Skip to main content

US Election 2012 analysis: Hindsight will view Mitt Romney as a poor candidate, says Toby Harnden

0 shares 66

View comments

Inside the ballroom in the Boston conference centre where Romney gave his perfunctory concession speech last night, his supporters were stunned by the scale of his defeat when just hours earlier they were confident of success or at least a nail-biting finish.

But hindsight will probably view Mitt Romney a poor presidential candidate who appeared to have no core values, was selected only reluctantly by his own party and campaigned as if the whole experience was deeply uncomfortable for him.

He made plenty of mistakes but his biggest failing was that even after running for the White House for the best part of six years it was hard to fathom exactly who he was or what he really believed – as opposed to what he thought voters wanted him to believe.

Comprehensive defeat: Romney supporters have been stunned by the scale of their candidate's defeat

Perfunctory concession speech: Hindsight willl view Mitt Romney as as a poor presidential candidate, says Toby Harnden

‘I thought that tomorrow we would have a new president-elect and a new dawn for this country,’ said Mark McIntrye, 39, a management consultant from New York. ‘All along, I thought we would do it. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed that we could have got it all so wrong.’

Cindy Summers, 33, an events manager from Boston, said: ‘Mitt Romney is a good man. In some way his downfall was that he did not like politics, the games you have to play the sound bites you have to give.

‘He ran out of a sense of duty to his country but also to his family – a lot of what drives him on is his father and his Mormon faith. Next time, we might need someone more combative and aggressive to take on the Democrats.’

Romney’s aides, who had projected an air of supreme confidence that all the pollsters were wrong and that swing voters would move towards them and greater enthusiasm put them over the top, were conspicuous by their absence.

  More... Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours! Victorious Obama celebrates four more years and promises America 'the best is yet to come' Pray for our President: Romney calls for unity but insists that his values will endure Paul Ryan left red-faced after Obama sweeps his home state of Wisconsin... but will he be the Republican candidate in 2016? The Donald angrily takes to Twitter to demand 'revolution' following 'disgusting injustice' of Obama's re-election

Romney’s speech lasted barely five minutes and people were already beginning to stream out of the ballroom as he took to the stage.

During the course of the evening, the cheerful couples who has arrived to celebrate what they had convinced themselves would be a Romney victory began to look concerned, then crestfallen and then almost bereft.

Some women wept as their husbands, looking more than a little ill at ease, comforted them. There was a brief period of hope as it looked like Romney would win Florida and Virginia and might have a shot at Ohio but by 11pm the atmosphere was funereal.

Although Romney may come close to President Barack Obama’s popular vote total, he was crushed by the president in the only contest that really mattered – the electoral college.

Obama was a very vulnerable incumbent. His party was trounced in the 2010 congressional elections and his healthcare reform, rammed through without a single Republican vote, was highly controversial.

If, as seems likely, Obama wins Florida and Virginia, then the margin of defeat in the electoral college will be 332 to 206 with Romney winning only Indiana, which the president did not contest, and North Carolina among the Democrat’s states in his big win over Senator John McCain in 2008.

No core values: It was sometimes hard to fathom what Mitt Romney really believed

Something went fundamentally wrong: U.S. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney gives his concession speech last night

The scale of a defeat like that means that something fundamental went wrong and it was more than simply Romney’s shortcomings or the strategy of his campaign.

While there were tactical errors like the failure to respond quickly enough to the Obama attack ads paining Romney as a heartless plutocrat, the loss was down of larger factors than that.

As well as the presidential election defeat, Republicans failed to win back the Senate in a year when Democrats had many more seats to defend. As Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who led the Republican Senate election effort, noted, ‘we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party’.

America’s demographics are changing, with the Latino population increasing and formerly Republican states like Virginia becoming more liberal. Unless the Republican party changes with the country, they will lose again in 2016.

Obama defeated Romney by 40 points among Latino voters – three more than in 2008 over McCain. Since 2004, Latinos have jumped by 25 per cent within the electorate and now amount to one in 10 voters.

Romney’s gamble was that Middle America would be angry enough at 7.9 per cent unemployment, a spiralling national debt and a president who had failed to deliver the post-partisan politics he had promised to defeat Obama.

But Romney failed to deliver an attractive enough alternative and in the end swing voters decided to stick with the devil they knew rather than take a risk with someone new.

As a moderate governor of Massachusetts who adopted staunch conservative positions as soon as he decided to run for president some six years ago, there were always doubts about exactly who the real Romney was.

In the primaries, he moved even further to the right to beat back the conservative challenge from Governor Rick Perry of Texas and Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives.

It could be argued that Romney faced an uphill battle to win the general election once he advocated ‘self deportation’ for millions of immigrants in the country illegally but living productive lives.

That alienated Hispanic voters and also turned off centrists – even hard-line conservatives like Perry and Gingrich branded it as heartless.

The other most significant moment of the campaign was the release of a secretly-taped video shot at a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida in which he was filed stating that 47 per cent of Americans were dependent on government and were therefore never going to vote for him.

Romney eventually renounced the comments but the problem was they appeared to most voters to be a true reflection of what he thought. They played into the attack ad caricature of him – and filled the vacuum left by the kind of long-held principles most politicians have.

Gamble: Romney betted his campaign on the hope that voters would be angry enough about the sluggish economic recovery under Obama

While he was an uneven campaigner at best, Romney did excel in the first presidential debate in Denver, delivering a performance that virtually humiliated a lacklustre Obama.

That breathed new life into a campaign that looked moribund at that stage but in the end it was not enough. Romney played safe in the second and third debates, part of a strategy designed to avoid mistakes because his campaign believed momentum was on his side.

Romney was always uncomfortable talking about foreign policy and his in initial reaction to the death of four American officials in Benghazi, he struck a petty political note that meant he was never able to fully hold Obama to account over what was plainly a security and intelligence disaster.

The ‘October surprise’ of 2012 was Hurricane Sandy. While it cannot be blamed for his defeat, the storm knocked Romney off the television screens for four days.

More importantly, it allowed Obama to be seen as a bipartisan figure when he was praised effusively by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Romney ally and one-time vice-presidential possibility.

The bipartisan sheen that Christie gave Obama was invaluable – particularly when the president’s campaign had often descended to a petty level, with aides suggesting Romney might have committed a criminal act by failing to pay taxes or have caused the death from cancer or a worker’s wife.

Romney’s act of passing healthcare reform in Massachusetts – probably his greatest achievement as governor – meant that he was never the best person to make the case against Obamacare.

The Obama campaign’s much-vaunted ‘ground game’ turned out to be every bit as effective as his aides had boasted.

While the euphoria of the ‘hope and change’ campaign of 2008 was absence, Obama’s field organisers proved superbly adept at targeting groups of voters and ensuring they got to the polls.





Popular posts from this blog

Study Abroad USA, College of Charleston, Popular Courses, Alumni

Thinking for Study Abroad USA. School of Charleston, the wonderful grounds is situated in the actual middle of a verifiable city - Charleston. Get snatched up by the wonderful and customary engineering, beautiful pathways, or look at the advanced steel and glass building which houses the School of Business. The grounds additionally gives students simple admittance to a few major tech organizations like Amazon's CreateSpace, Google, TwitPic, and so on. The school offers students nearby as well as off-grounds convenience going from completely outfitted home lobbies to memorable homes. It is prepared to offer different types of assistance and facilities like clubs, associations, sporting exercises, support administrations, etc. To put it plainly, the school grounds is rising with energy and there will never be a dull second for students at the College of Charleston. Concentrate on Abroad USA is improving and remunerating for your future. The energetic grounds likewise houses various

Best MBA Online Colleges in the USA

“Opportunities never open, instead we create them for us”. Beginning with this amazing saying, let’s unbox today’s knowledge. Love Business and marketing? Want to make a high-paid career in business administration? Well, if yes, then mate, we have got you something amazing to do!   We all imagine an effortless future with a cozy house and a laptop. Well, well! You can make this happen. Today, with this guide, we will be exploring some of the top-notch online MBA universities and institutes in the USA. Let’s get started! Why learn Online MBA from the USA? Access to More Options This online era has given a second chance to children who want to reflect on their careers while managing their hectic schedules. In this, the internet has played a very crucial in rejuvenating schools, institutes, and colleges to give the best education to students across the globe. Graduating with Less Debt Regular classes from high reputed institutes often charge heavy tuition fees. However onl

Sickening moment maskless 'Karen' COUGHS in the face of grocery store customer, then claims she doesn't have to wear a mask because she 'isn't sick'

A woman was captured on camera following a customer through a supermarket as she coughs on her after claiming she does not need a mask because she is not sick.  Video of the incident, which has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter alone, allegedly took place in a Su per Saver in Lincoln, Nebraska according to Twitter user @davenewworld_2. In it, an unidentified woman was captured dramatically coughing as she smiles saying 'Excuse me! I'm coming through' in the direction of the customer recording her. Scroll down for video An unidentified woman was captured dramatically coughing as she smiles saying 'Excuse me! I'm coming through' in the direction of a woman recording her A woman was captured on camera following a customer as she coughs on her in a supermarket without a mask on claiming she does not need one because she is not sick @chaiteabugz #karen #covid #karens #karensgonewild #karensalert #masks we were just wearing a mask at the store. ¿ o