In an ongoing effort to find a reason for their decisive loss in the recent elections, Republicans and Conservatives are looking everywhere but at themselves. And focusing on Mitt Romney.
They blame Romney for his poor political judgement, his bonehead comments (The famous "47%" line comes to mind), his repeated flipping on issues (often flipping, flipping back and flipping again), but they don;'t seem to remember that they themselves were willing to go right along with them, even to campaign from his "new" positions, express the same sentiments.
In short, they're blaming Romney for their own inconsistency, as if it's all Romney's fault that they were forced to compromise themselves.
No one forced them. If they were unable to be true to their own convictions, it's because they were inconsistent; because they were willing to abandon their principles in order to defeat the dreaded monster called Obama. And they can't stand the thought that it was their willingness to abandon what they stood for that led to their defeat.
And to an extent it was; it's hard to have your disciples preach two (or more) completely different philosophies on two different days, then change back overnight. (People tend to see you as untrustworthy.) But there were other reasons for Romney's defeat, too many to go into here. So many that the Republican party has given up on trying to understand them; they've mostly chosen to focus on one simple explanation and ignore all others. To them, it's all Romney's fault.
Well, it would be nice to believe in the simpler explanation for Romney's failure, but politics abhors simple explanations. And if portraying all Republicans as refusing to deal with reality smacks of an overly-simple explanation...well, it is. The truth is that there are many Republicans who are looking closely at the causes of Romney's defeat, and not at all liking what they see. Looking at all the causes, that is, which is what they're going to have to do if they want to start winning elections again. I am actually hopeful that this Republican introspection will result in a genuine dialog on the issues that divide our nation.
Probably not, though; those simple explanations are just too temptingly simple.
I won't say they're throwing Romney under the bus. (On MSNBC this afternoon, one commentator called it "throwing him under the clown car.") I think it's more like Mitt being pitch-forked into the Great Republican Manure Pile.
In other words...he's truly forked.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
What We Learned: Under the Bus (NationalJournal Magazine)
GOP Throws Romney Under the Bus (Real Clear Politics)
(This seems to have been originally a NY Times op-ed column titled: Anybody Notice a Pattern?
Did Chris Christie Just Throw Romney Under the Bus? (The Raw Story)
Five 2016 Contenders Who Are Throwing Romney Under the Bus (The National Memo)
Mitt Romney Is Now Officially the Most Hated Man in America (Mother Jones)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment