Lies, liars, and missed opportunities

Robert Knight identifies the reasons Romney lost the election to a vastly inferior candidate who conclusively demonstrated an inability to set priorities and, to use his own words, "get things done".  It's one thing for a candidate to run a campaign based on lies and distortions of an opponents' beliefs and record, it's an entirely different and inexcusable thing to let these lies and distortions stand as Romney did over and over much to the consternation of true conservatives.  Here is a partial list of both the lies and distortions and the missed opportunities by Romney.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

Maybe not. Mired in the worst recovery since the Great Depression, with unemployment near 8 percent, companies laying off workers over Obamacare, a $16 trillion debt and gasoline at double the 2008 price, America still re-elected Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney ran a single-issue campaign: the economy, stupid.

The missed opportunities were endless. After CNN’s Candy Crowley silenced him in the second debate on the Benghazi attack, Mr. Romney declined to expose Mr. Obama’s shocking lies and transparent cover-up. He also declined to educate Americans about the administration’s brazen lawlessness, especially that of the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Labor Relations Board.

What about Supreme Court appointments? The XL Keystone Pipeline? The numerous “czars” appointed without Senate approval? Obamacare? Obama’s flip-flop on marriage?

Meanwhile, 42 percent of voters in the Fox News exit pollsaid Mr. Obama’s response to Hurricane Sandy was an important factor. Of those, more than 65% voted for Mr. Obama. Even if these voters were unduly impressed by the photo ops and Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s fulsome praise, it means that character still matters. Obama passed the last-minute leadership test, assisted by a media blackout of FEMA’s inadequate response and the scandalous non-coverage of the Benghazi coverup.

Many policy areas in which outright lies have been the coin of the realm could have been exposed if GOP consultants had not insisted on playing only Monopoly. Mr. Romney broke through the media fog in the first debate, showing the public a decent, more rounded candidate. He wasn’t the soulless, cancer-patient-killing corporate raider in the $100 million worth of smear ads that had run for months. But it wasn’t enough.

So, what do we have, aside from a nightmare scenario involving the pending makeup of the Supreme Court, half of the American people’s de facto embrace of socialism, the survival of Obamacare and the Harry Reid-led U.S. Senate, and the Republicans’ continued control of 30 governorships and the U.S. House?

Well, we have some important lessons.

* It’s not just “the economy, stupid.” If it were, Romney would have won in a walk.

* A moderate Republican from the Northeast who presided over the creation of “gay marriage” and pioneered Obamacare in his own state is not the best candidate to counter the Left’s relentless promotion of moral and fiscal insanity.

* Big Bird’s Food Stamp Army is for real. Millions turned out to ensure that the government will support them from other people’s earnings. As Obamacare hits harder and companies lay off more employees, it’s hard to see how this will decrease anytime soon.

* Featuring minority faces on primetime doesn’t help the GOP’s demographic problem. Republicans have got to get to know the communities and make the conservative case to them.

* It’s okay to cast your vote based entirely on race, as long as neither you or the candidate are white. Despite endorsing the anti-biblical notion of same-sex “marriage,” Mr. Obama still garnered 93 percent of the African-American vote, slightly less than in 2008. You could say it was “the economy, stupid,” except that the black community has been hardest hit under Mr. Obama’s policies.

* The media, who are unrepentant hack partisans, continue to worsen. They suppressed, Soviet-style, anything remotely unflattering to Mr. Obama, allowing him to continue the absurd fiction that his failures are George W. Bush’s fault.

I talked with a 20-something grad student in the Midwest (she’s afraid to say in print which school) who told me that her female classmates were for Obama because they believed that “if a Republican gets in, he’ll take away the rights of women.”

None mentioned the economy, the student said. One classmate did not know that the U.S. ambassador to Libya had been slain. All they knew is that Romney was out “to control their bodies,” the young woman said. “The Obama campaign and the media have been able to make people believe total lies.”

Indeed, the single-women and “youth vote” went for Obama again. It’s not surprising that after years of school indoctrination under left-wing teachers unions and a steady diet of music, TV and films that attack faith and promote sexual license, that a majority of young voters buy into government-subsidized sexual anarchy. They’ve come to regard church-going Christians as crazed scolds who might interfere with their limitless entitlements. Sandra Fluke is no fluke. The phony “war on women” found eager ears.

This was not inevitable. Nor were the “gay marriage” victories in four states. It happened because the party of traditional values hides under a green eyeshade. Being the Silent Majority worked once upon a time, but now GOP candidates must learn how to make the full conservative case. They cannot cede powerful cultural issues to the Left. They need to make a compelling defense of traditional morality, without which free enterprise will die. It’s not that hard – start by noting the consequences of moral decline. The same goes for the rule of law, without which diplomats die, constitutional liberties are lost, cities are ruined, and guns get shipped with murderous results to Mexico.

The Romney campaign has shown, decisively, that it’s a mistake to politely ignore lies and abuses of power. Maybe I don’t watch enough TV, but I didn’t see any political ads about the Fast and Furious scandal, Benghazi, Obamacare’s attack on religious freedom, Obama’s chilling “After my election, I have more flexibility” remark to the Russian president, or the outrageous order to Boeing not to build a plant in South Carolina. “You can’t build that” would have been a nice lead-in to an ad about government tyranny under Obama.

The GOP put all its marbles on the economy. It surrendered lots of marbles to people who long ago lost theirs.

ADDED:  Thomas Sowell is probably quoted more often than any other conservative pundit on this blog, and for good reason as he makes the conservative case clearly and without hesitation, as he does here supporting the case made above by Robert Knight:

The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.

If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare.

With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year award goes to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for his column of January 24, 2012, titled: “The GOP Deserves to Lose.”

Despite reciting a litany of reasons why President Obama deserved to be booted out of the White House, Stephens said, “Let’s just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose.”

Advertisement

To me, the Republican establishment is the eighth wonder of the world. How they can keep repeating the same mistakes for decades on end is beyond my ability to explain.

Bret Stephens said, back at the beginning of 2012, that Mitt Romney was one of the “hollow men,” and that voters “usually prefer the man who stands for something.”

Yet this is not just about Mitt Romney. He is only the latest in a long series of presidential candidates backed by a Republican establishment that seems convinced that ad hoc “moderation” is where it’s at — no matter how many of their ad hoc moderates get beaten by even vulnerable, unknown, or discredited Democrats.

Back in 1948, when the Democratic party splintered into three parties, each one with its own competing presidential candidate, Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey was considered a shoo-in.

Best-selling author David Halberstam described what happened: “Dewey’s chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one. His major speeches, wrote the Louisville Courier Journal, could be boiled down ‘to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead . . . ’”

Does this sound like a more recent Republican presidential candidate?

Meanwhile, President Harry Truman was on the attack in 1948, with speeches that had many people saying, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” He won, even with the Democratic vote split three ways.

But, to this day, the Republican establishment still goes for pragmatic moderates who feed pablum to the public, instead of treating them like adults.

It is not just Republican presidential candidates who cannot be bothered to articulate a coherent argument, instead of ad hoc talking points. Have you yet heard House Speaker John Boehner take the time to spell out why Barack Obama’s argument for taxing “millionaires and billionaires” is wrong?

It is not a complicated argument. Moreover, it is an argument that has been articulated many times in plain English by conservative talk-show hosts and by others in print. It has nothing to do with being worried about the fate of millionaires or billionaires, who can undoubtedly take care of themselves.

What we all should be worried about are high tax rates driving American investments overseas, when there are millions of Americans who could use the jobs that those investments would create at home.

Yet Obama has been allowed to get away with the emotional argument that the rich can easily afford to pay more, as if that is the issue. But it will be the issue if no one says otherwise.

One of the recent sad reminders of the Republicans’ tendency to leave even lies and smears unanswered was a television replay of an old interview with the late Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was destroyed by character assassination.

Judge Bork said that he was advised not to answer Ted Kennedy’s wild accusations because those false accusations would discredit themselves. That supposedly sophisticated advice cost the country one of the great legal minds of our time — and left us with a wavering Anthony Kennedy in his place on the Supreme Court.

Some people may take solace from the fact that there are some articulate Republicans like Marco Rubio who may come forward in 2016. But with Iran going nuclear and North Korea developing missiles that can hit California, it may be too late by then.