Romney was, and most Republicans are, amateurs when it came to explaining them:
Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things long before the game began, and now just need to execute.
Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum-wage rate, so that it would rise automatically with inflation.
Yes, I face palmed when I heard that. Romney was no Reagan, because it was clear that he had spent too much time learning business, and far too little understanding policy and its effects (otherwise, he’d have never done RomneyCare). He had no core political philosophy, and it showed. He is smart, and a quick learner (he actually did start to speak conservatism like it wasn’t a second language in the waning days of the campaign), but he didn’t learn fast enough.
I wonder if he may try again? He’s a very determined man.
Then there’s this as well:
One of the secrets of Barack Obama’s success is his ability to say things that will sound both plausible and inspiring to uninformed people, even when they sound ridiculous to people who know the facts. Apparently he believes the former outnumber the latter, and the election results suggest that he may be right.
Since most of the media will never expose Obama’s fallacies and falsehoods, it is all the more important for Republicans to do so themselves. Nor is it necessary for every Republican candidate for every office to become an expert on every controversial issue.
Just as particular issues are farmed out to different committees in Congress, so Republicans can set up committees of outside experts to inform them on particular issues.
For example, a committee on income and poverty could be headed by an expert like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This is a subject on which demonstrable falsehoods have become the norm, and one on which devastating refutations in plain English are readily available from a number of sources.
Another example would be space policy. I know someone who’d be happy to do it, if I could raise funds for it. But it’s not important enough, apparently.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Michael Walsh:
Principles, not programs, should be the battle cry. Romney’s foolish complaint that Obama won by giving away free stuff plays right back into the hands of the konsultant korps that lost him the election in the first place. If Mitt had a vision for America wider than the cramped, pinched and perpetually gray New England horizon, he sure didn’t show it. He didn’t show it because he was incapable of conceiving it, and there clearly was no one on his insular Boston team capable of supplying one. Instead, we got the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor, which in the end proved to be the candidate’s epitaph.
Yes. He was a principled man in his personal life, perhaps more so than most politicians, but he had no political principles.
Unfortunately true…
Is it that the Republicans are amateurs?
Or is it, that they SO need to ‘look’ like they are playing the game fairly, that they are so above board, that they simply refuse to yell “BS!”, when the Dems start spreading BS in general, or lie about them. I mean you don’t want to use the “S” word in mixed company I guess!
But to not yell long and loud when you are accused of murder, seems pretty stupid and weak spined to me. Likewise, when everyone who votes for your ‘side’ is accused of wanting to kill grandma, wanting dirty air, wanting dirty water, and the ‘leaders’ of said Party don’t defend their supporters, it makes many of us hopping mad.
It’s got me mad enough after the LAST two defeats (and the ‘choices’ we wound up with too) that I think it’s time for a new party, new party leadership, and a new group of party talking heads.
They need to learn how to say, “You’re so full of shit it’s coming out your ears” but in a nice way.
There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch…
Yes. Yes. Yes. Emphatically Yes to infinity.
Think about it. Obama was raised from childhood to be the master of strawmen. We need to take a gun to this knife fight.
Establish a school for republican politicians. Raise them all (assuming basic aptitude) to be Reagan. Keep it quiet. Debate (w/humor) is the core study. Economics, science and history need to be prominent (and not the revisionist versions.)
Corruption has had these schools forever (Skulls, etc.) It’s time the good guys fought fire with fire.
Exposure of Obama’s fallacies and falsehoods be raciss.
As a Catholic, I do not and may not hate Romney. He is a Mormon, but I have faith that he will someday be praying a prayer of repentance to the true Jesus.
The problem isn’t even with Mormons as a group. They had the right idea when they lit out for Utah. They should stay there.
Romney should have never left his own people. A Mormon can not lead a Christian nation.
If it makes you uncomfortable to stare this fact in the face, I sympathize. Doing so makes me uncomfortable, too. But I refuse to take refuge in the comfort of platitudes. I insist on facing the truth, no matter how ugly, unpleasant, or “bigoted’” the truth may be.
And I can do that — today. Today, stating the truth is merely offensive. Today, I’m a mere “bigot”.
Soon, however, it will become illegal.
I look forward to becoming a thought criminal.
Luce Brewis is, as always, entirely correct.
Chitty. We must hunt down this loosy broosy! Chitty. Call out the children smeller! Bang! Bang!
What about a pro-Muslim atheist? Can he ‘lead a Christian nation’?
I would agree except the United States has no leader. I had no problem voting for Mitt, since all I wanted was someone to manage the executive branch of the federal level of gov’t.
If you need a leader, then move to North Korea.
I thought this was a representative republic? My mistake, where do I go to bow down and prostrait myself in worship of these leaders?
Republicans can set up committees of outside experts to inform them on particular issues.
Outside groups should set up their own “information services” that makes sure their most outspoken and visible supporters know the right talking points and avoid the “gotcha” questions they are destined to get. For example, in the future the Pro-Life/Anti-Abortion groups should inform people alike Akin and Mourdock how to not end their Senate careers before they start.
Also, the in the last six years the GOP has demonstrated dramatically that their House members should not be trying to run for the Senate. Just how many of them have lost what should have been winnable seats? Seems like close to a dozen by now.
Nobody should be “running for” the Senate. People should have to be committed to it, by a judge, after a finding of irreversible idiocy.
The senate, now that it’s by popular vote as never intended, is just the attack dog for an executive that leads from behind.
It’s not a coincidence we have a same party exec and senate and an opposing party house.
It’s worth remembering that the high point of Romney’s performance in the first debate was: “Mr. President, I’ve been in business for twenty-five years, and I have no idea what your even talking about!”
That was the only Reaganesque moment that comes to mind.
We need that kind of light-footed approach. The Al Smith dinner did give me some hope, but Romney shied away from attacking on issues in the other two debates and lost them both.
He couldn’t. He’s not really a conservative. For him to attempt a robust defense of conservative arguments would have been clumsy – it was a foreign language to him. He didn’t think in conservative principles, so he would have had to repeat from memory or translate the responses he first thought of.
And, so, like all of the middle-of-the-road candidates in the past 60 years from the GOP, he lost. Remember, even Nixon ran as a conservative in 1968, irrespective of his “we’re all Keynsians now” once he was in office.
Over the past century, the only GOP presidential candidate that did not run as a conservative and won was Dwight Eisenhower. He was a war hero, when the electorate thought that meant something (no “aging-hippie” demographic in sight in 1952).
For starters no one, that is NO one who has previously run for election and been defeated, whether in the general or the primaries needs to clutter up the candidate pool in future. We’ve all seen how well the ‘my turn’ GOP establishment candidates have done (Dole, McCain, Romney, et al). I want fresh meat or I stay home and be damned to all of them. There might be a spot in a future administration for them as apparatchiks but they’ve shot their bolts as candidates for elective office.