| Sweet weeping Jesus, someone who fancies himself a man wrote this. If Romney had won despite having to take on both a president willing to say and do anything to hold his job and a media that allowed him to get away with it, it would have been an historic acheivement.
You want to know why Mitt Romney lost? Because he tied himself to the Nolan Finley's and Henry Payne's of the world and had to campaign from somewhere in cloud cuckoo land. I'm not the one who brought that phrase to this year's election, mind you. That's how The Economist -- the antiseptic conservative British business journal -- described his deficit-reduction plan. Not only do they believe in policy initiatives that make no sense to the average person not versed in wingnutese (Solyndra!), but they also believed the bullshit that going into the last weekend that the election was actually Romney's to lose. Meanwhile, the rest of us who live in reality looked at swing state polls and deduced that in the Electoral College, where the president is actually elected, Romney had as good a shot at winning the Oval Office as do the Lions of winning this year's Super Bowl (hell, could happen, 'cause the Lions are at least competitive these days). It has nothing to do with the media or Obama's willingness to "say anything." Obama's willingness to say anything has nothing on Romney's, who might change position by day and depending on who he was talking to. Back in the day, he might have gotten away with that, but this is 2012 and we have the Internet. You can actually see what candidates are saying in real time and it's usually preserved for at least six months so if you reverse yourself for no good reason people with working memories can point that out. Changing positions and saying anything to get elected was really Romney's selling point. He lost because, at the end of the day, he was a terrible candidate. He didn't connect with people, and everything he said had the feel to it of a sales pitch. Everytime he spoke to people who weren't part of his party base, he had people checking to make sure he hadn't lifted their wallets. And, this is on top of representing an ideology that is totally fucking insane. But, these people live by a simple lie they tell themselves and that it is never their fault. It's not their beliefs, or their ideas. It's always forces beyond their control that have connived to deprive them some Promise Land foreordained them in The Bible. Their candidates are always just what the doctor ordered, no matter what they were saying about them just scant months before. It's always someone else's fault. |
