…according to Reason magazine:
Here’s the skinny Republicans: If you actually did the fiscal conservative stuff you claim to believe, and added to it the social liberal policies the Democrats say they love, then legislate against, you might have a chance.
It’s not the Mitt was too moderate, like Bill O’Reilly claimed the other night; it’s that he stank of GOP establishment corruption — from the ham-handed manipulation of primary returns (Mitt won! Oh, wait, it was actually Santorum or Paul…), to the rules changes made over the objections of a sizable portion of the rank and file at the convention to the continuous lawsuit nonsense to keep Gary Johnson off the ballot in various states; it wasn’t just the shitty Senate candidates with the tim ears (Hey, did you know that women who were rape-raped [as Whoopie Goldberg called it] have a super-secret self-abortion ejection system for the fetus. It’s science, people!); it wasn’t just the idiotic stance on immigration…
Romney was an obvious puppet that aped old social policies that have been rejected time and again. Their economic message also doesn’t fly: From Reagan on, Republican government regularly outgrows government, compared to Democrats (until this administration). They expanded costly entitlements with Medicare Part D, increased regulations on education to the point that even a PhD in a subject has to go back to school for two years for a useless certification in pedagogy to teach. They got us into two wars — traditionally, war is the worst thing you can do for your economic health. And they rammed through the TARP bailout schemes for their corporate buddies.
Romney was a pro-(big) business, anti-free market man; not a scion of economic freedom. (But you can see the effect his loss is having worldwide; everyone is bracing for the collapse of the US economy now that Obama has no real restraints.) He was stiff, not overly bright once off message (much like his competition), and his big policy promises suggested more useless spending to the military/police-industrial complex…his competition wants to spend more on big programs that would require regulation and policing of the economy; just as expensive and even more fruitless. And for all Romney’s bluster about repealing Obamacare, there’s no one in Washington that wants to do that. There’s simply too much money involved to stop it.
There was almost no daylight between the two candidates, save in rhetoric. So if you’re just getting Obama with half the black and none of the “cool” (which I don’t see, by the way), why change guys? The GOP does need a moderate, but not a big-spender statist; they need someone who actually believes the idea of real freedom — social and economic. Give me someone like that, and I’ll support him.
At least it looks like Chris Christie shot his presidential aspirations down with his sycophantic embrace of Obama during the hurricane. And no — I doubt that lost the GOP the election.
