The Republican Party is facing soul-searching following the crushing loss in 2012. Should the party be more gay friendly? Move to the center on key social issues, like abortion and gun control? The Republican Party has turned into a tired bastion of rich, old, white men who control Wall Street and contort national policy to suit their minute yet elite interests.
Then there is the Hispanic vote. If only Mitt Romney had spoken more Spanish, had not said “self-deport,” and had demonstrated an assiduousness to reach out to people whose skin color was darker than his.
Conservative columnist Byron York ran the numbers. If Romney had pulled off a greater share of the Hispanic vote – President George W. Bush's 44 percent in 2004, or as much as President Obama's 71 percent even – he still would have lost the election.
Conservative columnist Anne Coulter was more gentle about the outcome (in large part because she had supported Romney long before other conservatives grudgingly endorsed the Establishment candidate). She concluded that any incumbent President is hard to defeat, especially when no one is dragging down the person in office through primary and third-party challenges. In 2002, and to a lesser extent 2004, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader siphoned away votes from the Democratic Party, helping to nudge more electoral votes to the Bush column.
It Would Not Have Mattered
No matter how many Hispanics would have voted for Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts still would have lost. Why? The white vote did not turn out in November. The low-voter turnout also explains why Democrats won the U.S. Senate seat in a number of very winnable races, including North Dakota and Montana. Despite the onerous gaffes of the candidates in Missouri and Indiana, Romney was a wet blanket on the entire national conference.
White men and women in the United States were turned off by a candidate who would have reintegrated American forces into Afghanistan.
They did not trust a man who had tacked so far to the right during the primaries, only to surge for the center once again, and show little fight while doing so. RomneyCare was on everyone's lips during the long, fraught, and long-fought primaries from the middle of 2011 until April 2012. How else can one explain a candidate as weak and marginal as Rick Santorum springing from single digits to second, then first place in Iowa, followed by jockeying back and forth, with some were taken by Newt Gingrich? ABC News speculated until April that another dark horse candidate could have stepped in to win the nomination for the GOP, and taken back the White House.
The Republican Party has to accept the unpleasant truth: Romney sucked. He sucked the enthusiasm out of the base for the whole political process. Pundits like Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan had to contort themselves to minimize the GOP Presidential candidates self-inflicting wounds:
“I am severely conservative!”
“Forty-seven percent won't vote for me.”
Romney was not a good candidate, ladies and gentlemen. Simple as that.
What Strategy?
He had no real plan for bringing down the debts and deficits damaging our country. He refused to come clean about which loopholes to eliminate in the tax code. He presented no credible plan for bringing down the cost of entitlements. Most of all, people did not believe that guy. Even he admitted that he really did not want to be President (per one of his sons).
The infuriating element of a depressed and depressing national standard-bearer is that many competitive, winnable races throughout the country were sandbagged. Scott Brown of Massachusetts would have trumped Elizabeth (Faux-cahontas) Warren without much ado. The Northern Plains states would have flipped back to Republican control without much trouble. Perhaps California today would not be saddled with a Democratic tax-and-spend supermajority if another Presidential candidate had motivated voters to get out and cast their ballots.
With this cynical appraisal in mind, conservatives and independents, Democrats and Republicans, need not worry that one-party rule is coming to California or the country, for that matter. The Republican Party does not have to take cues from liberal pundits or mainstream media mediators. New leaders like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, along with more libertarian leaning Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, along with the compelling legacies of 30 governors, will provide a front-bench of qualified, capable, compelling leaders for the future.
In the end, the aftermath of 2012 boils down to this:
Romney sucked.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a writer and blogger on issues both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A lifelong resident of Southern California, he currently lives in Torrance. He may be contacted at arthurschaper@hotmail.com, aschaper1.blogspot.com and at asheisministries.blogspot.com. Also see waxmanwatch.blogspot.com.
