
Romney needs an aggressive and bold response. After shooting down the lie that he and Ryan plan to increase taxes, he might begin by explaining how the 2008 financial crisis came about — namely that both parties, but mostly the Democrats, insisted that banks give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. As Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, 74 percent of the bad loans were on the books of Fannie, Freddie and other quasi-government entities. When the crash came, it nearly sank our entire banking system. Voters may believe that Republicans favor the rich. But they also believe that Democrats are the party of giveaways. It was the Democrats’ insistence on forcing private banks to make unsound loans that led to collapse.
Second, though Obama ridicules tax cuts, they have been responsible for bursts of economic growth every time they’ve been enacted. They worked for Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and, yes, even for George W. Bush. The economy created 8 million jobs under Bush, and the unemployment rate averaged 5.3 percent. By contrast, there is no example of a nation or a state spending itself into prosperity. If that were possible, Greece would be lending Germany money, California would be in the black, and Illinois would be a jobs hub.
Third, the signature policies of the Obama term, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, combined with uncertainty about what Washington will do, are crushing the private sector. The Economist has dubbed the 2,300-page financial-regulation behemoth “Dodd-Frankenstein” because it vests so much unreviewable authority in bureaucrats and drowns financial and other institutions in red tape. “Only 93 of the 400 rule-making requirements” had been completed as of February of this year, the magazine noted, two years after the bill’s passage.
After Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, private-sector job creation, which had been growing, slumped. A Chamber of Commerce survey found that 73 percent of employers cited Obamacare as an obstacle to hiring new workers. Not only does the law impose billions in new taxes and mandates, but, like Dodd-Frank, it vests so much authority in the federal bureaucracy that employers have no idea what to expect and cannot plan. Even if an employer were able to wade through the bill’s 2,700 pages, he would still emerge confused as to what the law demands. Obamacare creates 159 new agencies, bureaus, and boards, and has generated 12,000 pages of regulations — so far. It does include new hiring though — thousands of new IRS employees.
Obama is failing because his policies are wrongheaded and destructive. Uncertainty has kept capital on the sidelines. Obama has frozen employers into a defensive crouch. That is the case Romney has not yet made.
Who is going to be the candidate in 2016 or 2020 (depending if Romney wins). Well let’s see. Nobody on Free Republic liked Romney at all until he became the Savior to fickle Romney people. So it would not surprise me if the Republican party nominates Mayor Bloomberg as our next nominee and watch the FREEPERS get all supportive of him like they did Romney who “supposedly” they couldn’t stand just a short few months ago. Some have ZERO principles at all.
You know where to send any/all evidence in support of that claim, son.
Whenever you've got the time.
I would fully agree with you except for one small but important point. The msm will not cover him and when they do, it’s the most negative coverage they can come up with. Our so-called Conservative media aids and abets them by blaming Romney for not getting his message out, but do THEY cover his positives? There aren’t that many, I grant you, but the ones there are have been buried under a mountain of rino tears and fears,
He was not my choice, but he is all that stands between us and perdition.
You’ll note Jim Robinson (who you always call like some little girl calling her mommy - ‘Joey stuck his tongue at me’) stopped bashing Romney once it was clear that it was either support him or have the country destroyed by an Obama second term. But you appear to be TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND THAT!
NRO stinks since the boss man died...I use to get it via supscription, ended when they started writting loosely left of center....I also don’t like little metrosexual boys dressed in a man’s suit....
Serious question: have you actually read an issue of NR during the last four years...? ;)
You're just having a nice, noisy, public sulk, is all.
Bless your heart.
Look - I don't blame the losing conservatives for sticking it out until the last minute - many gave a year or more of their lives seeking the nomination. At the same time, I think the most experienced politicians are also the ones with the best political instincts, in the sense that they have a better feel* of what wins votes and what doesn't. Romney's single term as MA governor is nowhere near enough political experience to give him an understanding of how to win elections.
Even Obama had more political experience than Romney when he ran for the presidency. Despite being an arriviste from Hawaii who parachuted into Chicago politics, he managed to win an Illinois State Senate position against authentically black race hustlers, and then won a Democratic Senate primary against significant Democratic opposition, thereby catapulting him into federal office. All told, he spent 12 years in politics before running for the presidency. But in a sense, he's been running for the presidency all his life, with his book-length musings on the strategic and tactical aspects of getting political power. Bottom line is that Obama has sunk 20-30 years of his life figuring the practical ins and outs of winning elections. Romney has 4. In retrospect, it's not entirely surprising that he steamrolled Hillary Clinton *and* John McCain.
* The reason I use the word "feel" is because vote-winning strategies change. Goldwater's use of defense issues failed miserably, even though Kennedy's myth-making about the "missile gap" worked for him.
Aren’t we talking about now? Because NOW they suck lemons and spit seeds.
It’s conservatives who keep committing suicide by failing to coalesce behind one candidate. Unless, as I suspect, there’s no such thing as ‘conservative’ as a block, neither is ‘RINO’ block. The winner just smarter, more resourceful, and know how to build a winning coalition.
Again: the current editorial regime has fully and publicly endorsed Romney not once, but TWICE, in succession; and has spent the past. four. years. lauding him as the GOP's electoral savior-to-be, come 2012.
If all of that isn't enough... then: nothing ever will (or could) be.
Primaries wide (and disastrously) open to any and all "moderates," CINOs and other dishonestly labeled liberals -- thereby diluting virtually all significant conservative influence -- absolutely a steady, sludgy stream of McCain-esque losers, every four years.
Then answer me. HOW is he supposed to get a message out when the media blocks and bars him at every turn with negative coverage, even resorting to outright lies, let alone making lies up out of whole cloth as hairy reid did about his not paying taxes for ten years?
Romney's primary victory wasn't inevitable. Edwards and Obama split the liberal vote against Clinton. Obama political instincts were simply superior to Clinton's. And far superior to Romney's. Within the Democratic nomination process in 2008, Obama's situation was similar to Gingrich's and Santorum's, in these sense that the liberal vote was split between him and Edwards, whereas Clinton was the sole credible moderate. But Obama defeated the other liberals and the sole credible moderate. Much as it pains me to say it, Obama was more focused and disciplined and focused than either Gingrich and Santorum, and that was what won it for him.
GWB -- certainly no Demosthenes-level elocutionist, God wot -- somehow managed to do so, twice, against what was (by any sane and rational accounting) an even more unrelentingly hostile and unreasoning media assault.
The question you obviously ought to be asking, at this juncture, is: how come the (purportedly) more intelligent and verbally adept Romney canNOT...?
Kent, you’ve been so far off on this it’s barely worth the comment, nd that’s too bad because usually you are sensible. Charen has been undercutting Romney for weeks.
AMEN
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