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Romney is just another Mittstake

By: taylorwolken (Diary)  |  May 3rd, 2012 at 03:28 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

While 2010 was a marked victory for limited government fiscal conservatism national representation has left conservatives and libertarians miffed. Conservatives pulled the weight for the Republican party in 2010 leading to historic gains but despite their influence little of that manifested in the Republican presidential primaries.
Mitt Romney has been the consummate politician taking a page from the John Kerry playbook, flipping and  flopping on any side of an issue regardless of personal precedent in a desperate attempt to appease voters.
Rick Santorum gave us a healthy dose of social conservatism with little practical experience regarding limited government or fiscal conservatism.
Ron Paul offers a strong ideological stance, a toxic foreign policy and tone deaf solutions to complex problems while supporting real limited government and fiscal conservatism.
This election seems to be following a common theme dating back to President H.W. Bush. Republicans don’t have a good candidate to vote for, only a less bad candidate.
Thus conservatives and libertarian minded voters are stuck one again with the choice of picking the lesser of two evils or casting a protest vote.
The past two decades have shown a progressive shift to the left among national Republican candidates. Starting with H.W. Bush we moved to Dole, then W. Bush, then McCain and now Romney.
Every election threatens supposed dire consequences. What could be worse than Clinton or Gore? How many Supreme Court justices will be nominated? Can flip flopping Kerry lead a nation at war? What about dove single term Senator Barack Obama versus liberal maverick McCain and now Mitt “windsock” Romney, grandfather of Obamacare and a recently reborn serious conservative?
The all too common wisdom is that picking the moderate candidate allows you to grab the middle and win the election on the backs of independents who decide elections.
As a practical matter if you keep grabbing for the middle then eventually you end up on the left. Democrats pull their party left and expect the middle to come to them and the center adjusts to a position further left than when the process began.
Furthermore, when you actively endorse candidates in the middle it weakens the argument for the policies of the base by giving the appearance that Republicans don’t even believe in what they say they believe in. In effect, you undermine your own policies which won’t win votes in the middle and dampens enthusiasm from your base.
We’ve seen this all too clearly the past two election cycles. Republican rhetoric sounds hollow and lacking vigor.
The GOP base is treated as an afterthought as Republicans put the desires of the fickle middle above that of anyone else. The end game has become about winning for the sake of winning rather than about making good decisions for the country.
While a vote for Romney may halt a disastrous Obama regime and slow our miserable decline into liberalism, two decades of failure require us to ask if it is worth it. The GOP nominated a Romney before and we received eight years of pseudo liberalism under W. Bush that were catastrophic for the party and ushered in Obama. There is the potential we will lose Supreme Court nominees but such things are worthless if we are forced to forever shift to the left for votes.
This begs the question, “Does a vote for Romney provide a path to fiscal conservatism and limited government?” No.
A vote for Romney further undermines conservative principles giving more ground to the left. A vote for Romney sends the message for would be conservative candidates that this isn’t the party for them. Why go through the media drubbing when the establishment moderate always wins?
I fear this is an unfortunate situation where we need to step backwards to move ahead. Unless the vicious cycle is broken and the Rino wing of the party are immasculated the party is destined for endless mediocrity.
If we want to get American back on the right track we can’t keep moving left.

COMMENTS

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  • APA Guy

    A vote for Romney is a vote to remove from office a Soviet-era socialist who wants to take the United States to the left of the socialists in Europe. While he is not perfect, Mitt Romney is 1000% better for the future of this country than Barack Obama.

    Get off your soapbox now while you still can. You’re either for removing Obama from office or you’re not. Pick a side, because the country is in a state of emergency and this time there is no room for selfish purity tantrums.

    • Melody Warbington (rwm52)
      • earlgrey

        not to read it. Might want to do a different font or something next time.

        • blakemoney

          talk from conservatives, too. Romney should be not only embraced but thanked for putting up with a disgraceful primary season of attacks. He’s the first serious candidate we’ve had in some time if you think about it. And after the primary season where we had to endure 15 minutes of fame for one unelectable candidate after another, we should be grateful we have Romney to run against Obama, instead of Newt, Santorum, or Michelle Bachmann. How do you think that would turn out in November? Another disaster, that’s how. Romney is conservative enough without being too far to the right to be rejected by the majority of American voters. He’s played things near perfectly at a time when many inside the GOP were writing off the party for another decade, and he’s emerged as the strongest candidate to defeat Obama. He’s got a real chance to win this thing. What more could anyone want?

          • acat

            but that’s mostly because I completely disagree with your analysis… in part because you cherry-picked three of the worst of the dozen conservatives in the race.

            Perry or Pawlenty would have wiped the floor with Obama .. as it is, we’ve got … Romney.

            I’ll support him, but you can quit pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.

            Mew

          • vets4mn02

            We don’t hear much about what the Romneys did about the time of the Winter Olympics. They moved to Park City, of course.

            Anybody got more about that? Particularly local interaction with them?

            I don’t know anything about Mr. Romney personally. Local reactions to him would be useful deciding how he works with new people. He was very good at Bain Capital, but they worked for him. In the White House it’s different. Most people don’t work for you — they’re either on Capital Hill in the Legislative Branch or they are career civil servants.

            I don’t see anything linked online about the Romneys in Utah. Is it good? Bad? Help, please !!

  • conservativemusician

    You sound like a troll and I have grown increasingly annoyed when reading this type of “eeyore” drivel because the vast majority of us here know that Obama is the most serious and radical challenge to this nation’s sovereignty in our lifetime and that he has to be defeated – period.

    You’re about 6 months late with this analysis as we were talking about all of this during the primaries. Romney is going to be our nominee, so get over it. What you’re saying is irrelevant, so do us all a favor and either get on board, act like an adult and support our nominee (warts and all) or go post somewhere else.

    • Seedyrom

      Obamacare still around and funded and 4 more years of the most corrupt president since FDR. I could create a long list but its down to winning or paying higher taxes plus god knows what else.

      Also, compare the 2008 price of milk and other groceries to 2012. I still remember $1.89 milk, while I can swing the costs, Obama has created more poor people while dragging his feet on jobs and energy solutions all of which cost Americans billions in lost savings and increase living costs.

      Can you really afford to sit on the fence?

      Can your future grand children’s unborn grand children afford the damage of 4 more years of Obamanomics?

      • funwithknives

        you’ve got no choice, guy.
        You do not want to be any part of the solution needed, and you’re alternative is to be part of the problem.

        Mitt ain’t perfect but we got a really large focus group out here just sittin’ and waitin’. We know from various sources that he listens to said groups, as part of a strategy.
        So we go with the one at the front.

        Get off the black highlighting, TW.
        We know you’re that you’re !***DEAD SERIOUS***!
        Eyestrain not needed…..

        • xymbaline

          The more left-leaning the Republican nominee is, the less likely he or she is to win.

          So if you back Romney and he loses, what will you do?

          You’ll not only have relected the worst Socialist in American history, you’ll have removed any coherent message from the Republican Party.

          I have said for months that this was the most likely result of a Romney candidancy. There’s nothing personal in this observation, it jumps out at you when you review the last 50 years of GOP history.

          Nixon’s victories resulted in disaster for the GOP in 1974; Bush’s victories resulted in horrible losses for the GOP in 2006. All the “Rockefeller Republicans of the last 50 years have gone down to defeat.

          If Romney wins, I’ll happily eat crow in public.

          If he loses, will do the same?

          • APA Guy

            Newt is gone…no reason for your presence here if you intend only to depress enthusiasm to remove Obama.

            Romney is the nominee…get over it…and either become part of the solution or get the hell off this site. Your trolling has become a bore.

          • trimulchio

            Gov. Romney:

            There was an incisive column in TheWall Street Journalsome weeks ago by Brett Stephens(ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550304577136564147813258.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFT)thatmade the point that the heart of this election is ensuring that theUnited States does not follow the failed European model.

            I recommend reading it . However, most voters are immersed in pop culture, not The Wall Street Journal.

            To make the point Mr. Stephens made in a more visceral way, I refer you to a Marvel Comic, The Ultimates, published around the time of the Iraq Invasion where a newly-defrosted Captain America tells a would-be alien invader:

            Surrender??!! You think thisletter on my head stands for France? Ultimates I, issue 12

            The US is NOT France.

            Ours is a nation of freemen, free markets and free pulpits. Ours is a nation of builders,traders, entrepreneurs and, if need be, warriors.

            We are citizens. We are not subjects or slaves. We are men. We are not sheep, not even after almost 100 years of nanny-state nonsense.

            If you want to be elected,you have to clearly and compellingly remind the Americanpeople that: 1) we don’t want to be like Europe; 2) that the idea of sharing a diminishing pie and queuing up to take their turn like good little proles/sheep was why many of their ancestors left Europe (as well as, especially since 1965, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America) to come here; and 3) if the last three years of stagnation and drift were not enough, that

          • trimulchio

            http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304749904577385650652966894.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

          • vets4mn02

            It’s not great engineering to harp on the Solyndra failure. Yes, that company got hammered. But what hammered them was a $30-billion splurge by China in state-financed solar panel factories.

            China backed old-style panels. They are selling them dirt cheap.

            U.S. companies have advanced technology — close to coal-fired $$$-per-watt efficiency when pushed to large-scale production. The unique Solyndra surface shape will be part of that. The other $4+-billion invested in solar technology makes the rest of the story.

            The Chinese are already out the $30-billion. Their plants are running at break-even. When the much more efficient U.S. combo designs get to marketed, our $5-billion investment will do very well indeed.

            I’ve seen the new U.S. panels at work. Much, much better than the Chinese panels. Fabricate the U.S. panels to the Solyndra proprietary shape and it’s a knock out.

          • funwithknives

            Give Barry 4 more and hold on tight.
            SCOTUS Nominations [that will not go away in your lifetime, bud.]
            Gun Laws up the Wazoo
            Foreign relations into the crapper. [Spelled China,Russia and Iran]
            A meandering, directionless economy with many more large corporations shifting out of the U S.
            Futher “investments”, with funds provided by you and me, by that Capitalist ,par-excellance Barack Hussein Obama-Soetoro.
            All of “Barry’s Guys’ that do not leave after 1/21/2013.

            {Hey…. I’m gettin’ really sick writing this. Ceasing this function…}

  • Bill S

    Not only is the content crap, but the formatting is, too.

    Romney’s the nominee. Get over it.