{"id":481,"date":"2012-11-08T16:38:13","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T21:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/?p=481"},"modified":"2012-11-08T18:25:57","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T23:25:57","slug":"the-predictable-defeat-of-mitt-romney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/?p=481","title":{"rendered":"The Predictable Defeat of Mitt Romney"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mitt Romney Fiddled While His Campaign Burned<\/p><\/div>\n

This blog, contrary to all appearances, is not permanently abandoned. \u00a0However, posts have become non-existent. \u00a0This is because I am spending my writing hours working on a book articulating Catholic Populism. \u00a0Once I finish, I expect to go back to blogging regularly. \u00a0Until then, this may be the last post in a long while.<\/p>\n

However, I feel the need to comment on the incompetent campaign performance of Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections. \u00a0Opponents of free will love to claim that something was inevitable after it has occurred. \u00a0These people will say that given the state of the American populace and the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Mitt Romney could not have won. \u00a0His roots in Wall Street made it inevitable that he would be opposed by the American people as an out-of-touch plutocrat, they say. \u00a0Others will say that the only hope would have been to nominate someone more moderate (Giuliani is the only such person who comes to mind) or more conservative (such as Gingrich). \u00a0All of that is a load of crap.<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney could have won but instead did not.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney ran an elitist campaign and Barack Obama ran a populist campaign. \u00a0That is why it has been evident for months who would win this race.<\/p>\n

The person running the populist campaign has won every election for decades.<\/p>\n

What is a populist campaign and what is an elitist campaign?<\/p>\n

The populist campaign is one that makes the argument that the election is about a moral choice. \u00a0It defines the ideologies of the two candidates and the direction that they want to change the country as diametrically opposed. \u00a0It portrays the election as dramatic. \u00a0It trusts the people to understand the issues enough to understand the direction they wish to take the country through their selection of the candidates. \u00a0It seeks polarizing and divisive contrasts between the candidate policies. \u00a0It attacks or minimizes the all-important resume of the elitist campaign’s candidate. \u00a0It de-emphasizes bipartisanship in favor of arguing that the American people need a fierce advocate to stand up to evil special interests. \u00a0And it tends to focus on moral issues, since they are most clearly about fundamental principles. \u00a0Its primary accusation is that the opposing candidate is immoral. \u00a0Its advertisements tend to be filled with contrasts, accusations, warnings, and policy differences.<\/p>\n

The elitist campaign claims that both of the opposed campaigns want the same result but that the candidate supported by the elitist campaign is more competent at delivering that result. \u00a0It presumes the most important difference in the campaign is the kind of expertise each candidate has. \u00a0It assumes that instead of deciding which direction the country ought to go, the people are merely competent to decide which kind of expert they want. \u00a0The campaign runs primarily on the resume and expertise of the candidate. \u00a0It attacks the other campaign for being too partisan. \u00a0It typically claims to be above partisanship and proclaims the ability to reach across the aisle. \u00a0It often accuses the other campaign of being melodramatic. \u00a0Its primary accusation is that the opposing candidate is\u00a0incompetent. Its advertisements tend to be filled with statistics, promises of bipartisanship, and experts.<\/p>\n

It is a case of the polarizer vs. the pragmatist, the ideologue vs. the moderate, the man with the plan vs. the man with the resume, the the moral agenda vs. the pragmatic agenda.<\/p>\n

Another election a lot like this one (a populist incumbent campaign against an elitist challenger) was Bush v. Kerry. \u00a0Bush declared he was fighting evil Islamists. \u00a0Kerry scolded him for having been melodramatic on the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. \u00a0Kerry touted his resume as a war hero and member of the foreigns relations committee as key to the expertise Bush lacked. \u00a0The Bush campaign organized Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of veterans who had known Kerry and argued that his valor in combat was radically over-hyped. \u00a0Kerry claimed to be more pragmatic and moderate in working with allies in the war on terror. \u00a0Bush accused Kerry of being too cowardly to stand up to evil men abroad. \u00a0Bush also attacked Kerry for supporting same-sex marriage and partial birth abortion. \u00a0Kerry refused to engage on issues but had facts arguing that Bush was weak on foreign policy. \u00a0Kerry accused Bush of presiding over a polarizing partisanship.<\/p>\n

In this election, Obama claimed he was fighting for economic fairness against entrenched special interests. \u00a0Romney said Obama was melodramatically fighting the very people who created jobs. \u00a0Romney touted his business experience at Bain Capital and Governor of Massachusetts. \u00a0Obama attacked Romney’s Bain Capital tenure as greedy and immoral. \u00a0Obama ran ads on issues like abortion and taxes. \u00a0Romney refused to engage on those issues but continually cited statistics illustrating Obama’s poor performance on the economy. \u00a0Romney accused Obama of being unable to reach across the aisle.<\/p>\n

This script happens every single election. \u00a0The pragmatic moderate has never won. \u00a0Ever.<\/p>\n

To win, a candidate must illustrate stark moral choices to the American populace.<\/p>\n

Did Romney have an opportunity to run a populist campaign?<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney had three opportunities to portray Obama in a polarizing way. \u00a0He could have argued that Barack Obama had attacked religious liberty through the HHS mandate. \u00a0This message would have resonated in fiscally liberal but religiously conservative Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio. \u00a0He took a pass on this opportunity in the first debate and ran no election-time ads on this. \u00a0Mitt Romney could have attacked the Obama Administration on Benghazi as an example of Obama’s unwillingness to listen to his own Ambassador warning about the ascendancy of Islamism in Libya, proving that he was too ideological to prepare for Militant Islam. \u00a0He passed on this issue in the third debate and never ran ads on it. \u00a0And he could have attacked ObamaCare and the individual mandate as unconstitutional. \u00a0But he never mentioned the word “Obamacare” in any of the ads for his campaign.<\/p>\n

However, Mitt Romney could never have levied any of those attacks without acknowledging that Barack Obama wanted to take the country in a different direction. \u00a0He would have had to argue that Benghazi was not a lack of leadership but a systematic Administrative-wide denial of the ongoing dangers of Islamism. \u00a0He would have had to argue that ObamaCare was not only bad for pragmatic budgetary reasons but also due to its invasive deprivation of American liberty. \u00a0And Romney would have had to argue that Obama was hostile to religious liberty, an issue on which the challenger refused to engage.<\/p>\n

The reality is that despite his populist rhetoric and campaign style, President Barack Obama does not have a populist policy agenda. \u00a0The only issue where he seems to be more populist than Mitt Romney is immigration<\/a>\u00a0(though Obama destroyed<\/a> immigration reform in 2007 and probably cannot be trusted on the issue). \u00a0Immigration hurt Mitt Romney badly by making Latinos the only portion of the electorate where he did worse than McCain. \u00a0Romney also hurt himself by failing to exploit the joint weakness of both Obama and Bush, who both pushed a regressive, elitist, easy money monetary policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although the President’s policies push the boundaries of acceptable elitism in US politics, Obama’s campaign style is so populist that swing voters — who are less political — can be forgiven for thinking that Romney is more elitist than Obama. \u00a0Barack Obama made a moral argument for the policies of the Left. \u00a0And Romney insisted that he and Obama wanted the same pragmatic solutions but that his own resume was better for that outcome.<\/p>\n

Game. \u00a0Set. \u00a0Match. \u00a0And so predictable …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog, contrary to all appearances, is not permanently abandoned. \u00a0However, posts have become non-existent. \u00a0This is because I am spending my writing hours working on a book articulating Catholic Populism. \u00a0Once I finish, I expect to go back to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[50,49,51,48],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-50","tag-barack-obama","tag-incompetence","tag-mitt-romney"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1tNLd-7L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":483,"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catholicpopulist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}