"His party doomed Romney" by Richard Cohen at WP

[applegrove]

His party doomed Romney


By Richard Cohen at WP


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/his-party-doomed-romney/2012/11/06/bde52c4e-288a-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_reddit

"SNIP......................................


The GOP started the presidential campaign in the black cold of the Iowa winter, appealing to evangelicals and other cultural conservatives. Good people though they may be, they are no more representative of the typical American voter than the equally good people of Beverly Hills’s ultra-liberal precincts. Romney pandered. He would end funding to Planned Parenthood and he recommended making things so tough on undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport.” Goodbye, Hispanics, and goodbye, many women.

The venue for that first contest and the field of candidates was the biggest break Barack Obama got. The entire Republican field swung to the right. One stupendously unqualified candidate after another took the early lead — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich. They took turns proposing one simplistic program for illegal aliens after another. Moderation, even compassion, was ridiculed. Gingrich wanted to do something reasonable for illegals who had been in the country for decades — held a job, belonged to a church. Nothing doing. This was a kind of war.

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About $2 billion was spent on the 2012 race, more than half of it, certainly, on Romney. The GOP would do itself — and the nation — a favor if the fat cats who put up this money started backing moderates and rebuilding the party. They could start by knocking Iowa and New Hampshire down the campaign calendar. They could begin in New York or Illinois or even Texas. Maybe that would encourage moderates to enter the race and not feel they’d be doomed by, perhaps, wondering out loud about abortion, same-sex marriage or immigration.

It took the GOP years to come to terms with the New Deal and the Fair Deal. It has taken the party a long time to come to terms with the necessities of modern government — a certain amount of deficit spending, a realistic tax rate and the occasional need to use the government to smooth the rough edges of the free-enterprise system. The auto bailout worked. It worked for the companies and their employees, and it worked splendidly for Barack Obama.

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[djean111]

1. I would suggest that being Romney doomed Romney.

What would he have done differently? There is nothing beneath what I initially assumed was a facade.
He seemed, to me, to be so unfamiliar with having to work for something that he became a whirling dervish of incomprehensible lies.
He sort of reminded me of the android in Alien.