Someone might say that the FIRST problem with Romney’s campaign is that he doesn’t seem to care about his most fervent supporters. Because he’s not trumpeting their issues, he’s creating the impression that those key issues are unimportant or unreal.
As Carl says, genuinely pro-life Christians know that they have to be all for for Romney. Obama is an extremist—by far the worst Democratic candidate ever—when it comes to respect for religious belief and institutional religion. He’s the same when it comes to the ridiculous view that science and equality are both on the side of the most absolutist view of abortion rights. What the merits of the MacIntyre 2004 position concerning to hell with both parties, things have changed A LOT since then.
You would never know about the gravity of such issues by listening to Mitt.
And the genuine lovers of LIMITED GOVERNMENT know that Obama is an unprecedented threat to the Constitution. So Randy Barnett, who disagrees with Mitt on stuff like abortion, is shouting, in his highly principled libertarian way, that this is the most important election in a long time. In the name of limited government, ObamaCare has to go!
You’d never know that from listening to Mitt, especially the most recent Mitt who, in effect, is bragging that RomneyCare was almost as GOOD as ObamaCare!
The energy of the Republican victory in 2010 was mainly hatred of ObamaCare. That hatred is fading mainly because the campaign against that mega-expansion of big government isn’t being waged.
The new book by Charles Kesler identifying Obama as a highly principled PROGRESSIVE ought to be ammo for the Romney campaign. So far the book has been authoritatively dismissed as hyperbole by Marc Lilla in the NYT. If they’re weren’t something to what Kesler says, there wouldn’t be such a big effort to take him out. Even if the book has some hyperbole here and there, that’s what you need to wage a partisan campaign.
My view has always been that PROGRESSIVISM as an ideology is dead. Obama is a progressive in speech and somewhat in deed, but he is destined to a be a blip on our political radar.
If progressivism is dead, and so progressives are out of touch, then the ticket is to out Obama as pushing a dangerously out-out-touch ideological program. My view of Obama and even ObamaCare as blips becomes wrong if he gets reelected by not being properly identified as what he is. Who’s fault would that be, Mitt?