Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and Louisiana Gov.
Bobby Jindal have added their voices to the swelling chorus of
second-guessers saying the Mitt Romney ran the race badly and
therefore “deserved to lose” to Barack Obama on Nov. 6.
But here’s a simpler and, I think, better explanation. There is
no magic that dictates that the American people in their infinite
wisdom will always make the right choice, and in this instance they
‘doubled down’ (to use one of the president’s favorite expressions)
in returning a very bad president to the White House — one who had
already shown himself to be incapable of providing competent (let
alone inspiring) leadership in domestic and foreign affairs.
This happened despite the fact that Mitt Romney ran an
exceptionally decent (as opposed to nasty) campaign, while
President Obama ran an exceptionally nasty (as opposed to decent)
campaign.
In his speeches and ads, Obama assaulted Romney’s record as a
businessman — accusing him of everything from lying under oath, to
being unpatriotic (lacking in “economic patriotism”), to causing to
the death of laid-off steel worker’s wife.
Obama made his primary theme one of envy, resentment, and class
warfare. In one speech after another, he ignored the central truth
that the American free enterprise system is based on voluntary
exchange for mutual benefit, and he claimed instead that it is
based on the rich exploiting the poor… and on profit-seeking
businesses looking for every opportunity to cheat their customers
on the far side, and their employees on the near side.
More than a triumph of hope over experience, Obama’s victory was
a triumph of spite over experience; and of government-favored
plunder over earned success and achievement. This is an abhorrent
(let’s hope fleeting) perversion of the American
dream.
None of this is not to deny mistakes and mishaps on Romney’s
part in the long slog from the Republican primaries through to the
general election. But it is, I think, very much to his credit that
many and perhaps most conservatives came to like him a great deal
more at the end of that journey than they did at the outset. He
stopped looking and sounding like a robot and — wonder of wonders
— began to look like “fully-formed adult,” as one of my friends
put it.
The same cannot be said of petulant and strident Obama, or the
mocking and clownish Biden. Both got away from with telling
outrageous falsehoods during the debates — knowing that they could
count on the mainstream media to divert or suppress any real
criticism. In fact, they could even count on the support of
supposedly neutral “moderators” from the fourth estate.
In affirming rather than contradicting one of Obama’s
falsehoods, CNN’s Candy Crowley kept him from being hoist on his
own petard in open debate. She jumped in to save the hapless
president when he claimed that he had unequivocally called the
Sept. 11 attack on the consulate and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi a
terrorist attack the very day after it happened. In fact, he did
not do so until weeks later.
To this day, Obama has refused to give any detailed account of
what he knew and did during the seven-hour siege at the consulate
and the annex. And he has never given any satisfactory explanation
of why he and others in the administration continued to spin the
story of a spontaneous demonstration long after all of the facts
pointed to a well-planned terrorist attack.
Among the whopping falsehoods told by Joe Biden in his debate
with Paul was the claim:
Let me make it absolutely clearly, no religious institution,
Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic Social Services,
Georgetown Hospital, Mercy Hospital, or any hospital, none has to
either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none
has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy
they provide. That is a fact.
Except that it is most certainly not a
fact. As the Heritage Foundation
pointed out, “The real ‘fact’ about the (HHS edict requiring
employers to provide insurance that pays for contraception,
abortion drugs, and sterilization) is that it applies to almost all
employers — including many religious organizations such as
hospitals and social service providers.”
One may argue that President Obama benefited from the good
publicity that grew out of his response to Hurricane Sandy.
But that only begs the question: Why would anyone give the
president high marks in that emergency— which did not require any
hard decision-making on his part — while giving him a pass on
Benghazi, which did put him to the test and expose grave
misjudgment and serious weakness?
This brings us back to the main question — of where to look
first in pointing the finger of blame.
I believe it must be pointed at the American people.
People will believe what they want to believe. And in this case
more people than not were inclined to focus on a meaningless
positive indicator while averting their eyes from a damning
negative indicator.
They had two examples of presidential leadership to choose from:
the one frivolous and the other serious. And they chose to go with
frivolous example.
Now if you accept the premise that the American people made a
big mistake in re-electing a very bad president to a second term,
there are other conclusions that flow from that regarding the
lessons to be learned for the Republican Party.
One of those lessons is not to try to fight the last war by
feeling a great need to do more to seek out the youth vote, and the
women’s vote, and the Hispanic, Asian, or Black votes — through
headlong competition with the Democrats/demagogues in offering
special-interest favors to each and all groups.
Obama and the Democrats campaigned on wedge issues — and on
making promises to others that the government will be in no
position to honor in driving the nation toward bankruptcy. Obama is
physically miscast for the part of Samson, but it seems that he
will be happy if he is able to impose a massive tax increase on the
“rich” — the misnamed rich, I might add — which will
pull down the proverbial temple upon all of our heads. His panoply
of heavier tax levies on capital gains, estate, and earned income
would provide a comprehensive and disastrous set of disincentives
for millions of small business owners and entrepreneurs who
struggle to send their own sons and daughters to college and who
are collectively responsible for an outsized proportion of the
nation’s total workforce.
Let him (the skinniest of Samson’s) do his damnedest: Even if he
succeeds, most will probably crawl out from under the rubble. Maybe
it’s better to have a sudden and violent shock than a slow descent
into greater and greater government aggrandizement and greater and
greater government failure.
Far better, I say, for the Republicans to stick to principle —
rather than to imitate the Democrats in their slavish pandering to
different groups and their insolent disregard for economic
reality.
The bedrock principles for conservatives ought to be liberty,
open markets, freedom of choice, and limited as opposed to
limitless government.
If those are the abiding principles, there will be room enough
for everyone to flourish — including all of the groups and
sub-groups mentioned above.
If we re-awaken the real American spirit, there will be less of
the useless fretting over wedge issues that assumed such outsized
importance among some groups during the 2012 election.
