Ann Coulter Says: Don't Blame Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter’s new column is entitled: “Don’t Blame Romney.” It should have been called: “Don’t Blame Me.”

Coulter was so loudly beating the drums for a Romney candidacy and you would think that she would be slightly humbled by Tuesday’s election.

Not at all; she’s doubling down by shifting the blame.

It’s hard enough to say you’re sorry. It’s harder still to say you were wrong.

So Coulter has written a column where she explains clearly and concisely why she was right.

To her mind, Romney lost because incumbents are devilishly difficult to beat. And besides, it is sous-entendu, Coulter’s paladin was just too good for today’s America.

In her words:

Romney was the perfect candidate, and he was the president this country needed right now. It's less disheartening that a president who wrecked American health care, quadrupled gas prices, added $6 trillion to the national debt and gave us an 8 percent unemployment rate can squeak out re-election than that America will never have Romney as our president.

Indeed, Romney is one of the best presidential candidates the Republicans have ever fielded. Blaming the candidate may be fun, but it's delusional and won't help us avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

None of us wants to delve too deeply into Coulter’s idea of perfection, but Romney’s stance on immigration, a primary factor in his loss, was far less than perfect.

I find it edifying to contrast Coulter’s thinly disguised self-congratulations with the sober and sensible analysis that Jeffrey Anderson offered at The Weekly Standard.

Anderson is not the first to make these points. As reported on this blog, many others were convinced that Romney could not make the case for the Republican Party and would not lead the charge against Barack Obama.

Romney was and still is a good and decent man, a very competent executive and manager, but he was not a very good politician.

Anderson makes a cogent case for Romney’s imperfection:

For all of the worthiness of his campaign, which (to his great credit) was so much more honorable, classy, truthful, and responsible than the president’s — and the extraordinary effort that he devoted to it after so many other Republicans refused to enter the contest during their nation’s time of need — the unfortunate fact is that Mitt Romney too often didn’t prosecute the case.  He didn’t really make the case on Obamacare (and especially on the federal individual mandate), on Libya, on our debt crisis (hitting it only intermittently), or on this president’s demonstrated willingness to circumvent the rule of law to achieve his desired ends (“recess” appointments when the Senate was in session, the steady stream of flagrant actions by this administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, the ongoing actions of its Justice Department, the president’s unilateral decrees gutting welfare reform and asserting that — regardless of what the law says — young illegals are hereafter free to stay in this country, etc.).  How much did the majority of Americans, who primarily get their news from the mainstream press corps or The Daily Show, have any of these concerns on their minds as they entered the polling booth?

As a result, an election that should have been about Obamacare wasn’t really about Obamacare — and a president who might well be further outside of the American ideological mainstream than any other president to date, amazingly came off looking (again!) like a moderate.  To make matters even worse (and more unjust), the president portrayed Romney as the extremist.  The lesson should be clear:  When Republicans don’t fight, they simply allow liberal Democrats to appear to be centrists.

Nuf said.