Posted on 11/20/2012 12:10:08 PM PST by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Every person who talks and writes about politics gets stuff wrong. I’ve gotten my fair share wrong. But what I think I got most wrong in Campaign 2012 was the damage Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark would do to him.
It may seem obvious, but bear with me.
Mitt Romney was talking off the cuff to a supposedly off the record group of donors and muddled several data points together, ultimately telling the tale of the 47% who won’t vote for him for any reason. He was referencing the 47% who don’t pay taxes and interwove it with a 47% of locked in Obama support. The statement was a mess.
I didn’t think Mitt Romney would be as hurt by the statement as he was because I assumed Romney had misspoken in an off the cuff way. I assumed Romney would clarify that he knew many of those who have government assistance did not actually want the assistance, but needed it. I assumed he’d make the case that he’d help those people get off the government dole and back into work.
In other words, I assumed Romney believed what I believe — many of those people are good people who fell on hard times and are not of the same class of people who will vote for Barack Obama for free stuff. I was absolutely wrong. Romney not only believes completely what he said as he said it, he reinforced it with his post election analysis of his defeat blaming gifts to various classes of people. If that was true, as Newt Gingrich pointed out, Romney had plenty to gift to plenty strapped to the back of marching elephants.
Note to Mitt Romney: really, it’s you, not them. Seriously.
What does this have to do with Ronald Reagan? As Dan McLaughlin pointed out, every Republican Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan opposed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election except John McCain. Think about that for a minute. Every nominee of the party cast by the media as an insane fringe of conservatives actually opposed, from the left, Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Each of those candidates ran successfully as heirs to Reagan or, when they failed, as rich Republicans who believe in some sort of noblesse oblige. George H. W. Bush, embracing his own identity outside the shadow of Reagan in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012 all ran as patrician aristocrats who intended to make government more efficient to help the poor. There really was no theme of elevating the poor from poverty or the middle class to the rich. The theme was the care and comfort of men through the technocratic efficiencies of government and a conservative disposition. Romney did that this time too, going so far as to put his more conservative running mate in a witness protection program for candidates.
Reagan in 1980 ran a campaign on the explicit understanding that government was an obstacle to the poor and middle class elevating themselves from poverty and the role of a Reagan Administration would be to get the government out of the way. George W. Bush largely ran his 2000 campaign in a similar vein, but cast as a compassionate conservatism that quickly morphed into a big government conservatism once elected.
Republicans are not successful when they run campaigns as the rich patrician out to make government more efficient so it can be more helpful. Republicans win with conservative populists who run as men who pulled themselves up in life fighting big government and its cronies.
Fortunately for the GOP, in all this talk about the end of the GOP, people overlook that from here on out for the next decade or two we’ll be in an era of Republican politician who was raised in the era of Reagan and supported either Reagan or the idea of Reagan. Mitt Romney will probably be the last Republican nominee who ever opposed Ronald Reagan. That is a very good thing. From here on out our candidates will most likely speech Reaganese, even if not in a Reaganesque way, without sounding like they learned it from Rosetta Stone because each of them will have formed their world view during Ronald Reagan’s America.
*ROMNEY LOST because he is not a Conservative*... Never was... In fact, as this article clearly states, Romney spent his whole career opposing Conservatism.
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Nice to see common sense coming back to Freep. I was a bit afraid of getting zotted for posting the same thing a few months ago.
Republicans won in some states with high numbers of people on welfare or food stamps. At least some of those 47%ers voted for Republicans because of social issues.
Also, in the past the argument that "a rising tide lifts all boats" encouraged some voters to support lower taxes on people richer than themselves in the interests of bringing back prosperity. Perhaps such an approach could also work for many of Romney's 47%.
Yep.
I supported Mitt, wanted him to win, thought he’d win. We’ve had, I think, an unspoken agreement to disagree about that the way we had a spoken agreement to disagree about McCain.
But I think Erickson is right here. Mitt was part of the problem. It’s time for Generation Reagan to get in there and be part of the solution.
Thanks for the compliment - Been here all along, tho I think a lot of folks (me among them) don't bark as much once the Republican fanbois get the bit in their teeth - I am tired of fighting the same ol crap...
No use barking at them if they can't hear anything. Maybe once their echo chamber collapses around them, but not until.
Too bad they won't remember... Then FR could be used to back one candidate and become mighty for the cause.... But they won't remember a dang thing... Watch and see.
dunno... Was his mouth open?
I don’t know if Romney’s statement is wrong or right. I’m just saying that we should be honest about it. If 47% of the voters won’t change their mind based on how things are now, then we have to make some adjustments.
Dude, he blows. He spent the lede making the countervailing argument and then says:
"Mitt Romney in 2012 all ran as patrician aristocrats who intended to make government more efficient to help the poor."
Ridiculous. He never said any such thing. IF anything, he said f the lazy, the government is already taking care of them -- which was always followed with his intent to revive the working class with jobs.
Horse manure. Romney’s mistake was not taking that “47%” remark and elaborating that yes, there is a huge contingent of eaters and moochers who will vote for Ubama simply to get more of the “free stuff” confiscated for them from working taxpayers by their rat politicians and handed over in exchange for votes. Instead, Romney ran like a coward and tried to distance himself from his own (accurate) remark.
There’s a reason the African communist Ubama never brought up the “47%” remark in the debates.
Mittens’ wholly predictable (and predicted) loss to Herr Zero has driven a significant number of formerly more-or-less sane Republicans full-bore, weapons-grade conspiracy theory batsqueak insane.
My God! Finally, someone who understands me!
Very true. Perhaps the saving grace will be the level of control the statists will have to impose to keep things limping along - e.g. death panels. A good percentage of the people motivated enough to vote may want "free stuff", but don't like to be micromanaged to that level.
But then again, I think it'll play our exactly like Atlas Shrugged.
“The paranoids and conspiracy theorists and huffy, red-faced hysterics will all wander off eventually, most likely, as their claims (of necessity) steadily grow wilder and more over-heated, and less tethered to observable reality.”
so you are dismissing the possibility that voter fraud was used by the demoncrats to ensure BO’s re-election? you have far more faith in the Demoncrats than i have. isn’t fraud one of the most used tools in the box of those who believe that the ends justify the means? wasn’t voter fraud in Chicago what gave the election to Kennedy over Nixon in 1960?
roly poly boy from NJ
None of them got very far. None of them actually was Ronald Reagan. None of them brought all the qualities he did into the ring. Some of them had voting records in Congress that made it hard for them to play the Reagan part convincingly (as President Reagan might have had if he'd been a senator, rather than a governor before being elected president).
Another problem is that you don't see classic conservative vs. moderate (or liberal) races in the Republican primaries any more. There will be one candidate who appeals to religious conservatives (Robertson, Huckabee), one supply-side, tax-cutting economic conservative (Kemp, Forbes), maybe one fiscally conservative deficit hawk, maybe one neoconservative war hawk, maybe one "constitutionally conservative" libertarian (Paul), maybe an old fashioned populist (Buchanan). They all split the conservative vote.
And with all those players in the game it can be hard to sort them out. It's easy enough in retrospect to say, "Bob Dole lost. He must not have been conservative enough," or "Poppa Bush wasn't conservative enough. That must be why he lost," but that's with a lot of hindsight.
“I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but we had a president with one of the worst records ever. Maybe the worst. He’s been awful. And we couldn’t beat him. I’d like to see a Reaganist candidate next time, but there’s no guarantee that candidate will win.
Sure, Romney should have raised the banner of conservatism, but he’s not far wrong saying there’s just too many parasites now. “
AMEN...AMEN !!! The Takers have now taken over for good, and the makers are dwindling fast. America’s days as the Beacon on the Hill to the world apply mainly now to those illegals who want what they can get free from American taxpayers.
why are people so adverse to seeing the truth to what Romney said about the “gifts”: free birth control, free medical care, instate tuition for illegals, SSI, on and on? when will the American taxpayer finally wise up that all this free stuff we give to illegals is costing this dear country all that it once stood for?
most politicians don’t mind reaching into the taxpayers’ pockets for another freebie, if it means another vote when they are up for re-election. they would rather give it to the illegals who cross our borders than to the poor white folk who are struggling to make ends meet in Appalachia.
U.S. politicians seem to care only about certain protected classes of citizenry, and the rest can just pull themselves up by their respective bootstraps if they can afford any boots at all.
This is why I could bring myself to vote for Dole and McCain but not Romney. I could remember the days when Dole and McCain were foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution, though they strayed later. Romney always opposed the Reagan Revolution, just as his father before him opposed the Goldwater Revolution.
There were two reasons that Romney's message fell flat even when he said the right things. First, the message reeked of insincerity since he sounded uncomfortable as if he was talking a foreign language, which he was. Second, Romney's history of flip-flopping made people very distrustful of any convenient conversions. He had a reputation of telling people anything he thought they wanted to hear.
The 47% remark was ignorant, that is why no one can define who the 47% that he dismisses, is.
It sure isn’t defined by collecting a check from the government.
The article says he was talking about the percentage of our population who don’t pay federal income tax. I don’t know, is it 47%? That seems pretty high.
And, as we've recently seen too often, seppuku.
I'm "dismissing the possibility" that low-info Republicans -- unable to accept that real, actual state-by-state polls showed Mittens failing as decisively as conservatives had actually predicted he'd do, from Day Freakin' One -- didn't willingly emigrate, en masse, to a happy, magical make-believe land of talking pink-and-white bunnies with names like "Dick Morris" and "Karl Rove" and "UnSkewedPolls.com"; AND that said cowardly retreat from baseline reality plays an immense and undeniable part in their current paranoid electoral fantasies du jour.
All of that is straightforward and plain enough, in what I actually, y'know, wrote.
Any little additions and/or modifications you feel like adding onto that are solely your own look-out, and (thankfully) none of my own, now or ever.
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