Why Romney Lost
Conservatives are suggesting lots of reasons. The media was in the tank for Obama. Hurricane Sandy robbed Romney of his “momentum.” Romney did not vilify Obamacare enough. Obama and/or pollsters “suppressed the vote.” And so forth. Of course, that’s all crap. The media, as always, tried as hard as possible to make the election a horse race, which gets them ratings. Romney’s “momentum” had died well before Hurricane Sandy, and was not his momentum but instead Obama’s self-injury in Denver, from which he recovered. Romney could not vilify Obamacare more than it had been vilified, and people were beginning to tire of the claim, not to mention Romney’s case was weak because of Romneycare. And as for suppressing the vote, that’s a contemptible fabrication from a party that put forth the most powerful drive to suppress the vote in living memory.
So, why did Romney lose?
To me, the reason was simple: Republicans didn’t have anyone competent who could pass through their sickeningly twisted nomination process, and once Romney was through it, it turned out that he was a rich, elitist, out-of-touch, lying, flip-flopping Mormon Gordon Gekko who spat on poor people (the “47%”), proposed raising taxes on everyone but the rich (for whom he would cut taxes deeply, again), gave no details on any of his ludicrous and fraudulent plans, and chose an extremist VP candidate famous for idolizing an radical atheist and wanting to kill Medicare and Social Security.
I mean, seriously, what does it take to lose a presidential campaign nowadays?
It’s not surprising at all that Romney lost. What was amazing is that he came as close as he did to winning. Not too close, but enough to make your hair stand on end when you think about what people could see he was and yet voted for him anyway.
Is it just my imagination, or do politicians in the GOP have to regularly say and do things today which would have destroyed the career of any politician just thirty years ago?
Update: This helps make the case. I am pretty certain you could not make a video like this of Obama, not without using selective editing to fake half the stuff, and even then the video would only be about 20 seconds long and still not half as damning as this.
Agree with you, it is amazing that Romney could get as many votes as he did, given his position on things.
The fact that he was a hyper-liar is mind boggling on several levels, but given his and Ryan’s real positions that they held, they had to constantly lie about what they wanted and what their intentions were.
All of this goes back to the problem of what is now being called ‘extractive economics’ (versus inclusive economics): concentration of wealth and power has and always will lead to decline and collapse of nations, empires and civilizations.
(extractive means – exclusive and exploitative of those being excluded)
Correspondingly inclusive economics is associated with the rise of every great society in human history. After World War II economic growth for the globe doubled in less than 30 years – there was more economic growth in those 30 years than the prior 11,000 years of human history. This is because, any country where there were American troops at the end of WWII enjoyed a (more liberal) version of the New Deal. In East Asia you had massive land reform empowering the masses, paving the way for explossion in economic demand, fueling industrialization.
In the United States GNP doubled and every class advanced roughly the same. The wealthy were taxed heavily. The country had the political will to fund advances in Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other Great Society programs, fight a war in Vietnam and put a man on the moon (in these last two were not mutually exclussive – in St. Louis, McDonnell Aircraft built over 5,000 F4 Phantom IIs AND capsules for the Gemini program).
Since 1972, the media wage has been flat, though GNP has gone up over 150%. All those increases in rent flowing to the 1% while their taxes have steadily declined. And men on the moon? In outer space? These and other great advances were set aside because a lack of political will.
The electorate that have supported Republicans since at least 1980 were sold a bill of goods. Now, the numbers of people who are being excluded and exploited are becoming a permanent majority.
As time goes by, this is going to be come much clearer to see for the ordinary person.
I do think that many more people would have voted Democrat if a black man wasn’t heading the ticket. But the the influence of angry white males is in permanent decline.
Slowly, we can see that the pendulum is swinging away from the Movement Conservatives. It’s just impossible for a majority of people to vote for the economic imprisonment of themselves. All the Republican tactics and strategies were about hiding the fact that voting for Republicans would worsen the average persons well being. It didn’t work with a majority of people, and that majority is likely to grow in the future.
“Not too close”
pretty close actually, given Obama lost 1 out of 10 of his 2008 voters.
Romney needing ~70,000 votes in FL is 35,000 Obama voters voting for Romney, 1 out of 120 Obama voters.
For Ohio, give the Libertarian votes to Romney and he’s 60,000 votes away, or 30,000 Obama switchers, 1 out of 90 Obama voters.
Same thing for VA and Romney needs 35,000 Obama voters out of 1.9M, 1 out of 50.
That puts Romney just one state away from winning — 3 EVs!
eg. 16,000 Obama voters in NH — 1 out of 23 switching to Romney/Ryan.
That was the margin I guess, 1 out of 23 people voting Obama instead of Romney.
Graphically:
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http://seattletimes.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/politicsnorthwest/files/2012/11/tzr_elexresults.jpg
is Washington, but a picture of the election regardless. We’re a bitterly divided nation still, just like the 1850s.
In the United States GNP doubled and every class advanced roughly the same. The wealthy were taxed heavily. The country had the political will to fund advances in Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other Great Society programs,
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=cGR
shows productivity gains were spectacular 1950-1970, growing +$10,000/worker each decade.
1970s topped out a bit with only 10% growth, but job growth was +20M jobs (that’s 166,000 jobs every month.
Productivity was pretty good in the 1980s and really good since.
We’re a lot wealthier now on the whole compared to 1950 — better houses, cars, infrastructure — but we have wasted so much of this growth, and all of this growth since 1980 has come with immense debt take-on:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=cGT
is total debt / wages and shows the 1990s were mostly an honest decade wrt debt leverage (we were leveraging up personally but deleveraging public debt).
2000-on has been complete BS on the leverage front — we were just borrowing our way to a better distributed economy.
It’s just impossible for a majority of people to vote for the economic imprisonment of themselves.
Actually, I think it’s really easy. Romney was just a horrible salesman with enough skeletons to stock a Halloween store. What I fear in 2016 is a smooth-talking mofo like Huckabeee selling the small-government snake oil.
Or a hard-ass like Petraeus serving as a stern father figure punishing us for our failings. I’d like to think Obama moving him to D/CIA in late 2011 was a two-step to taking him out of national politics — 1) get him out of the Army protective bubble and out of his uniform 2) whack him with fatal dirt.
We need to raise taxes $1.2T/yr in this country:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=cGW
Income taxes are $1.7T. This basically means we need to almost *double* taxes in this country — +70% actually.
We can do it if we double the top 5%’s income tax burden, that would raise $500B. And get another $500B from the $1.6T corporate after-tax incomes today.
The middle class could take a $200B tax rise or spending cut I guess.
But that just closes the current gap, it’s still going to expand as the baby boom turns 65. Right now the peak birth year is 55, so they’re just 10 years away.
Ryan’s voucher idea was to just write off the back half of the baby boom as unsupportable in the current tax system, and that’s entirely right.
Now we have to convince the people that the 5% need to pay a helluva lot more taxes. Problem is they own the media and dozens of propaganda mills to create the BS to fight that with.