The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Republican Clown Car Campaign

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 115 Comments

Susannah Fleetwood has a long critique of the 2012 campaign today at Right Wing News that makes an important point early:

Mitt Romney out-performed eleven out fifteen of the Republican Senatorial candidates, and the four that he didn’t out-perform were from very blue states that Republicans never win. . . .
In other words, if the problem was that Romney was a weak candidate (and the Republican brand was in good shape), then those numbers would be flipped the other way around. What the numbers tell us is that Mitt Romney performed well in those states in spite of the Republican brand–not because of it (people who came out to vote against Akin still voted for Romney).

This fact must be explained by anyone who wants to scapegoat Mitt Romney, to say that mistakes by the campaign or weaknesses of the candidate entirely explain what went wrong in 2012. If the Republican Party were generally in good shape, it would not be attracting to its ranks and nominating to high office such catastrophic disasters as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who lost Senate races in states that Romney won.

Nor can we blame this debacle on the “GOP Establishment.” Susannah quotes me (from a long phone conversation we had while I was driving home from Ohio) about the problems of “selfishness masquerading as populism” and people who weren’t “task-oriented or mission-focused.” You saw this, for example, in the case of Akin, who refused to resign the GOP nomination even after such eminent conservatives as Mark Levin urged him to quit for the good of the country. Akin selfishly clung to the nomination (which he’d won with just 36% of the primary vote) as if he owned it, as if he were the living embodiment of the Republican Party grassroots and anyone who criticized him was part of the “Beltway elite.”

When I say that people weren’t “task-oriented or mission-focused,” I refer among other things to people who let their leftover disgruntlement from the GOP primary campaign distract them from the key task of 2012: Defeat Barack Obama at all hazards.

Look: Mitt Romney wasn’t my dream candidate. I went all-in for Herman Cain and, when that campaign ended, I went all-in for Rick Santorum, because I saw them as best positioned to stop Mitt from becoming the “It’s His Turn” nominee. But once the alternatives were eliminated, I put aside my dissatisfaction and got in step. (See my May 7 column, “Mitt’s Men Don’t Plan to Fail,” which includes a few sharp hindsight ironies.) Meanwhile, however, there were devotees of various failed Republican primary challengers who couldn’t turn loose of the anti-Romney arguments they had parroted for months, and who continued bitch, bitch, bitching all the way to November.

If selfishness and stupidity are “True Conservative” principles — if an unwillingness to engage in broad-based coalition politics is celebrated as a virtue — then we are truly doomed. Puerile gestures and egocentric bullying are incompatible with effective teamwork. To borrow a phrase from Elbert Hubbard, “Get Out or Get In Line.”

OK, so much for my lecture. Now go read Susannah Fleetwood’s article, “Romney Lost Because Republicans Behaved Like Undisciplined Clowns.”

UPDATE: In the comments, I found myself accused of being part of the “Establishment,” engaged in “blame the base” messaging. Whatever. Some people will not listen to arguments that are not personally flattering to them, that do not elevate to a pedestal their particular beliefs. Evidence that does not confirm their beliefs must be ignored or rationalized, and the bearers of bad news must be demonized. Psychological defense mechanisms are not a political philosophy. People who are incapable of self-criticism are incapable of self-improvement. If you cannot learn from failure, you are doomed to repeat your failures. Attempting to externalize blame, to abdicate responsibility for failure by reference to convenient scapegoats, is not conservatism, it is narcissism.

UPDATE II: I’m grateful to Mark Steyn for this analysis:

Regardless of what kind of Republican you are, the electorate was antipathetic to you.
In other words, whatever the weaknesses of a supposedly weak candidate, the party was weaker. With hindsight, that first debate performance appears to have made Mitt sufficiently likeable for a narrow slice of voters to overlook the R after his name. The candidate was less of a problem than the Republican brand.

Dead on target: The Bush-era “brand damage” problem, which conservatives hoped had been vanquished by the Tea Party uprising and the “Republican Mandate” of 2010, came back with a vengeance. The problem is not conservatism, nor is it “centrism,” but rather the success of the Democrat-Media Complex in making the Republican label a negative symbol. To the extent that various GOP candidates or spokesmen cooperated in that project — e.g., “legitimate rape” — then they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

To put it another way, the problem is political and cultural, rather than ideological, and we need to learn to distinguish these categories. Constant invocations of ideology — the claim that any Republican we disagree with is guilty of insufficient fidelity to conservative principle — tend to sow suspicion within our ranks and undermine effective cooperation. This is not to say that there are no RINO sellouts, or that the Charlie Crist/Richard Lugar types don’t do damage to the GOP, but rather to say that ideological deviation cannot be blamed for every problem in the Republican Party.

 

 


Comments

115 Responses to “The Republican Clown Car Campaign”

  1. Leroy_Whitby
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:11 pm

    Romney lost. It’s not scapegoating. He lost.

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:12 pm
  3. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:13 pm

    Yes, but the Democrats are better organized, unified clowns.

  4. Leroy_Whitby
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:13 pm

    Exactly. The real failure of the Establishment was in candidate recruiting at the Presidential level.

  5. elaine
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:15 pm

    Stacy,
    While I don’t disagree with your main point that there were some weak candidates and the media and dems have done a great job at demonizing repubs/conservatives, that’s not the whole story of why this campaign was “lost.”
    I’ve been digging through the Cuyahoga County OH returns, comparing the 2008 McCain #s to the 2012 Romney ones, and have found something… interesting.
    In Republican-leaning precincts, Romney actually outperformed Mccain, to beat Obama by a larger margin than did your cousin…
    In one precinct McCain narrowly lost to Obama four years ago, Romney decisively won it.
    In Democrat-leaning precincts where cheating didn’t occur, Obama won by a much smaller margin than he did four years ago. He generally lost more votes than were accounted for by the loss of population in the precinct. (Pretty much every precinct in Cuyahoga seems to have lost population in the last four years).
    So the trend is that Romney did better than McCain four years ago, while Obama lost ground.
    In Democrat precincts where cheating was rampant, Obama got all or nearly all of the vote, with Romney maybe making it to low double digits, but more likely to get single digits or even no votes at all. Compare this with four years ago, when McCain managed high double or even triple digit vote totals. It’s funny how in spite of the trend elsewhere in the county, in these particular precincts Obama bucked his trend of losing votes to actually gaining them.
    I’ll wager if someone with connections cared to check, you could find a direct correlation between precincts where voter irregularities occurred and precincts where Romney supposedly received virtually no votes at all.
    Like I said, Romney’s trend through most of the county (the non-cheating parts) was to outperform McCain, while Obama lost ground against Romney. And yet… somehow Romney “lost.”
    And until we finally address voter fraud with some real desire to end it, we’ll continue to see situations like this, where fraud is rampant.
    BTW, Smitty said the other day that he believed fraud wasn’t an issue, but I’d ask — how can you know? If someone comes to the polling place and shows only a social security card or piece of mail as their ID, how can you know for sure they are who they say they are? You can’t. So fraud could be taking place right under honest poll watchers’ noses, and how would you know? And let’s not get into all the reports of machines where people voted Romney, but their vote was recorded as being for Obama…

  6. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:17 pm

    Richard has long supported the idea that the GOP is broken. Check out “Not One Red Cent“, if you don’t believe it. Stacy is there as well.

    If you can get over your snit, that is. Good luck with that.

  7. Leroy_Whitby
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:18 pm

    The establishment DID let the country burn rather than let conservatives have any power.

  8. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:18 pm

    Time to restart “Not One Red Cent”, Richard. Just to make your point clear to Blake and his ilk.

  9. kevino
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:21 pm

    I enjoy your blog very much, but I reject the strawman argument that talking about Governor Romney’s shortcomings and mistakes translates into “scapegoating Romney”.

    Romney was a poor candidate to begin with. To name just a few:
    1. No one has been elected President who didn’t win his home state: you give your opponent a huge electoral college advantage. Romney could not win MI or MA.
    2. Romney was a successful person who would have made an excellent President but is terrible at politics. He lost to a man who has no record of achievement, made a terrible President, but runs brutal, effective political machines.
    3. At a time when most Americans detest corporate America for outsourcing jobs, Romney represented corporate America.
    4. We will never know the effect that Romney’s religion had on the Evangelical vote.
    5. Romney supported legislation that is very similar to Obamacare.

    All of these issues were well known to the GOP Establishment, and they selected Romney anyway. (Hell, the GOP Establishment was too stupid to catch on to the fact that Team Obama wanted to run against Romney.)

    Romney did little to counter his obvious negatives. For example, why not sit down and tell the American people: “Look, business people are required to work within the rules and the existing business climate. Politicians like the Democrats have worked to make the rules favor moving jobs overseas. If you want more jobs in the US, get the Democrats to change the business environment.”

    On a similar vein, when asked by an interviewer, “Is it fair you only paid 14% in taxes?” Tell the stupid journalist, “I’m an American. Americans play by the rules. If you think that the rules aren’t fair, then let’s change those rules.”

    This was a terrible election, and GOP Establishment needs to consider several basic points:
    1. They have chosen the Presidential nominee twice now, and both times I could look see at the start of the campaign that the Democrats would clean their clock.
    2. They have spent huge amounts of money, but they failed to talk to the American people like adults about the opportunities for this country and the seriousness of the problems we face.
    3. They lacked the vision and the guts to put forward a pro-democracy, pro-freedom agenda and explain to the American people why that is important. While downplaying the Tea Party in 2010, the GOP establishment failed to figure out until the end that is was possible to take the House and Senate. (One wonders what could have been accomplished had they started out with the attitude that the Democrats bring to elections.)

    As a Libertarian, I’m often at odds with Democrats and Republicans, but the GOP Establishment is truly disgusting. They don’t offer a true alternative to the Democrats, they frequently favor “Liberal Lite” solutions. And that seems to be the big lesson that the GOP Establishment is taking from this election: we need to absorb more of the Democrat’s agenda.

    Gag.

  10. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:22 pm

    He also said “I also know which enemy to punch first.”

    FAIL yourself. EPIC fail. Work on your reading comprehension.

  11. Blake
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:30 pm

    Jeff,

    Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

    We’ll have to disagree on whether or not the base is being blamed.

    The reflexive action of the GOP is to always blame the base rather than themselves.

    By the way, Romney did not run a good campaign. Check out the article RSM did on the much touted “ORCA” program the Romney campaign used.

    http://theothermccain.com/2012/11/09/orca-romneys-killer-fail/

  12. Mittens Romneycare: Head Clown | Daily Pundit
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:30 pm

    […] Romneycare: Head Clown Posted on November 12, 2012 9:30 am by Bill Quick The Republican Clown Car Campaign : The Other McCain Mitt Romney out-performed eleven out fifteen of the Republican Senatorial candidates, and the four […]

  13. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:49 pm

    Excuse me — when I say “good campaign”, it was much better than McCain in 2008. It wasn’t a great campaign, but Romney made a serious, personal commitment to victory. His failure is in fact a personal one. A lot of people were fooled — check out Ace of Spades.

    Romney’s failure was selecting a staff who didn’t know the difference between a hawk and a handsaw, And not a little arrogance.

    And I believe that the GOP does blame the base — but that Stacy is not blaming the base. You are shooting the messenger.

  14. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 12:50 pm

    Yep, he was flawed. But when choosing between flawed and evil, I’ll take flawed, every time.

  15. rosalie
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:01 pm

    “I said it the day after the election, maybe we need to re-examine allowing the media so much control over our primary process?”
    I think we should have learned a long time ago. Everyone complains about the debates, but they remain the same. Our party is very frustrating.

  16. CPAguy
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:07 pm

    Because….evidently, you can’t be President without first being corrupted by some other government position.

    It is time that more business people stepped up to the plate.

    However, given Herman Cain’s experience, that is unlikely.

  17. rosalie
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:08 pm

    What about the Catholics? I’m Catholic, and I don’t understand how he got so many votes. I’ve come to the conclusion that our church is made up of socialists.

  18. StrangernFiction
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:27 pm

    Bingo

  19. keyboard jockey
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:40 pm

    What would have happened if Sarah Palin was out on the campaign stump, pushing back against the Democrats fake war on women meme?

    This is just one example of how the Romney campaign under utilized a strong popular conservative republican. I ask myself why, but the answer is always the same. The establishment republicans, would rather lose elections than losen their grip on the republican party.

  20. Angie
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:49 pm

    No one said he was perfect– try reading the article first before commenting.

  21. ThomasD
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:50 pm

    What makes you think the Long March excluded any particular institutions? Anyplace they were not actively opposed they currently occupy.

    The hierarchy of the Church is rife with hard core leftists whose primary religion is not Christianity.

  22. TC_LeatherPenguin
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:50 pm

    May I repeat: “the ineffably brutal Stacy McCain.”

    If you will allow a bit of civility; your “number stuff” is ridiculous… watch me take your numbered argument apart:

    1. No one has been elected President who didn’t win his home state: you give your opponent a huge electoral college advantage. Romney could not win MI or MA.

    Uh, that’s just wrong — a lie (notice I didn’t say, “you ignorant bitch”)

    : http://bit.ly/Q8Ih81

    I could go on…. And generate even more bets to pay for Christmas….

  23. TC_LeatherPenguin
    November 12th, 2012 @ 1:58 pm

    And as they did, you bailed out. Feeling proud?

  24. Adobe_Walls
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:09 pm

    The Republican base has many components just as the Social Democratic base does. They on the whole, do a better job of appealing to their segments. They won because they did better with their undecided potential base than Republicans did. They made the case to enough of their vote democratic or not vote at all base. The Republicans didn’t make a good enough case to get out their vote Republican or not vote at all base.

    All of the hand wringing about the appealing to Hispanics is non-sense as 40% is probably the ceiling and their votes weren’t about immigration like everyone else they vote based on who they think will and can take care of them.

    When Republicans tell us (people who read this blog and others like it for instance) that freedom from government and maintaining individual liberty leads to prosperity we understand that argument. That particular politician saying they believe in small government, basically only have to convince us that they mean it. For many voters that isn’t enough the argument is too abstract. To get those who didn’t vote but would never have voted for Obama in any case to the polls requires making them understand how implemented conservative principles improve their lives materially.

    Democrats do a much better job in touching individual lives and even worse get to use tax dollars to do it. This is true whether they or Republicans are in charge. Republicans threaten to turn off the spigots, then gain power but don’t. Even worse Republicans then give the money to leftist organizations for disbursement at the community level where Democrats get all the credit for taking care of the people.

    Daniel Greenfield: How We Can Win
    “Hypothetically speaking, if the Republicans weren’t completely clueless, their first act after getting their hands on the till, would have been to cut off every single minority organization that’s actually a front for Democratic politics, no grants, no benefits routed through them, no contracts of any kind, while pushing that money through to conservative minority groups.”
    http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-we-can-win.html
    There is a lot more about the difference between Democratic outreach and Republican lack of it at the national level.
    Consider that one reason why the GOP kept the house is perhaps because Republicans only engage in “retail” politics at the district level.

  25. Mark30339
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:17 pm

    The GOP is not an attractive group to belong to. We think the world is an intellectual battleground in which we convince ourselves that we made the better argument every day — and we take no prisoners in the process. Our small government polices are not the problem. The problem is that while the electorate is endeared to Michael Jackson’s “We are the World” model of mutual respect and concern, we conservatives are reduced to: “two men enter, one man leave.” [As in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.]

    We’ve got to stop advocating on the grounds that our thinking is superior; all of us need to manifest a respectful tone showing how our small government ideas will make our communities better. Constant whining about media bias and Obama missteps is getting us nowhere.

  26. Leroy_Whitby
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:23 pm

    I don’t think that many in the GOP have anything to be proud of. I have many more children than the average family. We’ve had illness, financial issues adjusting to the Obamaconomy etc. Romney didn’t motivate, and it wasn’t just me. It was tens or hundreds of thousands of activists. Maybe millions.

  27. Dai
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:43 pm

    If Steelman was the “establishment candidate” AND was backed by Ppalin, AND is a babe as well, how could Akin have possibly won the primary? Something fails to compute here.

  28. Thomas L. Knapp
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:51 pm

    Dai,

    Akin was in third place a few weeks before the primary, but it was a fairly tight cluster.

    My recollection is that just prior to the Palin endorsement, it looked something like Steelman 38%, Brunner 32%, Akin 30%. Steelman was ahead just outside the margin of error.

    The Palin endorsement hurt Steelman some — the week after, it was more like Steelman 35%, Brunner 33%, Akin 32%.

    It was only after McCaskill started running those ads that Akin moved into the lead, and even then it was iffy.

  29. Adjoran
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:56 pm

    You recruit candidates for the House or Senate. Neither party has ever had to recruit a Presidential candidate since the GOP won the tug of war for Ike.

  30. Adjoran
    November 12th, 2012 @ 2:59 pm

    Cain’s experience in tripping over his zipper, you mean?

  31. Adjoran
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:02 pm

    Obama would have shredded Santorum to pieces, and Santorum could not have raised the kind of money Romney did to fight it.

  32. Quartermaster
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:05 pm

    Did he actually trip over his zipper? Or did Allred just find someone that was willing to lie. The evidence says it’s the latter.

  33. Adjoran
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:08 pm

    Allred didn’t find them all, and Allred had nothing to do with the settlements the Association paid out earlier. Cain had 10 days noticed the story was coming and told four completely different stories in the first three days after it broke. Only morons believe the allegations were manufactured.

  34. Quartyermaster
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:11 pm

    I would agree on decent campaign, but not good campaign. McNasty ran a terrible campaign by comparison.

    I don’t think Stacy is blaming the base either, but the article he links does have blame the base undertones.

    I don’t know if anyone here has seen Fred Thompson’s column on the election, but I’m in the number that doesn’t think it mattered who got elected because the problems are going to come crashing down on us regardless. I seriously doubt Mittens would have taken the measures needed to avoid a complete melt down.

    I didn’t stay home, however. I took a bromo and held my nose a voted for Mittens, for all the good it would have done.

  35. Adjoran
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:12 pm

    Akin and Mourdock have nothing to do with it. There are always down-ticket candidates who say stupid things, and if they are Republicans it is national news. But these two lost for very different reasons.

    Missouri party primaries don’t have a run-off. Akin was able to win narrowly – with McCaskill’s help – in a three-way race. Had there been a run-off, he would have lost.

    Mourdock lost mainly not because of his gaffe, but because Lugar wouldn’t endorse him. Blame “the Establishment” all you want – many here blame the GOP Establishment for everything anyway – but when you run a negative campaign against a guy, don’t expect him to come kiss your tushie when it’s over.

  36. Leroy_Whitby
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:12 pm

    I believe the GOP establishment actively DISCOURAGES candidates.

  37. Quartermaster
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:14 pm

    The hierarchy has pushed socialism for years in the name of caring for “the least of these.” All the while ignoring the fact that what they were really doing is using government to carry out armed robbery to do their charitable works.

    I have no sympathy for the Bishops whining how they are being attacked by being required to furnish birth control to their employees through their medical insurance.

  38. Bob Belvedere
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:14 pm

    Stacy wrote:

    To put it another way, the problem is political and cultural, rather than ideological, and we need to learn to distinguish these categories. Constant invocations of ideology — the claim that any Republican we disagree with is guilty of insufficient fidelity to conservative principle — tend to sow suspicion within our ranks and undermine effective cooperation. This is not to say that there are no RINO sellouts, or that the Charlie Crist/Richard Lugar types don’t do damage to the GOP, but rather to say that ideological deviation cannot be blamed for every problem in the Republican Party.

    The problem is with Ideology itself. An Ideology is a system of ideas that the believer in it believes in scientifically. In other words: like a scientific proof, the parts of any Ideology, of the particular philosophical system, cannot be allowed to be discredited, as far as the believer in it is concerned, because the delegitimizing of any part will cause the whole to collapse. Therefore, no deviations from the Ideology can be permitted or allowed to stand. Therefore, the defenders of it engage in a vicious defense of it, believing that any one who questions any part of the Ideology is not simply engaging in civilized disagreement, but in a form of treason.

    Those people who dare call themselves conservatives must never forget the wisdom of Russell Kirk:

    …conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

    The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

    We must resolve ourselves to not be Ideological, to realize that to be a conservative is to embrace Life as it is, The Art Of The Possible, to not make cause with any ‘ist’ or ‘ism’. We must reject any systems of ideas because no Human Being has THE ANSWER, the illumination necessary to perfect Life on Earth. To assume you do [ie: to embrace and Ideology] is to grant to oneself a power reserved only to The Creator – and that is mortal and fatal sin.

  39. Bob Belvedere
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:29 pm

    Methinks if you look deeply into those who self-identify as Catholics, a good number of them are of the ‘Cafeteria’ variety. IE: they are not really Catholic. It’s, in a strange way, become ‘cool to be Catholic’ in certain circles.

  40. Bob Belvedere
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:30 pm

    Hear, hear!

  41. Quartermaster
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:38 pm

    It was hard not to run a negative campaign against Lugar. The man was too compromised by his own idiocy.

    No one expected the old codger to kiss anyone’s tushie. To support the candidate f his own party, however, is not much to ask. Lugar was basically a Dim in GOP clothing and his petulance was not a surprise. The electorate repudiated him, so he repudiated the electorate.

    And Lugar was GOP establishment to his core. He is their kinda guy.

  42. Quartermaster
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:40 pm

    If you don’t believe your thinking is superior, then there is no basis on which to run a candidate. The left is anything but respectful and you will simply be regarded as weak if you give them the idea that you take them seriously. The only people you need to take seriously is the electorate.

  43. Stogie Chomper
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:44 pm

    I think maybe we are over-thinking the election results. We lost more to changing demographics, the mainstream media’s almost fanatical loyalty to the Democrats and the fact that the American people are largely stupid, lazy and want free stuff. Screw it, let’s just secede. Oh yeah, I think I said that already.

  44. K-Bob
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:57 pm

    Okay, I linked to this yesterday, but Ima linkit again because it applies even more to this thread.

    We had a great discussion at Scoops about this and I must say, most of the Scoopers seem to get it, just like Stacy does.

    Here was my take. I suggest reading Kemberlee’s thing, too.

    two big points:

    1) The Reagan approach has not been tried since Reagan. However, many moderate approaches have been tried and failed. Let’s not do that again.

    2) It was not the so-cons fault. THEY turned out to vote, and THEY knocked on doors, even though Romney was clearly not their guy.

  45. Quartermaster
    November 12th, 2012 @ 3:58 pm

    Conservatism is a philosophy that does hold certain things dear. The GOP establishment OTOH, is quite willing to be liberal lite and, like cryin’ John Boner, is quite happy to knuckle under as long as they get to keep their positions and bennies. The GOP establishment is happy to lose and would rather lose to the libtards than to run a conservative.

    Having said that, I am compelled to say that Mittens was not a good candidate. He alienated a good bit of the Republican base and the country will now pay a price for it. I seriously doubt Mittens would have done what was required to avoid the melt down that’s coming, but there was a slight chance he would have where as with Zer0 there was none.

    As I said earlier, however, the column you linked does have a “blame the base” undertone to it. Given the entire article, I don’t think that is intentional, but it is there.

  46. Bob Belvedere
    November 12th, 2012 @ 4:00 pm

    ORCA returned it’s investment.

  47. Bob Belvedere
    November 12th, 2012 @ 4:03 pm

    And a good chunk on the population in this country are driving clown cars [and, no, I don’t mean the Prius or the Volt, specifically].

  48. Bob Belvedere
    November 12th, 2012 @ 4:24 pm

    Well put over at The Right Scoop, KB. I especially liked the line: ‘Learn to Reaganize the response’.

    May I publish your TRS comment over at my joint?

  49. K-Bob
    November 12th, 2012 @ 5:34 pm

    Soitenly. I gotta get a login for WordPress so I can comment at your place.

    (EDIT: Thanks, BTW, Bob! More on the concept of Reaganizing The Response here. Germaine bit:
    “Reagan showed how to combat this problem. Whenever the media asked Reagan about abortion, he always said, “Well, until science determines when life begins, I always say ‘err on the side of life.'”

    That’s all that needs to be said about abortion when you are running for office. It works.

    I call this Reaganizing the response. Act like your core values are a given, and move the media past that, so you can focus on selling the greatness of individual liberty and self-sovereignty.”)

    (EDIT II: Feel free to clean it up like you did last time. I’m just not as disciplined as Stacy in my writing skills yet.)

  50. JeffS
    November 12th, 2012 @ 5:57 pm

    Same here, QM. Oh, I put a Romney bumper sticker on my vehicle, but it came down to Mitts or Zero.

    Which is the difference between going over the cliff at 40 MPH or 90 MPH. If that.