That’s the biggest argument for him, but I don’t buy it, and neither does Richard Miniter. The entire field is just awful, and likely to give the president a second term, because none of the Republican A team chose to run this year. It’s quite depressing.
6 thoughts on “Is Mitt Romney Electable?”
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The GOP nomination process in 2008 was abysmal, and it appears that the guy who finished second in that process will be presented as the best option for 2012.
While I believe that any of the four remaining GOP candidates will be better than Obama (and that is a low bar indeed, a bar that each of them barely can clear), I am beginning to resign myself to four more years of the incumbent.
Incredibly, I find myself considering as consolation that after four more years the conservatives in America will be so outraged with the current spineless GOP that perhaps the greater part of them will be sent back to the private sector.
There is no GOP A team. The people who sat out the race this year would be just as bad; they all have glaring weaknesses. It’s hard to be a credible presidential candidate without at least a few years of political experience, but the mainstream views of the pre-2010 GOP are anathema in the party base today. That leaves you with fools who actually believe the new religion (Cain, Bachmann, Perry, Paul) and frauds who pretend to (Romney, Gingrich).
The talk radio/Fox News/tea party right convinced itself that anyone could beat Obama, so they had the luxury of insisting on ideological purity. That scared away heretics like Christie. Now they’re stuck with a choice between two hypocrites.
Maybe the gop should use the criteria the dems used in 2008 but the last few years has shown us picking the person with the best abs isn’t the way to go.
The moment an exit pollster started noticing the trend towards “I voted for him because I think he has the best chance of winning”, you know the democratic process DOES NOT WORK. It’s Statistics 101.. if you tell voters the results of previous votes you will bias the future votes. JOIN THE WINNING TEAM is the only slogan any politician ever needs under this system.
Trent, I think you are wrong. Consider that in the recent past, Canada’s Conservative Party formed a minority government. The Conservatives were preferred by a minority of voters, but they could still get in, because Canadians typically were idealistic and refused to vote strategically, even when Liberal Party voters would have been happier with NDP candidates than Conservative Party candidates, and when NDP voters would have been happier with Liberal Party candidates than Conservative candidates. A whole bunch of websites sprung up urging Canadians to vote strategically — google “voting strategically” and “canada” to see them.
And here’s an academic study:
http://www.probeinternational.org/old_drupal/UrbanNewSite/strategicvoting.pdf
You can also google for online discussions of “the Buckley Rule” (always vote for the most electable conservative).
Trent,
That is why the Founding Fathers created an Electoral College to select Presidents, to insulate the process from the passions of the people, and it appears their greatest fears are coming true in this election. A return to the spirit of the electoral college would good if there was some practical way to do so.
One option, and a crazy one, would be if some group just ran individuals for the position of elector, whom technically voters are actually voting for, under the banner of “The Electoral College” party. Then the electors would actually pick the President when they meet, instead of just rubber stamping the election results. Yes, its a crazy idea, but the Founding Fathers recognized the limitations of popular voting and how easily it is to mislead them, which you illustrate, which is why they limited popular voting to the House of Representatives.