No Ronald Reagan is he.
Daniel Greenfield is an excellent writer, and from my experience reading his work, a heck of an analyst as well. He says it all for me in this piece on the aftermath of the Romney/GOP election debacle.
The best of the best that the GOP old guard could run, Mitt Romney, and look where it got us, a very distant last place just like John McCain. Being a decent person isn’t enough, you have to know your conservative principles and articulate them well to an attention span challenged public, well in advance of running for office, not on the fly during an election campaign.
Romney was a star political athlete who had an excellent training regimen and coaching staff. But to win elections, you have to change people’s minds. It’s not enough to try hard or to fight hard; you have to fight for something besides the chance to round the bases. You have to wake people up to a cause.
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When the Republican Party sold out the Tea Party, it sold out its soul, and the only driving energy that it had. And there was nothing to replace it with. The Republican Party stopped being the opposition and became a position that it was willing to reposition to get closer to the center. Mitt Romney embodied that willingness to say anything to win and it is exactly that willingness to say anything to win that the public distrusts.
The Tea Party Got It Right, Mitt Got It Wrong
In this election the Republican Party ran two wholly inoffensive blue state Republicans on a platform of jobs at a time when the economy was everyone’s chief concern and the incumbent had absolutely failed to fix the economy. And they lost.
The Monday — or Wednesday — morning quarterbacks will have a fine time debating what Mitt Romney should have done differently. The red Republicans will say that he should have been more aggressive and should have hit Obama on Benghazi. The blue Republicans will blame a lack of outreach to Latinos. Some will blame Sandy, others will blame Christie and many will point to voter fraud. And they will all have a point, but the makings of this defeat did not happen in the last two weeks; they happened in the last two years.
Mitt Romney won the primaries because he was electable. But, as it turned out, he really wasn’t electable after all. Not when the chief criteria of electability is having no opinion, no point of view and no reason to run for office except to win. Not when the chief criteria of being a Republican presidential nominee is being able to convince people that you’re hardly a Republican at all.
