Random Rants with 20/20 Hindsight

Ok we just lost an important election...how come? After hearing the postmortems from the pundits and professionals, and there's a lot of opinions out there,  I'm going to put my two cents in.

Overall Romney ran a good, positive campaign. He certainly passed the threshold of competence and character important to most voters. But he did make some fundamental and in my view fatal errors that I think cost him the election. Romney left a lot of votes on the table. With such a target rich, incompetent individual like Barack Obama I think the mistakes were with messaging and tactics. Look I know the Democrats would have us believe it's demographics and believe me, I don't discount that argument. But Romney lost the white working class all through the Mid-West and three million conservative voters stayed home. Those are votes that should have been in the bag, votes that would have won him the election. So there's obviously more to it than just demographics. I've got a few ideas as to why and you can agree or disagree.

First and foremost was Romney's failure to hit Obamacare in the debates. Candidate Romney knew how Obama would counter; he would have said but Gov. Romney, the Affordable Care Act was much the same as Romneycare, a program you instituted in your home State of Massachusetts. You must have liked it then? To which Romney should have stared straight into the camera and said "look, the people of my state wanted this. I felt an obligation to give it our best shot and to do everything in my power to make it work. We had a bi-partisan consensus for the program, we had bi-partisan cooperation on creating the program and the final bill passed with bi-partisan support. We ALL tried to make it work, it didn't and it doesn't. But the point is the States are where grand experiments like Romneycare (don't run from the word) should be tried, NOT AT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LEVEL! If we make a mistake like this in Boston it's a lot easier to pull back than if you do the same in Washington. There is no exit strategy from Obamacare. Go down this road and there's no turning back because you're burning every bridge, the infrastructure of the whole health-care system. But I guess that's the point for you isn't it Mr. President? But let me get back to the differences in the programs themselves. Mr. President, you and your party rammed through that bill. You had no bi-partisan anything. You had no input from anybody apart from the Democrats in Congress. No public input, no Republican input, no input from any outside group or think tank. Republicans weren't allowed to amend the bill, offer suggestions, they were not allowed to even read the bill before it was voted on and passed. This is the kind thing Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin does. This is not how legislation is crafted in a democracy. What you did was use authoritarian tactics to push through unpopular legislation and now you want to blame our side for not cooperating? And if Obamacare fails, which it is doing now with the increase in insurance premiums, I'm sure you'll blame that on Republicans as well. Mr. President, this is foolish and naive behavior and worse still is the fact that Obamacare is a bad, in fact dangerous takeover of our healthcare system and as President I will work aggressively to repeal it. Then we can get to work on REAL health-care reform. And who would know better than I that it's bad legislation that won't do what you claim it will, as you've said many times, it's based on RomneyCare."

Secondly Benghazi. In the third debate Romney should have stared straight at Obama and asked, "Mr. President what is going on? We had an Ambassador killed and your State Department sends out Ambassadress Susan Rice out with some story about a video on YouTube? You blamed the video in front of the UN delegation for all the world to see. Now you say it's terrorism and that you described it as such from the beginning. Just tell us what happened Sir? And please none of this, it's under investigation nonsense, that's a lawyer's trick. You've had ample time to to gather the facts. But you won't tell us, the American people what happened. You have stonewalled and obfuscated, with the help of the media I might add. What are the facts? What do you know now, what did you know at the time and when did you know it? How did we fail to protect our ambassador and four other Americans? Please, we want to know." An exchange like that would have nailed Obama to the wall. The media would have no longer been able to run interference and Obama would not have been able to run out the clock. This was a big opportunity missed by Romney.

Thirdly, we lost the white working-class vote in the Mid-West. Not all that surprising really. Since George Sr., through Bill Clinton and GWB every free trade bill that came down the pike, and there are more than you can imagine, have had bi-partisan support, especially NAFTA. And they all have something else in common, they screw the working class. Romney touched on this a bit with China but he didn't come anywhere close to hitting it as hard as he should have. And with Team Obama running ads in Ohio since last winter positioning Romney as an out of touch, rich guy outsourcer, it's no surprise Romney couldn't close the sale. In twenty five years we've lost 55,000 factories, not jobs, manufacturing facilities. Chew on that a while before you complain about how stupid folks in Ohio are.

Fourth, we had huge gender gap...again. With married women we did ok, not great but ok. With single women we got slaughtered. How do we attract young females? This will be a tough one. Typically with the unmarried female you've got a combination of youth, inexperience and naivete; highly susceptible to an emotional appeal like denying birth control. Or a young single mom highly dependent on the social safety net. And then there's the older, embittered, childless female (most of CW's ex-girlfriends probably fall into this category) who has had some man problems and can't stop eating cookie dough ice-cream. Ok Ok, just kidding, well sorta. If it makes you feel any better young males are far worse, far more stupid and far more malleable than women in terms of manipulation. How the hell do you think we get them to fight wars? But again the question is how do we attract unmarried women? I really don't know. We can parse the abortion argument but I'm not sure how much would get through the Democrat controlled media propaganda machine. My guess is it probably can't be done. This is Julia we're talking about, and Julia likes her free stuff.        

And lastly, we lost bad with Hispanics. We got nearly 30% but those are the ones who have been here a while and built a life, i.e. the Cubans. Heather MacDonald with the Manhattan Institute has studied immigrants and immigration issues for years and she claims border issues or amnesty have little to do with Hispanic support for Democrats. For them it's all about wealth transfer. For the last two years Obama has advertised ON MEXICAN RADIO advising to potential illegals that food-stamps and other social services were available to them if they should ever find themselves in the US. How's that for going after the Hispanic vote? As Rush Limbaugh says, it's hard to compete with Santa Claus. Republicans will never get this vote until these folks have something to protect.

At this moment in American history the electorate is split 50/50. The 50% who vote Republican do so in part to protect their hard earned assets from the 25% who want to take those assets and give them to the 25% who want those assets, for free. Admittedly long term we conservatives are in bad trouble (read anything written by Pat Buchanan in the last ten years) but this election could have been won. Unlike McCain Romney certainly had the resources to go toe to toe with Obama. He was just not willing to get down in the mud and fight Axelrod, Messina, Cutler and Plouffe on their own terms. I've said it before, Romney needed a Lee Atwater.