POLITICO: If Romney loses…

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83302.html




For Republicans, the only thing harder than losing to Barack Obama might be explaining it.

By any reasonable standard, Obama is a seriously vulnerable incumbent: a president overseeing a limping economy, whose party got thumped in the 2010 midterm elections, and whose signature accomplishment of health care reform is highly controversial. Whatever his strengths on national security and personal likability, Obama probably began the 2012 campaign as the most beatable sitting president in 20 years.

So if Obama manages to defeat Mitt Romney’s on Tuesday, the Republican Party will have to go through a painful process of self-examination and internal debate in order to explain what went so badly wrong.

The debate won’t just be fodder for political obsessives: it will also determine how Republicans approach governing next year and how the party campaigns in 2014, 2016 and beyond.


Even before tomorrow’s vote, the post-election arguments about why Romney lost — if he does — are beginning.

Here’s a POLITICO preview of the top arguments Republicans would use to explain and excuse it:

Mitt Romney was a historically bad candidate


If Romney wins on Tuesday, he’ll be president of the United States. If he loses, he’ll be the fall guy for the entire Republican Party.

Republicans weren’t overjoyed about nominating Romney in the first place, partly because he was a shade too moderate for their taste, but also because he was such an inept competitor in the 2008 primaries.

Win or lose, Romney has validated many of those fears, careening from misstep to misstep throughout the 2012 race. If Romney wasn’t fumbling his response to the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act ruling, he was offending the British on the eve of the London Olympics, or getting caught on tape bashing Americans who don’t pay income taxes.

On a deeper level, Romney was a problematic candidate for 2012. In a campaign still shadowed by the meltdown of the financial services industry, the GOP picked a candidate as close to Wall Street as any in history. Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said in August that Democrats had branded Romney as a “wealthy plutocrat married to a known equestrian.” He was right, and Romney may have been more vulnerable to such attacks than any other major Republican in America.

Relentlessly attacked by Democrats for his Bain Capital record, Romney never responded in an effective way. He stuck to his script that Obama hadn’t successfully steered the economy back to solid ground, failing to flesh out his own agenda until late in the game and even then only vaguely.

If Republicans come up short in Senate or House races, too, they’ll gripe about the lack of Romney coattails. It probably won’t be fair for the party to blame Romney for all its failings down-ballot, but it’ll happen anyway.

Oh, Sandy

Over the weekend — days before the election ends — Republicans were already pointing to Hurricane Sandy to explain a Romney loss. The argument goes like this: wall-to-wall news coverage of the superstorm, combined with the loss of life and uncertainty about how to campaign in the shadow of a tragedy, stalled Romney’s momentum.

Obama took charge of storm-relief efforts, visiting hard-hit sites, and Americans tend to rally around the president in a crisis. The glowing praise for Obama from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a top Romney surrogate, also didn’t help the Romney cause.


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Republicans weren’t overjoyed about nominating Romney in the first place, partly because he was a shade too moderate for their taste, but also because he was such an inept competitor in the 2008 primaries.

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Romney is not a shade too moderate. Romney's problem is he is not "angry" enough. The dems have cornered the market on "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it any more". Whatever "it" is.

 

All true, but you wouldn't know it listening to the MSM. Obama is the best thing since sliced bread listening to the MSM. Had they done their job of properly investigating and reporting on any number of topics, Obama wouldn't stand a chance. Of course, had they done that he never would have been elected in the first place. McCain had no chance, but we would have seen another President named Clinton for sure had the media done their job properly.
Considering how in the tank the media is for Obama, I'm surprised Romney is close at all. People are lazy and won't dig for the facts. They fall in whatever line the talking heads tell them to. Obama wins as a result.

 

Dear politico spare us the campaign autopsy on why romney lost.

when marion barry won re election in DC, chris rock summed it up perfectly, how bad do you have to be to lose to a crack head.

Obama is our crack head.