The Reemergence of Mitt Romney at CPAC...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty
-vs- Tyranny


Romney at CPAC 2013. The reemergence of the Mitten. A man that is as close to a chameleon as there ever was.The crowd eats it up.

THE HILL - GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney appealed for the Republican Party to learn from the mistakes of his losing 2012 presidential campaign and, as conservatives chart their course forward, to look to GOP governors for a path to future electoral wins.

Romney received perhaps the most enthusiastic reception yet of any speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, with a packed auditorium offering him an extended standing ovation before he began.

He told the CPAC crowd that while he "left the race disappointed that we didn't win," he remained optimistic for future success — if the party learns from his campaign.

"We've lost races before, in the past, but those setbacks prepared us for larger victories. It's up to us to make sure that we learn from our mistakes, and my mistakes, and that we take advantage of that learning to make sure that we take back the nation, take back the White House, get the Senate and put in place conservative principles," he said.

The speech marked a reemergence of sorts for Romney, who has quietly returned to private life following his defeat.

Many Republicans have blamed Romney for losing a winnable race to President Obama, criticizing him as a poor candidate who ran a flawed campaign. The loss caught many in the party off-guard — Romney included — due in part to faulty assumptions about turnout and mistaken polling.

Some Republicans have also charged Romney was not conservative enough, and didn't cut a stark enough contrast to Obama.

Skip

"As someone who just lost the last election, I'm probably not in the best position to chart the course for the next one," Romney admitted.

"That being said, let me offer this advice. And perhaps because I'm a former governor, I would urge us all to learn the lessons that come from some of our greatest success stories, and that's 30 Republican governors across the country," he added.

The former Massachusetts governor's loss in November has sparked a party-wide recalibrating, as the GOP looks to avoid the mistakes of 2012. {Read More

Wondering if the rEpublican socons and neocons will ever get it right.



Via: Memeorandum

Comments

  1. I had a lot of issues with Romney, too; the flip-flopping, the pandering, the lack of specificity, etc.. But I also have to tell you, of all of those retreads at CPAC this weekend; Gingrich, Santorum, Palin, Bachman, etc., he was definitely the most palatable in my opinion. The fellow is decent and it's a shame that he had to go through such gyrations and a Kabuki dance in order to present himself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Personally I saw Romney as a decent person that has done much that people don't know about.

      For me Romney is really the example of the Rockefeller Republican when I prefer the Goldwater Republican.

      In the end Romney may have been better off running as himself. Deferentiaing himself aa a fiscal conservative, a social moderate, and been rock solid on HIS core principles, rather than pandering to all points of interest.

      Delete
    2. Is there any whiff of scandal about him? Other than the dog on the roof? The Obama campaign flat-out lied about his being a "vulture capitalists" and killing people (long since debunked), and the bully accusation turned out to be a hoax when the "victims" vanished like cockroaches under light when it came time for truthtelling.

      Delete
  2. Well, in actuality, CPAC has little significance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That really is true. It is unfortunate however that CPAC is so heavily influenced by individuals that are focused on solutions that will not resolve our nation's problems. There are those on the hill that that agree.

      Delete
  3. Will, the reason Romney "had to go through such gyrations and a Kabuki dance" is because the GOP has become so extreme and out of touch with the American people that he HAD to become what he is not in order to get the party--and its base--to nominate him.

    When Romney was governor here in Massachusetts, he was a moderate Republican. No one can be moderate and be acceptable to today's Republican party. Example: See Chris Christie. He put his state over politics during Sandy and worked with President Obama, and because of that, he was snubbed and not invited to CPAC.

    And yet Donald Trump got a speaking invitation?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are correct in saying he had to satisfy the base, all levels of it. To crib s phrase, 'He sold his soul to the devil", this never turns out well. His reward, he lost the election.

      Delete
    2. People are too afraid to lose, Shaw, on both sides.

      Delete
    3. The "extreme and out of touch" claim is baseless.... and ancient. Hardline Dems say this of the GOP even when they win by large majorities, and have been doing this for ages. It really says more about how out-of-touch and blindly partisan those making these claims are.

      Delete
    4. That's why you Republicans have lost two presidential elections in a row? Because you are not out of touch? Funny!

      Delete
  4. I agree with Shaw that the tea party, socons, and neocons have taken the Republicans in a negative direction. But I also think that folks such as Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Gregory Meeks, Maxine Waters, Alan Grayson, Barney ("I think that we should roll the dice on Fannie and Freddie") Frank, Bernie Sanders, John Conyers, and even President Obama lately have in fact done some similar damage on her side, and it would be nice for Shaw to occasionally acknowledge this.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Only slightly less out of touch than Democrats... and that is for the Presidential election. And in another important national matter, voters in these two elections (and the mid-term in between) overall, across the nation, chose more Republicans than Democrats for the US House of Representatives. The Dems being here more out of touch than Republicans.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What will be telling will the results of the 2014 mid term elections. If the results mirror what progressives are saying we can expect a democratic senate, a democratic house, and a democratic president in 2016.

      Of course given the most recent numbers on the economy and unemployment who knows. Americans tend to be politically fickle and seem t have selective memories.

      Delete
    2. The more Obamacare blooms, with its increases in the percent of uninsured, forced sharp price hikes for medical supplies and also insurance itself, workers being cut from full-time work to 30 hours a week due to that Obamacare's anti-full-time-worker penalty, and more people hit by the massive middle-class tax hike that is part of the act.... the worse it looks for Dems.

      I forgot that there is another penalty in Obamacare to discourage small businesses from hiring too many employees. This will result in either people being fired, or just not hired at all as businesses thinking of expanding get hit with this penalty.

      Delete
  6. Wrong again, dmarks:


    "House Democrats got more votes than House Republicans. Yet Boehner says he’s got a mandate?
    Posted by Ezra Klein on November 9, 2012 at 10:15 am, Washington Post



    House Republicans were reelected. They have as much right to claim a popular mandate as the president does.

    Or they would if they’d actually won more votes. But they didn’t. House Republicans did the equivalent of winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote.

    It can be a bit difficult to tally up the popular vote in House elections because you have to go ballot by ballot, and many incumbents run unopposed. But The Washington Post’s Dan Keating did the work and found that Democrats got 54,301,095 votes while Republicans got 53,822,442. That’s a close election — 48.8%-48.5% –but it’s still a popular vote win for the Democrats."


    From "FairVote" The Center for Voting and Democracy:

    "Democrats' Edge in House Popular Vote Would Have Increased if All Seats Had Been Contested

    In the aftermath of the 2012 House elections, many political observers noticed an uncomfortable fact: Democratic House candidates won more raw popular votes than Republicans, but Republicans won 33 more House seats than Democrats. A new FairVote analysis suggests that if both parties had run candidates in all 435 congressional districts, the Democratic margin of victory - and the amount of distortion in the election results - would have been even greater than the partisan skew indicated by the raw vote totals."


    From PolitiFACT:

    "The majority of (the American people) voted for a Democratic House." PolitiFact finds this claim "mostly true."

    Hoyer said the majority of Americans "voted for a Democratic House." We found an impartial and thorough analysis that supports his claim, at least when considering votes for the two dominant parties. Indeed, Democrats earned a majority."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Considering the press you Republicans have been getting (add recent CPAC meeting) the last two years (negative) I wouldn't count on any victories in 2014.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Way to cook the numbers, Shaw. When it comes to actual elections, people voted to send more Republicans to the House. Cooking the numbers like you are doing is the exact equivalent of counting the millions of Republicans in California to add to totals and claim a Romney victory in 2012... although in the actual election, Republicans lost California.

    It's sore-loserism each way.

    Mandate? The edge the voters gave the Republicans in the House is not THAT huge, I will agree that like with Obama's victory, there is no landslide, and no "mandate".

    ReplyDelete
  9. Who got more applause, Romney, Coulter or Palin and her Big Gulp?

    The party of fools. We'll see the Republicans in a couple decades still
    trying to push Booby(sic) Jindal on a public that has long since wised up to this
    clown car.

    The big problem is that they have moved so close to the lunatic fringe that
    the Dems are now right of center and the progressive voice in America is all
    but gone.

    When the House budget is prepared by someone who thinks Atlas Shrugged
    is serious literature we are in for a long damaging slog.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dems right of center? I want some of whatever you're toking!

      Progressive voice all but gone? Please be more specific. You do understand Ducky, to this moderately right of center (in the fiscal sense) individual the progressives are plentiful, organized, and planning their strategy. Just like the progressives nemesis, the out there right wing conservative statists.

      As to Atlas Shrugged, nobody would expect that a progressive statist (speaking economically and in a fiscal sense as well as the communal) such as yourself would find this best selling literary work anything but less than serious.

      You are correct Ducky in that we're in for a long, steady, downward slog. I do believe we are looking ay the new 'normal.'

      Delete
    2. Yeah, RN. The Dems are in fact left of center, and the progressive voice is strong in the Presidency and the US Senate.

      And with Paul Ryan proposing an expansion of the Statee and large growth in social spending, it is purely silly to call him any sort of libertarian or Randist.

      Delete
  10. dmarks, shaw is absolutely correct.
    The House popular vote went to the Dems. It was redistricting that
    gave the R's the majority.

    Not complaining really. Both parties do it at redistricting time but just
    accept that you have a majority through gerrymandering.
    The republican ideology is a minority position in America.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The House popular vote went to the R's. Referring of course to actual election results, not imagination.

      The republican "ideology" is no more and no less popular than the Democrat one. That is what happens when things have been 50_5p in actual election results for the past 12 years or so.

      Delete
  11. The Ryan budget goes up 40% over 11 years. Only in the lunatic world of the progressives is that considered draconian.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Ducky, forget trying to get through to dmarks. He's a perfect example of where the extremists are on the right: They create their own reality, and damn the facts! It's so quaint.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kind of like when Al Gore created that reality of the sea levels rising 20 feet by the end of the century?

      Delete
    2. Shaw, I. Was referring to the facts, and did not have to create any reality or cook numbers. The Republicans in the last two House elections were more popular than Democrats according to how voters voted. If anything is "extremist", it is the immense contempt for democracy and the Constitution required for someone (such as you and Ducky) to make the claim that the losers actually won.

      Unlike you two, I accept reality and am no sort of extremist. Voters chose divided government: Democrats to ruin the Presidency and SenTe, and Republicans to run the House. It would be "extreme" to imagine any other result into being, and that would also disenfranchise the nation.

      This is what the voters chose. I accept it.

      Delete
    3. So yes, Shaw. Forget trying to get through to me and convince me the imaginary conjurations of partisan pressure groups like FairVote matter in elections, instead of looking at how people voted. No, I insist on facts, not the "partisanship over principle" of soe losers.

      I have standards.

      Delete
    4. Typo alert: Obama was chosen to run the Presidnency, not ruin it!

      Delete
  13. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey aNon from Italia...Understand this is NOT a porn site. I posted your garbage by mistake. Therefore, following this comment your post has been deleted.

      DO NOT COME BACK AND ATTEMPT TO GET THROUGH THE NOW ENHANCED FILTERING.

      Delete
  14. Blog management has just completed deleting over 2100 comment posts (made over the past 11 months) that were either a personal attack on a commenter of this site or the site's administrator, as well as sites attempting to gain exposure on this site under false pretense. Such as the aNon above that was just deleted.

    Unfortunately 100 such comments inadvertently got posted during the process of deleting the other 2,000+ comments. Site management apologizes for any inappropriate or offensive comment that may have been among the 100.

    Thank you for your understanding. Your readership is valued at RN USA.

    The Management,
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    ReplyDelete
  15. What doesn't dmarks understand about this fact?:

    Democratic House candidates winning the popular vote, despite big GOP majority
    Posted by Aaron Blake on November 9, 2012 at 11:52 am, The Washington Post

    Democratic House candidates appear to have won more of the popular vote than their Republican counterparts on Tuesday, despite what looks as though it will be a 35-seat GOP majority.

    And this:

    The House – new, with less democracy!
    November 9th, 2012, 2:00pm by Sam Wang


    "Today, Speaker John Boehner stated that his party’s leverage comes from the fact that it retained control of the House. Yet they lost the popular vote. How can this be?

    Before the election, I predicted that even if more people voted for Democratic House candidates, Republicans could still retain control. The reason I gave was redistricting since 2010, which has tilted the playing field significantly. The prediction was correct – though if anything, I underestimated the effect."

    Not Gerrymandering, but Districting: More Evidence on How Democrats Won the Popular Vote but Lost the Congress
    by JOHN SIDES on NOVEMBER 15, 2012 ·

    This is a guest post by political scientist Nicholas Goedert, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University.

    *****

    "Expanding on recent posts by Dan Hopkins and Eric McGhee, there appears to be evidence at a state-by-state level that the disparity between the popular vote in the House and the distribution of seats is not just due to Republican gerrymanders, but due to a skewed geographic distribution of population putting the Democrats at an inherent disadvantage, along the lines of Chen and Rodden’s recent work. That is, the Democrats’ loss in the House was caused largely not by gerrymandering, but districting itself.

    McGhee’s post compares the results of the 2012 elections to what the election might have looked like using the 2002-2010 maps, and finds that the most recent round of redistricting had relatively minimal effects. An alternate way of measure districting effects is to compare the 2012 results with historical patterns from recent congressional elections for seats won for a given popular vote share. Using this technique, I find slightly greater effects of partisan gerrymandering, but also a persistent bias in favor of the Republicans."

    ReplyDelete
  16. Only in dmarks' world would anyone not understand that the HOUSE Democrats won MORE VOTES--one million of them--than the HOUSE Republicans after posting evidence to show that is a fact.

    Here's one more, dmarks, for you to stamp your foot and say isn't so:

    Republicans Can’t Claim Mandate as Democrats Top House Vote

    "Democrats failed to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives even though they won 1 million more votes than Republicans."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shaw, I think I get your point. I am not going to argue this. What I will say is we are a republic rather than a "true democracy" which IMNHO is a damn good thing. I believe the reasons are obvious.

      What we need to do away with across the board is gerrymandering.

      But what do I know? I'm just one small L libertarian with fiscal conservative principles.

      Delete
    2. Shaw: I have checked into in this more. You are showing a great contempt and ignorance for the Constitution, and, yes, Democracy. You are arbitrarily shuffling voters out of districts and into others... or even into imaginary territory only in your mind.

      The fact is that in every single House district, candidates, usually both Republicans and Democratics, presented themselves to the voters. The voters, while mostly Democratics and Republicans, were not beholden to vote based on any past voting preference. They went to the polls. And in most of these districts, these voters happened to choose Republicans. That's democracy at work on a granular local level, 435 times over.

      What you are doing is imagineering things out of situations where, say, a Democratic candidate got 80% of the vote. That's 29% more than what is needed to win that house seat. You are taking these voters and shuffling them about elsewhere. No, it does not work that way. It never does, and ever will, in any election. House district votes count locally, never otherwise. To do what you advocate would destroy demoocracy. It would be like France voting overwhelmingly for a left-wing candidate, and England voting slightly more for a conservative candidate, so you take those extra French voters above the majority and apply them in England in order to get a left-wing victory in both countries.

      Sorry, it does not work that way, and it would be insane if it did. The voters in this or that un-named district in West Kentucky chose Republicans, and that is the will of the voters in these examples. You can't count voters from central San Francisco in these elections. If it were OK to do what you are imagineering about, one could easily scrape up a bunch of "way more than majority" votes in Texas districts, stuff them into Nancy Pelosi's district, and have a Republican win there instead.

      Let's accept reality, Shaw. The voters in House districts, which are decided locally not nationally, chose Republicans. Sore-loserism has no place in a decent democracy or republic.

      Delete
  17. The voters chose Republicans, but by too small of a margin to call it a mandate. Exactly the same with the voters choosing the Democrats for the Presidency. Thinking of Shaw's blog post which started with a juvenile bit: a photo doctored to make Paul Ryan look uglier, setting the stage for her alterations of his budget plan to make it worse than it is (a post of distortions from beginning to end), the voters put Ryan into the House, and his party into majority rule yet again. He has every right to push his ideas, as this is not the winner-take-all dictatorship Shaw was supporting when she was bashing Ryan for daring to oppose the agenda of the elected President.

    And Shaw again spits on the Constitution by not respecting the will of the voters.

    ReplyDelete

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