Home OP-ED Romney Could Not Ever Match Obama’s Dollar Giveaways

Romney Could Not Ever Match Obama’s Dollar Giveaways

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[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