One could almost love the Teaparty for Romney's bad decisions, but no .. one couldn't .. Romney's political campaign decisions have been his and his alone .. Obama has made a number of decisions in the face of opposition from his advisers as any responsible president, with the wisdom of longer plan foresight he has, would do.
Mitt Romney is catching a lot of flack from his own side now, which seems premature; although the odds are now against him, this is by no means over. But let me say that even if he does spend election night weeping in his car elevator, his critics from the right are being unfair. Yes, he’s a pretty bad candidate — but the core problem is with his party, not with him.
What, after all, does Romney have to run on? True, he hasn’t offered specifics on his economic policies — but that’s because he can’t. The party base demands tax cuts, but also demands that he pose as a deficit hawk; he can’t do both in any coherent fashion without savaging Medicare and Social Security, yet he’s actually trying to run on the claim that Obama is the threat to Medicare. On fiscal matters, doubletalk and obfuscation are his only options.
And no, Paul Ryan didn’t show that it can be done differently. His plan was, as I’ve documented many times, a fraud. Furthermore, he’s basically a Beltway creation; the Ryan legend was based on the desire of Washington type to anoint a Serious, Honest Conservative; expose him to the wider scene, and it all falls apart.
Nor can Romney do the Bush thing of running as America’s defender against gay married terrorists.
First of all, that old standby, national security, isn’t working; between Bush’s Iraq debacle and the fact that Obama was the one who got Bin Laden, the notion that only the GOP will defend America is dead for the foreseeable future. And at this point social issues are cutting the wrong way: there are almost surely more affluent women who will vote against the party of Todd Akin than there are white working-class voters who will punish the Dems for gay marriage.
And underlying it all is the diminishing whiteness of the American electorate.
This still might be a close election thanks to the weakness of the economy, and a better candidate than Romney might have had a better chance of pulling it off. But the long-term fundamentals are not good for Republicans.
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