Op-Ed: Why Romney Didn’t Get Enough Votes to Win
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky
Israel National News
11/13/2012
It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America…
…the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is dumb – ignorant, and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters – the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.
Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. Obama could get away with it because he knew he was talking to dunces waving signs and squealing at any sight of him….
…this election should be a wake-up call to Jews…
The complete editorial is at Israel National News
H/T Atlas Shrugs
This is the best thing I have read on the election loss and the broader question of the loss of America.
I have, for some time, struggled with the new reality — America void of her reason, existing without the reason for her existence, her morality. It did not seem possible. And yet what now seems impossible is that America ever was. As we revert back to the age of the primitive, the fact that America happened at all is nothing short of a miracle. The rational man’s shining hour.
The United States of America was created as an independent nation whose founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Freedom. Ayn Rand said, “freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion.” America was the first moral government based on individual rights, the nation of the Enlightenment.
That ideal has been tossed aside for ….. “free stuff.”…
Update: Hey! Let’s have a ‘Burn the Constitution Day!’
…I don’t believe the Constitution is holy writ nor do I think that the Founders had all the answers for today’s America. But all public officials and members of the military swear fealty to our founding document for a reason; it is the most visible, the most tangible representation of our sovereignty as a nation. We don’t have kings, or castles, or ancient ruins to which we can point and say our sovereignty lies within. It is the Constitution that unites us as a people.
And positing the notion that we should just throw it away is outrageously stupid and disquietingly radical. Seidman may scoff at original intent and embrace the living constitution interpretation. But that doesn’t mean that what the Founders thought should be dismissed out of hand by anyone. At the very least, their idea of limiting government power is as relevant today as it was 200 years ago.
And we don’t need a smarmy, sneering Georgetown professor to tell us otherwise.
Read the whole thing. Americans like Professor Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown University serve to prove the Rabbi’s point.
Also, Just How Awful Will 2013 Be?
…In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.” How did that government program work out? Johnson would be been better served if he had listened to Thomas Jefferson who said, “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” And “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Like Europe before it, America has succumbed to the siren call of Communism because (a) no one seems to learn anything from history and (b) most people would rather have the government tell them what to do and how to spend what little money they are permitted to keep. When Karl Marx died, most of his obituaries were wrong. The Neue Freie Press in Vienna, Austria wrote “Marx’s scholarship was an imaginative lie, his doctrine despair. The damage he created will pass like a corpse.”…
