***
Anybody Notice a Pattern?
By
Gail Collins
NOV 16, 2012
It appears that Mitt Romney
was a terrible presidential candidate.
O.K., some people have known
that ever since the story broke about strapping his dog on the car roof. But
now we seem to be reaching a consensus.
First, there was that matter
of losing the election. Then this week Romney told some of his donors that
while he was pursuing the “big issues,” President Obama had purchased the
support of blacks, Hispanics and young people with goodies like college loans
and health care reform. College-age women, Romney claimed, traded their votes
for “free contraceptives.”
Show them a birth control
pill and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Romney said all this in a
private conference call, so he couldn’t have suspected that it would wind up in
the media. There is no precedent whatsoever for reporters getting hold of
remarks presidential candidates make to private groups about the inherent
greediness of American voters.
Nevertheless, quite a few
Republicans thought it was a bad idea to insult the integrity of American youth
and minorities at a moment when everybody agreed that the electoral future
belonged to American youth and minorities.
“Romney, take responsibility
for being flawed candidate, w/delusional campaign w/no vision,” tweeted Ana
Navarro, a Republican strategist.
“I don’t want to rebut him
point by point. I would just say to you, I don’t believe that we have millions
and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work,” said Senator
Marco Rubio of Florida.
Florida is flooded with potential Republican presidential
candidates, the top two being Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. That’s reasonable
— except, have you noticed that things in Florida always have a tendency to get a
little weird? Is it an accident that the woman at the center of the Petraeus
scandal — the one with the financial troubles and the glamorous twin — is from Tampa? This week former
Gov. Charlie Crist officially repudiated reports in a London paper that he and the twin used to
date.
For Republicans, the mood
after the election was so bad that — I know you will be shocked to hear this —
a Republican Party official in Texas advocated
leaving the Union. “We must contest every
single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at
every opportunity,” wrote Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County
Republican Party. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of
flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our
opportunity.” (To be fair, you can’t judge an entire state by one county
political official. Although Bud Kennedy, a columnist for The Fort Worth
Star-Telegram, pointed out that Morrison had once been chosen to help screen
public school textbooks for the State Board of Education.)
Romney supporters couldn’t
believe that they had lost fairly. The Maine Republican chairman was
breathlessly reporting that “dozens, dozens of black people” had mysteriously
shown up to vote in rural areas.
Now things are calmer —
perhaps because, if they want to, Republicans can just blame everything on
Romney’s poor campaign skills. Really terrible skills! Maybe the worst
presidential candidate in American history! Well, possibly not worse than
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who got only 8 percent of the electoral vote
against Thomas Jefferson. But Thomas Jefferson had the Louisiana
Purchase. If Barack Obama had bought Manitoba, Republicans would have understood
his winning.
And actually not quite as bad
as John McCain, who got fewer electoral votes when he lost in 2008 than Romney
just got. But at least McCain has gone on to provide service to the country in
the Senate, such as his current attempts to warn the nation that we haven’t
been told enough about what happened during the tragic attack on Benghazi.
McCain was so desperate to
sound the alarm that he missed a classified briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference
complaining that he had not been given enough information. Which clearly he
hadn’t. He knew nothing! Nothing whatsoever! And what was the administration
going to do about that?
“It is essential for the
Congress to conduct its own independent assessment,” said the senator,
demanding that Congress form a special committee to look into Libya. This
would be a double benefit, helping to inform all the members who missed their
normal committee briefings while also addressing the continuing national crisis
over the shortage of congressional committees.
Afterward, McCain was his
normal even-tempered self. (“Because I have the right as a senator to have no
comment and who the hell are you to tell me if I can or not?”) But you did have
to wonder. McCain. Then Romney. Now, all these guys from Florida and Paul Ryan, who when last heard
from was blaming his ticket’s defeat on the “urban” vote.
Somewhere, there’s a
right-wing Michael Dukakis waiting for the phone to ring.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment