In 2008, Mitt Romney ran as the guy to the right of John McCain, which was not too hard given McCain’s record. The trouble for Romney was that he was not much of a conservative, by anyone’s reckoning so the party splintered. Evangelicals could not stomach a Mormon so they lined up behind their coreligionist, Mike Huckabee. McCain had the party bosses behind him, who thought having a black president was too important to wage a serious challenge in the general.
In 2012, Romney re-purposed himself into Robo-Conservative. His programming was combed through for any defects and bugs so that no matter which buttons you pushed, out popped the standard “conservative” response. It was a bit creepy watching a guy from West World run for president, but they say we will be ruled over by robots soon enough so it was good practice. The thing with Romney is that he said the right things, but no one believed him.
That’s the problem with “evolution” in politics. If you start out as a gun enthusiast who tried to bargain with the gun-grabbers, but evolved into a 2A absolutist, people understand your journey and they believe you. If you start out as a gun-grabber and then suddenly change positions, you better have a damned good story. Otherwise, you’re worse than wrong, you’re a liar.
The Romney career is a great example. For twenty years he kept evolving to meet the situation in which he found himself as a candidate. It was not that he evolved as a candidate that got him in trouble. It was that voters understood he would never stop evolving and that once in office he could turn out to be anything or nothing. To paraphrase Malcolm X, Romney believed in nothing so he would fall for anything.
Fiorina has the same problem, but it is not quite as evident to the voters. I pointed out the other day that she is a stalking horse for the party bosses. They are tarting her up to walk the same streets as Trump, hoping she can lure enough of his vote away to sink his candidacy. Some guy at Bloomberg, who maybe reads this blog or can see the obvious, has a similar take on the Fiorina show.
Carly Fiorina is looking like the insider’s outsider candidate.
On the surface, it’s clear why the national political mood has swept her, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson to the top of Republican presidential polls. A former California technology executive, she has never held elected office, a profile that a plurality of Americans say they prefer to a candidate with gubernatorial or U.S. Senate experience.
Yet, as she recently demonstrated when otherwise-feuding Republican lawmakers showed up to see her on Capitol Hill, she also has Washington credentials that have won her fans inside the Beltway, even as she seeks the nomination with a strategy that makes the GOP establishment a frequent punching bag.
I always thought that the problem with Romney, in the end, was that he was an insult to the voters. The people who championed Romney just assumed that the voters were too stupid to think about it too closely so they would line up behind him as their betters instructed. Most did, but many were disgusted by it all and stayed home. Whether or not it was enough to swing the result is debatable, but it was enough to be debatable.
Now the same folks that were ready to sell us Jeb Bush are now, in response to the revolt on the Right, selling Carly! Fiorina as the antidote to what ails the American Right. She is making many of the same noises that the angry rubes in hooterville find attractive in Trump, but she’s not one of those dirt people the modern GOP finds so disgusting. The trouble is, she is just Mitt Romney in drag.
Abortion is one of those issues that is a litmus test issue. If you think it is a barbaric act, you are never in favor of anything that makes it more attractive or available. There’s no wiggle room there. You can allow for its legality and acknowledge the moral ambiguity in certain circumstances, but you do so through gritted teeth. If you were waving the Planned UnParenthood banner around, your conversion to the pro-life cause better have happened on the road to Damascus. Otherwise, you’re just adding “liar” to your list of defects.
Coincidentally, abortion was the issue that really hamstrung Romney as he could never come up with a plausible answer for why he kept changing his opinion. By plausible, I mean one that did not indicate he was a soulless sociopath who would say anything to get elected. Fiorina is a more gifted liar than Romney, having climbed the greasy pole of corporate politics, which requires great skill at apple polishing. But her polling suggests she is not catching on with voters outside the Acela Corridor.
Placing the Carly! phenomenon in the timeline with Romney, the picture that emerges is of a party that has no idea why it is a party anymore. All they know is they are not Democrats. The Democrats are not much better as they are just a collection of fads designed to piss off the squares in normalville. One party is a revolt against commonsense, the other is a response to that revolt, with neither having anything to offer beyond hysterics.
Fiorina
How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina:
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-steve-jobs-fleeced-carly-fiorina-79d1380663de
You have one party rule. We have it out here on the Left Coast, but it’s because they elect Dems. There are pockets of resistance, but soon the entire coast will be like California. There’s no reason for a two party system, if you don’t have an opposition party.
Wasn’t Obama more of an insult to the voters? Much, much more? Look what the purists have wrought.
the picture that emerges is of a party that has no idea why it is a party anymore. All they know is they are not Democrats. The Democrats are not much better as they are just a collection of fads designed to piss off the squares in normalville. One party is a revolt against commonsense, the other is a response to that revolt, with neither having anything to offer beyond hysterics.
We’ve been here before. The old “party that has no idea why it’s a party” was the Whigs, who seemed to exist only to “oppose” the Democrats…. whose only purpose was to kick the secession can a bit further down the road each election cycle. The only issue anyone wanted to talk about was slavery, and that’s the one topic both parties used all their considerable talents to keep muzzled.
The Whigs, of course, ceased to exist before the election of 1856. And the election after that one was a bit problematic…..
This is not to say we’re headed for a civil war. (Personally, my money is on an openly fascist law-n-order party emerging in the wake of huge anti-immigrant pogroms and end-of-the-EBT-cards riots. Think Trump, if he got an ideology and some stormtroopers). I’m merely noting that our heavily-armed population, with its well-established revolutionary tradition, has been in a very similar situation in the past. We’ve been through this sham of “representative government” before; it didn’t end well.
“Personally, my money is on an openly fascist law-n-order party emerging in the wake of huge anti-immigrant pogroms and end-of-the-EBT-cards riots.”
Same here. Tyrants are often a response to disorder. When people on the right warn of a “man on a white horse”, I think people imagine it will be some sort of military leader to whom the overburdened and outraged middle class flocks to protect them from (and punish) the libertines and loafers who’ve made life impossible. But it could happen the other way around. It could be the elites who look for some strongman to defend them from the appalling hordes of commoners yelling for their heads. Isn’t that how Napoleon got to the top? He didn’t lead a revolution of commoners; he was hired by the government to save them, and then turned the tables and took the top job for himself. History is full of elites who end up outsmarting themselves.
It could go either way. And re: Napoleon, the scariest thing is that even we pessimists haven’t really been taking the army into account. The ass-kissing PC pogues among the officer corps will no doubt keep taking orders from whatever currently occupies the White House, but… what happens when the National Guard redeploys to quell domestic disturbances? Like the Roman legions of old, our military has quite a few foreigners serving to get their citizenship papers. Are they going to muzzzle-thump abuelitas because some REMF weekend warrior orders them to? And how long will the real professionals continue to take insults like ladies in Ranger school, mandatory pregnancy vests, ROTC cadets in red high heels….?
Continuing to count on the blind loyalty of under-equipped troops — that you openly loathe — while hanging them out to dry in yet another endless, pointless neo-imperial police action is a bad idea. Subsequently asking them to fire on the home folks is an even worse one… but that’s a risk Our Betters seem quite willing to take.
“The thing with Romney is that he said the right things, but no one believed him.”
How could anyone believe Romney?
His top campaign advisor told you that Romney would say anything to win.
Remember the Etch-A-Sketch remark?
Romney meant nothing that he said.
He was the presidential candidate sent over by Central Casting.
Romney was just a handsome version of RINOs Boehner, McConnell, et al.
God knows what Romney would have signed after Sandy Hook?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DmtPA02SNk
“WASHINGTON — Eric Fehrnstrom is Mitt Romney’s David Axelrod.
He is the keeper of the candidate’s narrative, the guy who has been with Mr. Romney since before he was governor of Massachusetts and has stuck like glue through two grueling presidential campaigns. He has been the defiant defender of Mr. Romney when he has been accused of being a flip-flopper or having no core principles.
And so it was curious that when Mr. Fehrnstrom on Wednesday reached for a word to describe how Mr. Romney might pivot to the general election, the one that came tumbling from his mouth was “Etch A Sketch,” the children’s drawing toy in which nothing is ever permanent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/politics/etch-a-sketch-remark-a-rare-misstep-for-romney-adviser.html?_r=0
Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Nazis invading Russia during WWII. They had to overrun and occupy a few hundred kilometers of the western edge of the Soviet Union before the actually got into “Russian” territory. Later, when the Germans had to retreat, many of those occupied people picked up stakes and retreated with them. Imagine that – choosing the Nazis as the lesser of two evils.
That’s how I felt about Romney in 2012. Maybe he’d do well, maybe not, but for God’s sake’ *anything’s* better than this evil dimwit of a Marxist dick-tater we’ve got now.
I’m pretty sure there’s many more like me out here. It would be nice if we had someone in office with a smidgen of respect for the Constitution, and at least some respectable level of determination to uphold it. There’s a couple of candidates on the GOP side now who offer more than hysterics. Maybe we’ll be blessed and one of them can work his way to victory.