What Romney did right
Romney saved the House of Representatives from reverting to Nancy Pelosi’s rule. A bad enough showing from the GOP nominee, or even an uninspired replay of 1996 or 2008, would have left dozens of House freshmen dangling. National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions runs a great operation, but the top of the ticket inspires or deters the base from turning out. Mitt Romney got the base together and motivated. And thank God he did.
Romney also assured the succession of the party’s leadership with his choice of Paul Ryan. Had he gone with Tim Pawlenty (my choice) or Rob Portman (many others’ choice), there would be a very complicated primary ahead in 2015-2016. Now we know the GOP is going young. We don’t know if Ryan, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, or which of the other bright young stars of the conservative movement will emerge as its leader, but Romney delivered his party to the next generation of pro-freedom, pro-growth, pro-family and pro-life leaders.
Blowback
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crickets……..
portlandon on November 12, 2012 at 9:51 PM
Yeah, I’ll not be voting for Paul Deficitsforeverisconservative Ryan.
astonerii on November 12, 2012 at 9:52 PM
Nothing.
tencole on November 12, 2012 at 9:57 PM
As you can see one of the wheels is still intact so…it’s really not that bad!
sharrukin on November 12, 2012 at 9:57 PM
Kind of hard to win when there is 108% turnout in certain OH districts.
nazo311 on November 12, 2012 at 10:01 PM
Romney blew it when he ran as the Republican candidate, instead of the Democrat candidate. He was a perfect match for that side of the aisle and could have done the nation some good by educating the Democrats on finances. On the Conservative side, the problem being that his being so far to the left in most things made him damaging to the United States of America by making the Democrats most lunatic ideas seem reasonable in comparison.
astonerii on November 12, 2012 at 10:01 PM
You know, this strikes me as ridiculous happy talk and cheerleading, but its still better than a bunch of insufferable dramaqueens mouthing eeyore-propaganda.
Valkyriepundit on November 12, 2012 at 10:02 PM
This is the second time Hugh Hewitt has been on suicide watch over his most beloved candidate. When are we going to stop allowing hacks like Hewitt and his country clubber-set pick our candidates?
Warner Todd Huston on November 12, 2012 at 10:03 PM
Oh PLEASE.
blatantblue on November 12, 2012 at 10:05 PM
Ditto that !
tencole on November 12, 2012 at 10:06 PM
I love it how you all start attacking the messenger whenever it’s a Salem Radio host. With all this infighting, no wonder we lost. If we can’t even unite ourselves, how the do you any of you expect to unite the country?
jawkneemusic on November 12, 2012 at 10:06 PM
You know who this benefits?
Attila (Pillage Idiot) on November 12, 2012 at 10:07 PM
Exactly, when you blame Romney more than Obama, I question your judgment.
thebrokenrattle on November 12, 2012 at 10:10 PM
You would have to be an absolute idiot to credit Romney with keeping the House Republican. It’s literally moron logic. His nonexistent coattails skipped the Senate entirely (where there was an absolute wipeout) but worked magic in the House?
Armin Tamzarian on November 12, 2012 at 10:12 PM
Romney ran a rather nimble campaign. His ads were produced quickly to respond to attacks, when Axelrod was having a campaign stop in the summer, Romney had one at the same time outside of Solyndra. Outside of Axelrod’s set up was a Romney camp set up.
He killed it in the debates.
They ran great ads against the Preezy.
He JUMPED on the Third Rail of Politics.
Not tip-toed on it.
Jumped on it. 99 percent of politicians never get NEAR it.
blatantblue on November 12, 2012 at 10:14 PM
I notice lots of comments from people who never headed even a PTA.
Kermit on November 12, 2012 at 10:14 PM
Romney’s “coat tails” can’t save foot-in-mouth politicians like Mourdock or Akin.
blatantblue on November 12, 2012 at 10:14 PM
They backed a loser…AGAIN…for foolish reasons and are desperate to salvage some shred of hope from the wreckage, and evade any responsibility for the disaster.
sharrukin on November 12, 2012 at 10:15 PM
jawkneemusic, what does Salem Radio have to do with it? I don’t hate all of them. I find Mike Gallagher a bit of a dunce, but so is Sean Hannity. Love Dr. Bennet, don’t mind Prager, but he is a bit boring sometimes. Medved is a shill, too, but I love his sense of history and his special history programs. I can only take Hewitt for short bursts. While I appreciate that he helps bloggers and young radio guys, his sold-out, rah, rah GOP nonsense is a bit too much. Rush is usually pretty good. Hated Savage because I think he’s all show and no principles. Etc., etc. In other words I assess each of them on their merits. The company they all work for doesn’t mean a thing to me.
Warner Todd Huston on November 12, 2012 at 10:15 PM
This simply is not true. A huge win, mostly thanks to the Tea Party, in 2010 saved the House. It gave us enough statehouses and governors to control redistricting and keep the House.
Romney showing this year was as bad as Dole’s in 1996.It is not coincidence that election and this is the only time that the total number of votes cast has dropped by a large amount compared to the prior election in the past 100 years. In 2012 it was a huge amount. Probably 5%. There is no doubt we nominated the equivalent of Bush/Kemp 2.0 in 2012 and it cost us in Senate seats, state houses and even some House seats.
Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 10:22 PM
Not much. Just mentioned it because it’s the second Salem host today that’s been attacked by Hotair commenters. It’s not Hugh Hewitt’s fault we got Romney. It’s the primary voters. I have been listening to Hugh for years and his support for Romney never influenced me to support him. I only came around when he nabbed the nomination because that’s who a majority of our fellow Republicans voted for.
None of us will always agree but we’re all on the same team. I fail to see how attacking Hewitt and Medved helps our cause.
jawkneemusic on November 12, 2012 at 10:25 PM
Maybe not.But a decent candidate should have easily saved people like Brown or got a seats in ND and Montana.
Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 10:25 PM
I agree..I thought they ran a good campaign..Got caught by suprise..
Dire Straits on November 12, 2012 at 10:28 PM
Okay, I’ll bite…..just what did Mitt do right?
tencole on November 12, 2012 at 10:41 PM
go take a lil trip up the thread
blatantblue on November 12, 2012 at 10:43 PM
Of course I blame Romney for not getting the base out to vote. For Pete’s sake…..he got less votes than McCain did! Who else you gonna blame…..he WAS the candidate.
tencole on November 12, 2012 at 10:43 PM
Granted..The GOP message did not register with some folks..obviously..
Dire Straits on November 12, 2012 at 10:47 PM
Mitt did nothing right, he was a lousy candidate…period. The election is over, and you can now take off your blinders, and can stop all the excuses and rationalizations.
Many people in this country are hurting…..and who do the republicans nominate?……a white billionaire who kept trying to tell us “I feel your pain”…seriously? He came off looking like the phoney he was and he was completely unaware how offensive that is.
Mitt’s a flip-flopper…..and that was starting to poke it’s ugly head out during the campaign….he couldn’t help himself.
Keeping the campaign all about that 3 letter word…J.O.B.S. and not about any of the other illegal, unconstitutional and impeachable activities of our current President.
Trying to tell us that Mitt was a conservative when he’s far from it. Thinking he had the conservative base all wrapped up when all he did was ignore us, patronize us and insult us.
Republican convention…..’nuff said.
The friends/advisers/financial backers that he hung around with.
The republican primary……and how he treated his fellow candidates, yet couldn’t muster the same against the guy who actually deserved such treatment.
Making our conservative pundits support/defend this faux-conservative candidate…..now they’re looking like the hypocrites they are.
Mitt did nothing right and the results prove it.
tencole on November 12, 2012 at 10:55 PM
Jeebus, do you purists ever quit? We get it…you hated Romney, always hated him and would still be hating on him even if he had run a flawless campaign and beat Obama in a landslide.
Whatever the outcome of the election, he’s a smart, decent man who believes in the greatness of America and would have done his level best to set the country on the right course. But you are so far up your own arses, you won’t give him a single inch. Even when the other party ran an incompetent, nasty, lying fraud, you just relentlessly dumped on a man you should have been proud of.
Why are you here, whining, gloating, constantly deriding the Republicans? Do you have any constructive ideas?
The reason you are all so hateful is because on some level your teeny-tiny brains realize there are so few of you. If you sincerely believed in your own wisdom and superiority–and powers of persuasion–you’d go form your own party.
Go ahead, get to work recruiting a majority of voters to your purist, rightwing vision. Good luck.
You’re going to need it.
Meredith on November 12, 2012 at 10:57 PM
Funny, almost 60 million people disagree with you.
I`ll say this again: The biggest error was thinking you can run up a successful campaign in 4 months when your opponent has had 4 years. Especially after a contentious primary.
Mitsouko on November 12, 2012 at 11:00 PM
Romney has been running for years.
sharrukin on November 12, 2012 at 11:09 PM
You know what? So was Bob Dole. I loved the guy, still do. He was an atrocious nominee who picked a House member who had never won a statewide election too. Bill Clinton was just as much an incompetent, nasty, lying fraud, as Obama is. You know what? Those purists got Bush elected twice. Bush had no problem campaigning as and for Conservatism. He just failed to govern that way, at least fiscally. Instead he bought into Rove’s idea that you can buy the Republican party a permanent majority. How did that work out?
Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 11:11 PM
And the next GOP candidate needs to start now..
Dire Straits on November 12, 2012 at 11:11 PM
Just because they voted for Mitt, doesn’t mean they disagreed with me……I voted for him myself. I wanted Obama out….as did those other “60 million”. It never meant that I supported or even liked Mitt…..I didn’t, but Obama had to go.
4 months!?…..Mitt’s been running for 10 years!
“Contentious primary”?…..the only thing contentious about THAT primary was Mitt himself.
tencole on November 12, 2012 at 11:11 PM
In that case, how could any incumbent ever lose?
It’s mind-boggling to me that anyone, even now, a week later, would try to deny the blatantly obvious: Mitt Romney was an awful, miserable candidate. He lacked conservative credentials. He constantly said stupid sh*t. He flip-flopped like crazy. He surrounded himself with total incompetents that he couldn’t bear to fire, even after they repeatedly proved their worthlessness. If he ran a business like he did his campaign, he would have been fired in a week.
Armin Tamzarian on November 12, 2012 at 11:13 PM
The biggest terror is thinking a campaign is something that starts when you have a nominee. The RNC should be doing this constantly just like the DNC. People don’t turn out to vote for campaigns, they vote for movements.
Rocks on November 12, 2012 at 11:14 PM
All I want to hear from Huge Hughit is two words:
Mea culpa!
But he’ll never say. He and the Medveds of the GOP got exactly the kind of “moderate” candidate running precisely the kind of Pale Pastel campaign they said we needed to run to win- and he lost. The country lost.
Can we try it our way now?
sartana on November 12, 2012 at 11:27 PM
Who would have won in four months, Armin-who ran that would have won I ask you.
I am not blind to Romney`s faults, nor the faults of the campaign. The convention was way too late, and there was not enough push back to the hate campaign mounted by Obama. Our surrogates, with the exception of Newt and Sununu, were weak. The GOTV effort was insufficient.
And despite all of that, he raised a prodigious amount of money, built momentum from nothing, and came within a hair`s breadth of the presidency. So, not awful and terrible, but he and the campaign, and the RNC made critical errors.
Mitsouko on November 12, 2012 at 11:29 PM
Having failed to support a candidate with the phenomenal qualifications of someone like Mitt Romney, I think it will be very difficult for the Republicans to attract adequate candidates in future.
Basilsbest on November 13, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Look, people. Stop the catastrophising. Yes Obama won. He won by a SMALL margin. The GOP has ousted an incumbent Democrat exactly ONCE in over 100 years.
The GOP is in MUCH better shape after the 2012 election than it was after the 2008 election. The GOP has more seats in the House, more seats in the Senate. We have more state legislatures, we have more governors. We have governors and legislatures in states that haven’t had Republicans in AGES. We have both houses of the Arkansas legislature … first time since reconstruction.
We kept both houses in Wisconsin.
You are acting like this was some massive blowout of the Republican Party. It wasn’t. The Republicans lost what, 2 Senate seats and 4 House seats? Those must be the shortest coattails in history.
Yeah, we did get wiped out in California and Illinois but that was due to redistricting, not due to any giant change in voter sentiment. Heck, Obama won IL by 16 points in 2012 down from 25 points in 2012. He was down in California, too. This was NOT a great swing to the left by the people of the US.
Guys, you are buying into that crap you are reading in the newspapers designed to demoralize you.
We are in MUCH better shape going into 2014 than we were going into 2010. By Christmas a year from now, people are going to be SICK of Democrats. About 100,000 votes in 4 states is all that separated us from victory. This was NOT a blowout election. To defeat an incumbent would have been stunning. We SHOULD have, had it been two white guys running for President like we had in 1980, we would have.
crosspatch on November 13, 2012 at 12:28 AM
The GOP absolutely controls 23 state governments compared to 14 for the Democrats. That is both houses of the legislature AND Governor. Despite losing 10 seats in the US House due to redistricting in IL and CA, the GOP lost only a net 4 seats in the House. That is NOT bad, folks.
crosspatch on November 13, 2012 at 12:52 AM
Because! Maintaining one’s pure and pristine ego is more important than anything else.
chimney sweep on November 13, 2012 at 2:02 AM
He did a lot of things right. What he did wrong was to concede before the cheating was investigated.
The Rogue Tomato on November 13, 2012 at 2:22 AM
Ahh, so many ABR’s here, you’d think they’d get tired of this by now.
As for this article, I agree with it whole heartedly. Romney did a LOT right, and while he was a flawed candidate in that he didn’t excite people, there is a LOT to learn her for future campaigns.
1: Stick to the issues. Romney did his best in the polls whenever he was given a few weeks to just talk about the issues,
What this means is that, if you know your policies are correct, and you can talk about them backwards and forwards, talking about them is better than rhetoric.
2: Each of Romney’s debates should be watched and analyzed very closely. The first debate with Obama especially is now the gold standard all politicians should aim for.
3: Yes, picking a young VP was a very smart move. This does not mean that Paul Ryan will be the next nominee, in fact I rather doubt that. What this does mean is that the next nominee is likely to be a young relatively fresh face. This is especially important when you consider that we as a party, need to shake the image of being a bunch of old white guys.
4: Setting a high standard for charitable giving, while likely not an intentional campaign decision, is a wonderful tradition to leave to the party.
One of the biggest problems we face as a party, is the fact that we’re portrayed as greedy evil white guys by the media. While Romney’s charitable giving was not unable to do that, it was one ingredient among many that eventually pushed Romney’s favorable to a tie with Obama in the final month of the campaign.
Basically, large charitable donations give you some degree of defense against the greedy charge. I mean, you can’t be all that greedy if you give millions to charity. Even the most hardened class warrior is likely to begrudgingly admit this.
5: Showcasing his family.
I believe this was another ingredient in his rising favorability near the end of the campaign. It’s also something that every candidate should strive to do in future elections. Bush Jr never really showed off his family beyond his wife, parents, and Jeb. McCain, similarly, hid most of his family away.
Palin didn’t, nor did Romney. In this case I think they were both very smart. Seeing an entire family around a nominee gives voters something else to relate to, and in Romney’s case he needed this badly.
Frankly, Romney did so much right that, even with his occasional gaffes, I’m still astounded that he didn’t win. This is the first time since 1992 that I didn’t predict the correct outcome of an election.
I knew he had problems as a candidate, but it really did feel like he had the momentum near the end. Plus, seven times out of ten, when candidates are statistically tied in the polls, the challenger wins.
So odd that it didn’t happen this time.
WolvenOne on November 13, 2012 at 2:49 AM
Two whole paragraphs of what Romney did right? Isn’t that about a paragraph too long?
There Goes The Neighborhood on November 13, 2012 at 3:37 AM
Ok, less flippant answer. The problem wasn’t what Romney did wrong, and what he did right is nearly irrelevant. He lost because of what he didn’t do right. He didn’t give people a good reason to vote for him. He was willing to destroy Obama on the current state of the economy, and it’s what he did best. But he never said WHAT Obama did wrong. He never made the case for WHY Obama’s policies failed. And that was his strongest point. He essentially ceded every other issue in existence so he could talk about the horrible economy, and didn’t even do that effectively. He had to make the case, not that the economy was bad (we all know that), but that the economy would never improve substantially as long as Obama was in charge.
And Obamacare! He promised to repeal Obamacare, but couldn’t even describe why Obamacare was bad! And Obama was able to point out that he did virtually the same thing with Romneycare.
You need a president who can make the case for conservative policies. Because if the Republican candidate for president can’t make the case for it, the media never will.
Ultimately, the only principle Romney stood for was, “I should be president.”
There Goes The Neighborhood on November 13, 2012 at 3:48 AM
1) Hard to beat Obama in the “Santa gives away free stuff” roll.
2) Also hard to beat him when Democrats control counting of the ballots.
I was a Perry guy till he crashed and burned, I thought Mitt did just fine and got behind him.
You want to indulge in a circular firing squad instead of dealing with the enemy, be my guest.
gdonovan on November 13, 2012 at 6:02 AM
mittens did NOTHING Right….THAT’S precisely the problem!
Pragmatic on November 13, 2012 at 8:45 AM
Basilsbest: cowardly liars who raise cowardly sons are not worthy of support….exhibit A: mittens milquetoast
Pragmatic on November 13, 2012 at 8:47 AM
Try again if Governor Ryan. To date, he has zilch, nada management/executive experience. Next!!!
AH_C on November 13, 2012 at 2:55 PM