I was going to drop a personal note to Mary Kissel about the American election but as Sinclair warned Samuel J, his post has drawn me into this once again. So while I am here let me bring into this my post mortem on the American election published in the January-February Quadrant. The article is about the various elements that went into the Obama win. But there is also this that I wrote about Mitt Romney which is a fact of political life that all too few seem to appreciate:
Romney was far and away the best candidate available to the Republicans. In an environment of the politics of personal destruction, there was virtually no element of his life history that could be used against him. He was conservative to an exceptional degree. He was personally warm and humane. He had a professional background that made him almost ideal in trying to find a way through the fiscal mess previous administrations had created. He would have rid the USA of Obama’s impending health care disaster while being able to work with the states to make a system of health care universally available. And on foreign policy he would have supported our Western way of life against a rising tide of totalitarian regimes of various denominations. In each of these aspects he presented a fundamental difference from Obama. But he lost, so let us discuss the reasons why.
And let me just dwell on the one element in what I wrote above that almost no one seems to understand where it says: Mitt Romney “was conservative to an exceptional degree.” It really ought not to have mattered to any conservative since all you had to know was that he wasn’t Barack Obama but since Romney was much much more than that the question does remain why so many people who ought to have known better preferred to take their cues from The New York Times and Washington Post rather than – as just an example of what they might have done – reading Romney’s No Apology instead. It is a book that, cover to cover, could just as easily have been written by Ronald Reagan. And I can only say that if you didn’t do everything you could to see Romney in the White House, you share some of the heavy responsibility for the policies and problems we are enduring today. The effort and political cost of trying to shave some measly and near infinitesimal proportion of the level of government spending is only one of the outcomes America and the rest of us will have to endure. And so far as any single policy question that has already or will show up at the White House over the next four years, the one thing I am very confident about is that Romney’s first instincts would have been similar to mine and to most of those who show up on this site. They would certainly have been different from Obama’s.
And just who was this mystery Republican candidate – so filled with charisma, so potentially popular, so completely electable and yet so deeply conservative – where was this mystery candidate who stood in the wings rather than come forward? Who was this person who might have won where Romney only just fell short. You know, the one who would have turned the media from insanely hostile into being no more than slightly on the negative side of neutral? You know, the candidate who could make all those promises to cut back on welfare and yet have the vote of at least half of the 47% locked up. You know the one who might have picked up say 100 votes in those 59 precincts in Philadelphia where Romney did not get a single one.
No candidate is perfect but if I was going to point out a flawed candidate from the last election, the one I would choose would certainly not be Mitt Romney. That so many who think they are this side of the fence could not see how pivotal the election was and how important it was that Romney win and Obama lose makes me wonder just how impaired their political judgment must be. And that they could not see Mitt Romney’s many virtues makes me wonder even more.
In many ways, Tony Abbott is the Australian analogue to Mitt Romney. His volunteer history with the Lifesavers and Rural Fire Service, and unheralded teacher’s aide stints in aboriginal communities mirror Romney’s long record of philanthropy and charitable works. Similarly, the very fact that Abbott is not TLS should have anybody who cherishes the principals of Australian Parliamentary Democracy rallied behind his flag. Yet this does not stopped supposed conservatives or small-government libertarians yearning for another mythical candidate while excoriating the choice we have. As Voltaire said: “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.
Cold-Hands
7 Mar 13 at 11:29 pm
But perfection is not what was being sought; offering perfection was never going to work.
Perfection is soulless.
More of what they had before Obama, but better executed, was not what was being sought.
Driftforge
7 Mar 13 at 11:41 pm
@Steve,
Totally agree.
Actually, I hope he has another go at it.
At the moment I rate America as a ‘careful watch’ country along with Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil, all of the so called Middle East and the entire African continent.
‘Britain’, Europe and Russia can get fucked. They are so mad its nice to see them destroy each other… finally. And true Australians know why they escaped from the madhouse of Europe!
NoFixedAddress
7 Mar 13 at 11:46 pm
@Steve,
Further to my previous post,
We now have a mad woman union dominated government that represents 3 fifths of fuck all of Australia!
And Coward Howard took away the guns!
And Cosy Costello gave away the farm!
Do not tell me that the Liberal Party will fix anything!
NoFixedAddress
7 Mar 13 at 11:54 pm
I dont really think this post is a critical analysis of why Romney did not win and i think in order to win, you have to be critical of where the candidate failed to attract enough votes rather than blaming on those “poor misguided fools who take their daily news from the New York Times and the Washington Post”
Mitt Romney may appeal to conservative voters but the reality is he didnt appeal to enough voters to win the election. There is no right or wrong involved. There is at the end of the day just a count of votes.
Aliice
8 Mar 13 at 12:03 am
Romney picked his own path, choosing to alienate those he could have reached out to. Good summary of the outcome.
And as to the issue in Philidelphia – I’ll raise you Detroit.
Driftforge
8 Mar 13 at 12:08 am
@Aliice,
That is why I do not trust the government of The United States of America and I rate them as a ‘careful watch’.
Their destruction will have a tad of a ramification for some people around the planet.
Feel free to tell me how good it will be when America is destroyed.
NoFixedAddress
8 Mar 13 at 12:14 am
I was deeply shocked that Romney lost.
The Democrats were cold and ruthless. They thoroughly trashed this very capable and decent man and appealed to the worst of human instincts to ensure that enough of their supporters were motivated to vote.
But despite all of that, the fact remains that Romney got less votes than the woeful McCain 4 years earlier. On top of that, the Republicans went backwards in the House and the Senate (although they did get the superb Ted Cruz in, but even that wasn’t a real gain).
And, given that America under Obama has declined in all areas where it counts, you really have to ask what kept Republican voters home? Why did they think voting for Romney would not be a better outcome than leaving the grossly deluded and irresponsible Obama in power?
I remain somewhat mystified – particularly given Obama’s utterly predictable behaviour since winning reelection.
For now, I’m accepting the conclusion of the great Mark Levin: Obama remains a cult figure with a ‘groupie-like’ attraction, and Romney just wasn’t viewed as a solid conservative – particularly being from Massachusetts with a lacklustre and slack approach towards conservative causes that just didn’t ‘energise the base’.
Ant
8 Mar 13 at 12:35 am
Steve – while I personally don’t mind Romney, the comment
can’t be right since it suggests that no one else could have won the election. Is it better to be 100 % right and in opposition or 80% right and be in government? The best candidate available to the GOP would have been one who won.
Samuel J
8 Mar 13 at 1:00 am
Nobody else could have won. Romney was the only one with a bulletproof past. Unfortunately his wealth and his religious convictions made him a broad target for a complicit media organisation whose only reason for existence is to intellectually fellate Barack Obama.
perturbed
8 Mar 13 at 1:11 am
We can’t know that.
Hardly a ‘bulletproof past’ then.
If Bill Gates had run as the GOP candidate I think he would have won. I’m pretty sure that many others could have won the election too.
Samuel J
8 Mar 13 at 1:18 am
And as Mary pointed out, Obama is the only president re-elected with than 7% unemployment and declining jobless rates – yet he won because of the GOP candidate and Republican weakness and disarray.
Samuel J
8 Mar 13 at 1:25 am
Samuel J
sounds like the Victorian Liberal party to me….
I hope Mitt Romney has another go despite the useless Republican parteeey!
NoFixedAddress
8 Mar 13 at 2:54 am
Samuel J
I trust and pray that you are nowhere near the levers of choice of leaders of political parties!
Why not choose the skank prophet from Omaha?
He would have to be better than Bill Gates because, supposedly, he has more money than Bill!
But of course he couldn’t be… the skank from Omaha…. because he is full on into crony capitalism…. but hey… lets go and bow at his feet because he’s such an old homey boy…..
Just like Red Ted…..
NoFixedAddress
8 Mar 13 at 3:04 am
Hardly a ‘bulletproof past’ then.
Well at least he didn’t have to exit the race over sex scandals like Herman Cain did. That’s not to say that Herman Cain was a reasonable candidate (I think Romney was streets ahead), but the reason for his exit was nothing to do with his Presidential capabilities. It would have been nice to see him get a little further, because I think the possibility of having to run against a self-made black man with no chip on his shoulder was scaring the shit out of Obama.
perturbed
8 Mar 13 at 6:09 am
Why do you neocons keep pumping up the tyres of these complete nonentities? You want a true libertarian? Try Ron Paul. Oh sorry, I forgot – he’s an extremist who eats babies because he believes in real currency and sovereignty. All we ever heard about from the GOP side were the soft-touch establishment types like Mittens Romney and “Gardasil” Perry.
Plato Sandilands
8 Mar 13 at 11:58 am
NFA, perhaps as the US goes down the tubes, we (The rest of the Anglosphere)may have to start standing on our own two feet.
That would be a change.
Winston Smith
8 Mar 13 at 12:12 pm
Who is Virgil Goode?
Viva
8 Mar 13 at 12:37 pm
As noted above, that was because better candidates such as Daniels, Thune and even Chris Christy refused to run, leaving the nomination to Romney.
Token
8 Mar 13 at 12:42 pm
Isn’t he the fat bloke who supported Obama at a key point in the election?
jupes
8 Mar 13 at 1:50 pm
“the one who would have turned the media from insanely hostile into being no more than slightly on the negative side of neutral?”
Do you have any hard data that support the assertion that the media were “insanely hostile”?
A quick note of the obvious – the mainstream media is owned by large corporations, who presumably would favour Republicans over Democrats. They’re not the 47%. But let’s assume the owners and executives had zero impact on hiring decisions, editorial slant, or guest selection.
There’s also a great deal of aggregation in talking about “the media”. The biggest newspaper in the US is the WSJ, hardly a liberal stronghold – see Kissel’s remarks to Australia’s press. America’s most trusted and most watched cable news network (until recently) is Fox News – no-one’s going to say they were hostile to Romney! US radio stations lean heavily towards conservative viewpoints, with the most popular radio shows being right-wing talk shows like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck.
So what about attempts to actually measure media bias? We have to be careful to maintain a healthy dose of scepticism about the people running surveys and collating data about subjective topics, of course. They can be biased too, and some kinds of data will be better than others. Still, it’s all we’ve got.
After having a good look around, it seems to me that it’s preposterous to claim “the media” is “hostile” to one side or another. There’s plenty of bias and hostility, but overall it wasn’t tilted against Romney. Some highlights:
- 70% of Sunday show guests were Republicans (study covered June 2011-February 2012).
- Over 23 weeks of 2011 during the primaries, Pew found 9% favourable news coverage of Obama and 34% negative (for Romney the numbers were 26-27).
- After Romney won the primaries, his favourable coverage percentage never dropped below his negative (for the duration of the study). It was the opposite for Obama, for the entirety of the 10 months prior to May 2012.
- 4thEstate found the Republicans’ share of quotations in print, on TV and on radio was 59% to the Democrats’ 41% (during May, June and July of 2012)
I’ll leave you with the results of D’Alessio’s meta-study of 99 studies of news coverage of US election campaigns over 60 years:
Jarrah
8 Mar 13 at 1:59 pm
Mitt Romney kinda sucks, and Tony Abbott sucks even more.
Tony Abbott has taken us to the left on economic policy.
James
8 Mar 13 at 2:45 pm
Presumably?!!!!!!
Ur a deadset twit Jarrah.
Big business loves big government – the more regulation the better.
The rest of ‘comment’ is utter bilge.
As usual.
JamesK
8 Mar 13 at 2:49 pm
The rest of ur ‘comment’ is utter bilge.
JamesK
8 Mar 13 at 2:49 pm
Yes, and up until that point he was seen as a strong contender for 2016. If he had got into the race during the anyone but Romney stage of the primaries it is likely he would’ve been nominated.
Token
8 Mar 13 at 3:33 pm
????
You could say the same for Hollywood but they have the extremely fat tax concessions and are assisted by the barriers to entry provided by government regulation.
As the RNC is dealing with a popular movement to move the party to support small government/less regulation, therefore many support the DNC which is all about political opportunism and crony capitalism.
_____________
This is a fallacy. As Tim Grossclose documents its editorial section is conservative and the news section is extremely left wing:
Token
8 Mar 13 at 3:41 pm
Of course, as you have a desire to see that is the case.
You and I went through this in November and at the time you acknowledged one of the many flaws to the survey was that material items like the interview about Benghazi which was dumped on the last week before the election was used throughout the campaign to check the Romney campaign on the issue.
The Pew survey which is based upon crude metrics is designed in a way to ignore material items like that.
Token
8 Mar 13 at 3:44 pm
My son lives in USA. Reasons for Romney’s loss according to him were:
- Mormon.
- His dog put in crate on top of his car for long trip
- His wealth
Honeybadger
8 Mar 13 at 4:13 pm
Presumably John F. Kennedy’s reasons for winning were:
-Catholic
-The help looked after the pets when on holiday
-His wealth
JamesK
8 Mar 13 at 4:32 pm
Yoohoo, Professor Kates? Any response?
Jarrah
9 Mar 13 at 2:57 am
The simple fact is that it’s difficult to pin down why Romney lost, because he should have won. No incumbent has won with the economy in such a rut as Obama. Yet Romney lost. I know what will be writ in History – GOP foolishly nominates silvertail with no common touch, can’t attack Obama’s wildly unpopular signature policy because he was the architect of it – well, we just had the WSJ editor informing us of all this despite the fact they backed Romney to the hilt in the election. It’s still a simplistic view.
Obama likes to claim his gaggle of computer nerds and their organisation got him over the line. Well, that certainly helped, and made the fact that Romney should have won less likely. Still, Romney lost. But it was a squeaker. 50,000 extra votes in four states would have seen Romney over the line. There were several paths to victory for Romney which involved a couple of hundred thousand votes over several states. When you’re talking about a margin that small, it really could be pinned down to a matter such as Christie chummying it up with Obama on the Sandy-stricken Jersey Shore. Or Obama affecting a certain composure in a time of national calamity. Or the national calamity itself.
The numbers pre-Sandy didn’t look good for the President. I know his proxies like to talk about their superior ground game, and their ground game was admittedly excellent because they delivered a blowout in the battleground state electoral college votes despite a miniscule difference in the battleground state popular vote.
The fact is, however, when you’re talking numbers that small, a change of weather can affect them. It’s quite conceivable that Romney could have won the college yet lost the popular vote.
Personally, from what I can see, the Obama campaign set out to be as absolutely good as it could be given the circumstances and succeeded wildly, and the Romney’s team ran a fairly lacklustre effort, despite their best efforts.
Oh come on
9 Mar 13 at 8:17 am
Jarrah, surely you realise how deceptive you’re being here. Or perhaps you don’t, perhaps because you don’t know much about the US media hierarchy and are more focused on “the biggest newspaper”, “the biggest channel” and so on. The newspaper with the largest circulation may be the WSJ (however it could easily be argued that other publications such as the NYT, WaPO or even The Economist! have greater influence), but so what? The newspaper market is highly fragmented. You don’t find many people in Idaho reading the WSJ. I suspect you know this; it’s just a bit disappointing you think such a shoddy decontextualised fact would slip by the Cat commentariat.
I don’t know about recently – I thought it was still number one. Who cares. Point is we’re talking about their top rating shows delivering numbers that impress both an American and an Australian media director, despite the Australian’s audience being less than a tenth of the size! So what if Bill O’Reilly wins the cable race and gets an audience of 3 million? Well done, that’s a massive 1% of the country! The local regional free to air TV channels are still king, attract far more viewers, and they’re Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC. No obvious conservative bias here.
Well, we should be a bit more precise about the kind of radio we’re talking about, because you’re quite wrong to say that “US radio stations lean heavily towards conservative viewpoints”. No, most US radio stations are apolitical. Nevertheless, it’s true to say that AM talk radio is dominated by conservative perspective, which is why the non-conservatives keep trying to get it shut down. But AM radio is pretty much the only medium conservatives dominate. Liberals have tried to make inroads, but have failed due to a lack of audience. Still, you are right to say that conservatives have an entrenched majority in American talk radio.
One out of three ain’t bad.
Oh come on
9 Mar 13 at 8:43 am
“The numbers pre-Sandy didn’t look good for the President.”
That’s not true.
Jarrah
9 Mar 13 at 11:59 am
As an American libertarian I can say that it was not clear that Romney would repeal Obamacare (he supported the pre-existing condition provisions, which required all the rest of the baggage) and he seemed quite ready to embroil us in more wars (Syria, for starters). The clear difference that Steve presents didn’t exist at the level of principles, leading many to withhold support.
Brian J. Gladish
9 Mar 13 at 11:59 am
“but so what?”
If many prominent components of “the media” were pro-Romney, how was “the media” “insanely hostile” to Romney? I used those outlets as examples of how deceptive Kates’ repeated assertions have been.
“it’s just a bit disappointing you think such a shoddy decontextualised fact would slip by the Cat commentariat.”
The commentariat and Kates are ignoring it, except for you
You have also focused on what was a minor point about how varied the US media landscape can be (rather than the naive and empirically ridiculous notion about a monolithic “liberal media”). The real meat is in the figures about what the US media actually broadcasts. You don’t seem to have anything to say about that.
“So what if Bill O’Reilly wins the cable race and gets an audience of 3 million? Well done, that’s a massive 1% of the country!”
You just finished talking about how a few hundred thousand votes the other way would have made for a different result.
Jarrah
9 Mar 13 at 12:15 pm
I’m no fan of the original GOP primary field and of them Romney was not my preferred candidate.
That said, any one claiming to care for the US constitution who did not vote for Romney against Obummer is a fuckwit or worse.
It really is not difficult.
JamesK
9 Mar 13 at 12:19 pm
I’m sorry, Professor Kates, but it seems you are a coward, unwillingly to defend your preposterous statements. If we meet again, I won’t be as polite as before.
Oh come on is also absent, but I hesitate to label him or her equally, since there is no pattern of behaviour as there is with the venerable yet spry Kates.
Jarrah
13 Mar 13 at 1:59 am