Unlike some presidents I could name, Bush largely disappeared the second Obama was sworn in. He didn't immediately hit the campaign trail for redemption and he hasn't badmouthed his successor. Yes, he hit the road to promote his semi-memoir, but he was very pointed in refusing to talk current politics. He's also the first former president since Nixon to not address his party's national convention.
As incredibly gifted on the stump as Bill Clinton is, I don't think former presidents should engage in politics. It's cheap and they owe more to the country than they do their parties. I actually like the idea that Harry Truman first floated in the mid-1950s; that the living former presidents become non-voting members of the Senate, serving as an institutional memory and national conscience. If nothing else, it would keep them off corporate boards and giving multi-million speeches that I also feel cheapens the office they held.
It would also keep Jimmy Carter from his meddlesome and destructive freelancing in foreign policy. I read The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity a few weeks ago and it makes clear that the only thing that the former presidents from Nixon to Bush 43 have in common is a deep and abiding loathing for Carter.
As for defeated former nominees, especially those that don't hold another office, they should just shut the fuck up. Given the circumstances of the 2000 election, you can make some allowances for Al Gore, but his tirades through the Bush years hurt his reputation more than it helped.
And for god's sake, if you lose a presidential election, just accept responsibility for it and move on. That's especially true for Republicans, who can't stop preaching about personal responsibility until it applies to themselves.
I have no idea what Mitt Romney was thinking when he started whining in a conference call to his donors yesterday. He's already said that he's finished his last campaign. And even if he hadn't said it, it would still be true. Neither party has re-nominated a defeated candidate in my lifetime, nor are they likely to. National campaigns are just too expensive for the parties to wait around for seventeenth resurrection of Richard Nixon. The exploding importance of the primaries also makes it all but impossible.
Again, I thought there might have been an exception I said at the time, and still believe that if Gore ran in 2008, he would've won the nomination and the election. Given how discredited Bush had become, all he would've had to do was say "I told you so" from his announcement speech straight through his inaugural address.
But Romney has to know that he's never going to be nominated for anything ever again. So why is he saying crazy shit like this?
Mitt Romney said on a conference call with donors Wednesday that President Obama won the 2012 presidential campaign because of "gifts" given by the administration to black, Hispanic and young voters.
"The President’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things," Romney said, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. "Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”
Romney said moves like the president's healthcare reform legislation and a decision to suspend deportations of certain illegal immigrants who came to the country as children proved "highly motivational" on Election Day. Romney also said he had "gotten beat up pretty bad" on issues including his immigration stance and personal wealth.Paul Ryan is building an equally ridiculous narrative, focusing on an unexpectedly high "urban vote" that ultimately destroyed them. Of course, that's bullshit and if Ryan believes it, he's even dumber than I think he is.
Both excuses are nothing but that: excuses. And piss-poor ones, at that.
When you think about it, Romney’s explanation for Obama’s victory is laughable -- the president won because he successfully delivered to his voters. Isn’t that what politicians and presidents are supposed to do? In addition, Romney’s “gifts” rationale doesn’t explain why he lost Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, states with older and whiter populations.
From the second Paul Ryan was tapped for the vice-presidential nomination, all I heard was how Wisconsin was going to the GOP. Not only did that not happen, Ryan lost his hometown of Janesville - hardly South Central L.A demographically - for the first time.
And what about the campaign's quixotic, last-ditch journey into the black hole of Pennsylvania? Non-Philadelphia Pennsylvania is one of the oldest and whitest places in all of Christendom. That's why losing Republican nominees have been making their last stands there for twenty years. What "gifts" did they get?
Look, I've been saying for years that Mitt Romney was the most electable candidate his party had who wasn't Jon Huntsman. I consistently said that he was going to lose, but he would at least keep the loss under five points. Can you people imagine what Obama would have done to Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum nationally? I can, and it ain't pretty. Obama would have won by at least ten points and the Senate would have been filibuster-proof again. I'm not sure that even gerrymandering would have saved the Republican House with someone so disastrous at the top of the ticket.
There are three major reasons that Obama won, and none of them involve gifts.
1) Incumbent presidents don't lose: I've addressed this over and over again, so I won't go in depth here. Since 1912, five presidents (Taft, Hoover, Ford, Carter and Bush 41) lost re-election. Of the five, only Hoover didn't face a primary challenge, a third-party candidate that sucks up his vote, or both. And Hoover was otherwise occupied being blamed for the Great Depression. Maybe you heard about it.
Obama didn't have a primary or a third-party that hurt him, which always made him the heavy favorite to win. You'd be amazed at how good history is at predicting the future. Really, you would!
2) Obama had the most organized campaign in my lifetime: Barack Obama's single greatest source of political strength was telegraphed as far back as the 2008 Iowa primary, where a black (or, if you prefer, "urban") candidate with no real record to speak of beat the institutional favorite in one of the oldest, whitest and rural places outside of Norway.
Before this year, Mitt Romney has run three campaigns and only won one. The Clinton machine had run something like ten campaigns and only lost one. Beating Hillary Clinton is far more impressive than taking Romney out could ever be.
Obama displayed in Iowa a ruthless capacity for identifying and turning out his vote in ways that we just haven't seen before. His campaign always knew that the delegate math was more important than racking up the popular vote in huge, industrial states where Clinton was favoured, just as he built an Electoral College victory against John McCain. It was frighteningly effective and deeply impressive to watch.
Obama for America made no secret of the fact that they were doing the same thing again, spending zillions of dollars building his general election while Romney was struggling to put away misfits like Gingrich and Santorum.
And what did the idiot conservative commentariat do when they saw this? They mocked it and made incomprehensible remarks about Obama's "burn rate," as if a sitting president of the United States with steadily rising job approval numbers wouldn't be able to replace that money for the general election. By the way, this is why not having a primary challenger is so helpful.
The GOP is so invested in its stupid "community organizer" narrative that they can't acknowledge this. People like Sarah Palin can't easily deride the community organizer while also admitting that those skills prevented him from ever losing to a Republican. Even she's not that friggin' dumb, and Sarah Palin is plenty dumb!
3) Mitt Romney didn't damage the Republican brand, the Republican brand damaged Mitt Romney: People act as if the Republican party losing it's collective fucking mind is a new thing. It's not. That can be traced back to Pat Buchanan's "culture war" speech to the Houston convention in 1992. By the time that speech was finished, the ability of the party to win national elections was diminished by several degrees of magnitude.
The GOP learned exactly the wrong lessons from Ronald Reagan, who often threw the superstitious lunatics in his base rhetorical bones about things like abortion and culture. But Reagan never followed through on them with actual legislation. Reagan was a much smarter politician than he was ever given credit for, and he knew that divisive social legislation would damage the greatest asset he had: his own personal favourability.
After Buchanan's speech and George H.W Bush's loss to Bill Clinton, the GOP actually tried legislating their insane social theories, which Reagan never did. In doing this, they immolated themselves with single women, who unsurprisingly ignored economic messages to preserve their reproductive liberty.
Do you think Bob Dole, John McCain or Mitt Romney gave a shit about abortion? I don't. But they were forced to defend their party's insane position on it by a base that demonstrably doesn't understand the basic mathematics of elections.
And those positions got worse as time went on. At least three state legislatures (Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania) passed legislating trans-vaginal ultrasounds on adult women seeking abortions. Other legislatures, including several Republicans in the House, tried to separate birth control from ObamaCare in an attempt to ride Rick Santorum's deeply weird late primary wave. And then there were the rape platforms in the Missouri and Indiana Senate races, both of which should've been easy Republican victories.
You can argue that Romney didn't start any of that, but you'd be missing the point. A presidential nominee has a special responsibility to either support or denounce party positions. Sadly for him, he was in a position where he couldn't do either. Mitt has been accused of a lot of things through his political career, but courage was never one of them. When he ran for governor, his positions on social issues weren't all that different than Obama's. It was only when he decided not to run for another term in Boston and instead run for the '08 Republican presidential nomination that he became "a severe conservative."
Since down-ticket Republicans were proposing crazy shit about reproductive rights every few weeks for the last 18 months, Romney had every opportunity to separate himself from it. But he chose the path of least resistance and allowed himself to get tagged with it, seemingly not understanding that there there are more single women who like to fuck in America than there are evangelical Republican primary voters.
The culture war, it appears, is over. And the Buchanan Brigades have finally lost. Unless and until the Republican party gets that, they'll continue to lose. Besides which, social conservatism is whollly incompatable with the idea of small government and should be driven from the coalition before the coalition is destroyed by it. If you need the power of the federal government to protect your family values, I can only conclude that your values aren't worth saving.
In Closing: I always thought it was going to be next to impossible for Romney to win this election, and I said so repeatedly over the last few years. Obama's people are unusually smart and the Republican position on social issues has become unusually divisive.
It isn't that I have a problem with fantastically handsome Mormon millionaires with great hair, either. I thought (and still do) that Jon Hunstman was the only primary candidate who could actually beat Obama with a fundamentally conservative economic message. But there was no escaping the fact that the GOP's al-Qeada wing was never going to abandon their own retarded dogma to the point that it would allow a Huntsman nomination.
That left Romney, who at least wouldn't foundationally destroy the party and keep the election sort of close.
Republicans could afford a Goldwater adventure when there was a deep bench of electable candidates waiting in the wings for 1968. I'm not so sure that's true today.
Of the possible 2016 candidates out there, only Bobby Jindal is making the right noises. The rest of the of the commentariat is screaming that Romney wasn't stupid enough. When these people aren't actually defending Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock, they're slamming them for being too honest.
These people are singularly incapable learning a lesson unless the bootheel of history drives it directly into their fucking foreheads.
If the Republican party is going to avoid being sent to the dustbin of history, they're going to have to get absolutely destroyed with one of their Taliban figureheads, like Rick Santorum or Sarah Palin the next time out. If those people are allowed to continue propagating the myth that sane people can't be elected, the party will be finished in twenty years, and probably ten.
Back in the fall of 1993, I had an interesting argument with a friend of mine who said that there was a permanent "liberal wave" in modern politics. Bill Clinton had just beaten George H.W Bush and the Progressive Conservative majority government in Canada had been reduced to two seats.
I argued that he was wrong at the time, and history proved me right.
I'm not sure I'd make the same case today.
As for Mitt Romney, he'll do far better in the eyes of history if he starts telling the truth for once in his fucking life. He got beat not by the "47%" (and the fact that he'd double down on that devastating meme tells you everything you need to know about why he lost) but because Obama ran an almost technically flawless campaign.
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