Sunday, December 23, 2012

Picking Through The (Delicious) Ashes

This article detailing the failings of the Romney campaign leading up to the 2012 election is, to me, like french fries wrapped in strips of bacon that were cooked in grease heated by Hendrix licks.

Yet, in the midst of all the Romney staffers' squinting guiltily in the bright glare of 20/20 hindsight--"we should have highlighted his character! we should have spent more on our ground game! oh, oh!"--one thing that people seem to have forgotten is...Romney was a terrible nominee for the current Republican Party.

Let's revisit the two biggies.  First, Romney's a Mormon, a religion which, up until they knew they were stuck with him, most Republicans considered about as Christian as the Branch Davidians.  In a party that is, if not built on, at least leaning drunkenly for support on, the Christianist factions at work in the modern U.S., this is a problem.

Second, not only was he the governor of a blue state (not a firing offense in and of itself) but his signature achievement, the health care law, had to be forgotten--Orwell-style--lest it remind the base that Romney paved the way for the Affordable Care Act, the legislative achievement of Obama's that made Republican's froth at the mouth because it was...an achievement...of Obama's.  Having your own nominee exude faint whiffs of the very thing that sends your peeps into an irrational, inchoate rage is not--pardon the expression--starting in the black.

So, you strip away Romney's faith and his signature achievement in public service, and all you're left with is a rich white guy.  And while this alone is apparently enough to make you the standard-bearer of the modern Republican Party, it is no longer enough, thankfully, to make you the leader of the free world.

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