[Editor’s Note: The activist Hovsep Fidanian of Glendale forwards the essay below with the following comment: “Take a moment to digest this most succinct, thoughtful explanation of how last month’s election demonstrates our nation is changing. The essay, by the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Yeshurun, Teaneck, NJ, appeared in the Israel National News, directed to Jewish readership. Seventy percent of American Jews voted as Democrats.”]
Dateline Teaneck, NJ – The most charitable way of explaining last month’s election results is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress.
They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Mitt Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes.
Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area.
Nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign.
Nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates.
Nor did he lose because President Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost
because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues of
liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and
aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a
majority of the electorate.
Free Stuff Wins Every Time
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff.
Every businessman knows this. That is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool.
Obama's America is one in which free stuff is given away: Adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions.
Those who, courtesy of Obama, receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both dis-incentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote.
The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47 percent of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money, “free stuff,” from the government.
Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs.
There Was No Margin for Error
Nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the end, that 47 percent leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff.
Never mind who has to pay for it. That engenders the second reason Romney lost: The inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter because most other voters – the clear majority – are unintelligent, easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads.
That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record.
He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.
(To be continued)
Mr. Fidanian may be contacted at fidan1@charter.net
