Posted on 11/23/2012 2:11:34 PM PST by SeekAndFind
What if we told you that the election was decided by a phrase?
You might not believe it, but assume we’re right for a minute. What word would you guess decided the election? Hurricane Sandy?
The answer lies in perhaps the single most illustrative exit poll question conducted, where CNN asked “What is the most important candidate quality to your vote?”
The response options were “Strong Leader,” “Shares Your Values,” “Has a Vision for the Future,” and “Cares about People.” Among folks that chose one of the first three responses, Mitt Romney won between 54-61% of their vote. But, among folks who chose “Cares About People,” Romney lost dramatically – 81-18%.
“Cares about you” is the single phrase that lost Romney the election. Those for whom empathy was the most important candidate quality clearly did not get a sense that he cared about people and worse, many eventhought he was antagonistic towards many Americans. Why was this so?
Romney’s business career, which was the central argument for his candidacy in an election dominated by the economy, was turned into a weakness by the left and the Obama campaign early on, with them portraying his experience leading Bain Capital as one of the opposite of care: harm. Laying people off, taking away their pensions, and destroying communities, Mitt Romney allegedly brought all of these across America.
The Bain attacks were less about vilifying Wall Street (though that too) and more about conveying the message “he’s not like us, he doesn’t care about us.”
Many voters bought into this early portrayal of Romney as one who does not care for people. Others, who did not quite buy into it, still held it as a potential lens through which to consider his future actions and statements.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Reagan truly cared about people, and it showed in his private life and politics.
The pro-abortion Romney, who has never veered from the path of self aggrandizement and anti-people politics, from calling gun owners nuts, to supporting abortion, to being for homosexual scout leaders and a gay military, and evading military service, and any activities that didn’t help him only with Mormonism or in his career, and even to having little contact with people who aren’t Mormon, or at least powerful.
“A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the Federal inspector will be in every man's counting house . . . The law will of necessity have inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it men will be hailed into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the tax payer. An army of Federal inspectors, spies and detectives will descend upon the state . . . Who of us who have had knowledge of the doings of the Federal officials in the Internal Revenue service can be blind to what will follow?”
Virginia House Speaker Richard E. Byrd, 1910, predicting what would happen if a federal income tax became law.
I want to see a hefty tax on printer’s ink. My contempt for the MSM knows no bounds.
I also like the idea of lower tuition for the hard science courses. To make up for that revenue loss how about quadrupling tuition for journalism and women studies courses ?
You got a problem with Ronny, take it up with him ~ not us, but the fact someone doesn't pay any federal income taxes means one of two things ~ that he's really rich and can hire the best tax accountants and lawyers in the nation, or that he's low income and simply doesn't owe any federal income taxes.
Otherwise, everybody pays something ~ much of it indirectly ~ and that was the way our Founding Fathers, if not yours back in the Old Country, wanted it.
Always some newbie coming around here telling us about how it was better in Europe where they taxed the peasants until they disgourged all their hidden wealth ~ bars of gold, cadillacs buried in the fields, all that stuff eh!
No, indirect taxation was the way it was done in our Constitution. Funny little foreign guys in the sway of Communist agents pushed the federal income tax off on us.
Real Americans want it repealed!
Our society is infantile and neurotic, and growing moreso. We’ve been heading for decades towards the point where the majority of adults have unresolved psychological issues stemming from growing up in broken families. It’s no wonder that more and more want to use government as a replacement daddy.
How many of us learned years later that it was the teacher who gave hard tests, it was the Mom and Dad that said no, it was the coach that pushed you to the max, it was the boss who screamed, “Get it done no matter what.” that was the one who actually cared for you.
Yep. Yet we already saw he lost his 1994 Senate race badly because of the Bain baggage. And he lost the South Carolina primary badly after Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich brought up the Bain baggage in their campaigns. Yet the entire Republican and conservative establishment circled the wagons around him and bashed Perry and Gingrich for even daring to bring up Romney’s business dealings and do what they’re supposed to do in a primary, dig up all of the other candidates’ weaknesses.
The Republican party can’t win elections if they insist on being the stupid party. And it’s stupid to ignore clear, obvious, demonstrated flaws that anyone with any political sense whatsoever should know would be used as an effective weapon by the Democrats. It’s even more pathetic that the main argument used to bolster Romney in the primary was that he was “electable,” when the very copious and unique Bain baggage clearly showed otherwise. Anyone who pushed Romney needs to be branded as useful idiots and ignored from now on, including Coulter and Drudge.
Voter FRAUD.
On a nationwide scale.
All the other armchair analyses, backward glances, and recriminations aside
Ironically, your disdain for and dismissal of a huge chunk of Americans mirrors the snotty, conceited and contemptuous view that the liberal, coastal elites hold of America. Only it is for different reasons - you for their lack of understanding that "caring for" is not a function of government, the liberal elites for their lack of sophistication in not endorsing more promiscuous lifestyles more whole-heartedly.
It is funny how such nearly identical sentiments are expressed by such opposing factions!
I remember talking to a colleague back in the clinton days. He had this look of shear terror thinking that the government wasn’t going to take care of him. Utterly pathetic. He was a registered Republican too.
Did teacher give us Romney/Obamacare and take our guns away, and try to give us gay Scout leaders and convince us of the importance of being pro-abortion, and tell us why homosexuals need to share foxholes with us?
Maybe he should’ve said “You didn’t build that”. Oh wait.. Romney’s not a black Marxist Muslim gay illegal alien celebrity and doesn’t own the news media.
I actually think the voters have a way of sniffing out a sense of who a candidate is as a person, even when they don't understand policy. Romney saying he "wasn't concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net" may have been a gaffe, but it was more in the vein of a Freudian slip. Romney was out-of-touch with the average American and it showed in so many things that he said and did.
This is exactly why he was such a heavy promoter of the welfare state in Taxachusetts. He doesn't relate to poorer people, thinks they're inherently disadvantaged as compared to him, and therefore thinks they need handouts. He consistently gave the impression he didn't believe in the class mobility inherent in the American dream. He was Democrat lite and a poor standard-bearer for the Republican party from day one.
Now, it's true that Obama believes the same things, even more passionately. But Obama didn't try to hide it, he ran on it. Romney was insincere and uneasy as he tried to balance his own liberal record on economics with what he thought the conservative base wanted to hear (such as that he was "severely conservative"). People trusted Obama more because Obama was actually being more honest than Romney about who he was. Swing voters don't understand the issues but they can sniff out the candidates' personal qualities, so they vote on those.
Again, Romney was an obviously bad candidate from the get-go. No intelligent, informed, conservative Republican had any excuse for nominating him.
This just in: RNC going to Build-A-Bear to select next presidential candidate.
These photos were making the rounds...discount their impact if you want...I don't.
Agreed 100%. We are held hostage by the THUGNATION fomented by 0bama and his constant class warfare spew as ‘community agitator’.
The social security collecting people, many of who don't owe income tax, are the most pro-republican voting age group in America.
“Cares about people”. What does that even mean? That’s too easy of an answer. It’s an indicator, a hint, but it’s not a definitive answer. We need to talk to the 81% that came up with this for Obama. My Grandma cares about people, but she can’t do much to help them. Would the Democrats vote for her?
What is so sad is that today we have Republicans, and some Conservatives, and some people who claim they are all above that DEMANDING the most onerous and abusive of taxes be laid on the poor without any pity.
They call it 'having skin in the game'.
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