Margaret Carlson
By Margaret Carlson
As I look back at the 2012 presidential campaign, it now all seems so obvious.
Not one of those clowns performing at the hundreds of Republican primary debates this year and last was a match for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. And Romney clearly wasn’t the candidate to defeat President Barack Obama.
Yes and yes — but still. We don’t always see what’s happening before our very eyes. To me, the last 12 months (give or take a few) raise two central questions: If we don’t learn from the flawed candidates of the past, how will we avoid taking them seriously in the future? And now that he is unencumbered by presidential ambitions, what should Romney do with the rest of his public life?
Taking the first question first, I confess that I accepted Herman Cain as a viable candidate for president long after his sell-by date. Then it was time for Rick Santorum, who was anointed by the Christian right as the un-clown who could stop Romney. “If you were to bolt a conservative candidate together from spare parts — and Santorum sometimes seems as if he has been,” I wrote in December 2011, “you would get something akin to the former Pennsylvania senator.”
He wore his faith on his sweater vest, was intensely pro-life and had a family to rival Romney’s. When evangelicals finally got together in a Houston suburb to eat, pray and lurch their way to an endorsement in mid-January, Santorum got the nod, if not a hug. (The group’s first love, Texas Governor Rick Perry, had too many stumbles.)
Newt Gingrich — professional provocateur, moon coloniser, disgraced former speaker of the House — could never win the Republican nomination for president, although I wrote about him as if he could. A serial adulterer who tried to repair his image by endorsing a conservative group’s vow to protect marriage, one of his low moments was having his daughters from his first wife defend Gingrich’s third wife against charges by his second wife that he had urged her to have an “open marriage.”
My defence for writing so much about Gingrich is that hypocrisy is rarely so entertaining. Besides, Gingrich did have an impact — his victory in South Carolina roused the rusty establishment, which exposed his exaggerated relationship with former President Ronald Reagan and Gingrich’s mediocre record as speaker. Then Romney and his super-PACs spent more than $10m for ads in Florida, which was more than enough to finish off Gingrich.
So the putative front-runner finally became the actual front-runner. I was still under the illusion that, with such a rotten economy, a challenger would easily be able to defeat an incumbent president.
And yet, was Romney ever really viable? He was so unloved that at one point even Cain polled better. Romney simply couldn’t connect with voters long enough to take advantage of the president’s weakness. Being yourself (or yourselves) is hard enough without the artificial authenticity of politics. What an ordeal every day must have been for Romney, as he tried to find a way of being that would get people, even in his own party, to stop saying what a stiff phony he was.
Trying to prove them wrong, he went for spontaneous only to blurt out ridiculous things he couldn’t possibly have believed.
Wp-bloomberg
By Margaret Carlson
As I look back at the 2012 presidential campaign, it now all seems so obvious.
Not one of those clowns performing at the hundreds of Republican primary debates this year and last was a match for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. And Romney clearly wasn’t the candidate to defeat President Barack Obama.
Yes and yes — but still. We don’t always see what’s happening before our very eyes. To me, the last 12 months (give or take a few) raise two central questions: If we don’t learn from the flawed candidates of the past, how will we avoid taking them seriously in the future? And now that he is unencumbered by presidential ambitions, what should Romney do with the rest of his public life?
Taking the first question first, I confess that I accepted Herman Cain as a viable candidate for president long after his sell-by date. Then it was time for Rick Santorum, who was anointed by the Christian right as the un-clown who could stop Romney. “If you were to bolt a conservative candidate together from spare parts — and Santorum sometimes seems as if he has been,” I wrote in December 2011, “you would get something akin to the former Pennsylvania senator.”
He wore his faith on his sweater vest, was intensely pro-life and had a family to rival Romney’s. When evangelicals finally got together in a Houston suburb to eat, pray and lurch their way to an endorsement in mid-January, Santorum got the nod, if not a hug. (The group’s first love, Texas Governor Rick Perry, had too many stumbles.)
Newt Gingrich — professional provocateur, moon coloniser, disgraced former speaker of the House — could never win the Republican nomination for president, although I wrote about him as if he could. A serial adulterer who tried to repair his image by endorsing a conservative group’s vow to protect marriage, one of his low moments was having his daughters from his first wife defend Gingrich’s third wife against charges by his second wife that he had urged her to have an “open marriage.”
My defence for writing so much about Gingrich is that hypocrisy is rarely so entertaining. Besides, Gingrich did have an impact — his victory in South Carolina roused the rusty establishment, which exposed his exaggerated relationship with former President Ronald Reagan and Gingrich’s mediocre record as speaker. Then Romney and his super-PACs spent more than $10m for ads in Florida, which was more than enough to finish off Gingrich.
So the putative front-runner finally became the actual front-runner. I was still under the illusion that, with such a rotten economy, a challenger would easily be able to defeat an incumbent president.
And yet, was Romney ever really viable? He was so unloved that at one point even Cain polled better. Romney simply couldn’t connect with voters long enough to take advantage of the president’s weakness. Being yourself (or yourselves) is hard enough without the artificial authenticity of politics. What an ordeal every day must have been for Romney, as he tried to find a way of being that would get people, even in his own party, to stop saying what a stiff phony he was.
Trying to prove them wrong, he went for spontaneous only to blurt out ridiculous things he couldn’t possibly have believed.
Wp-bloomberg
