Thursday, November 8, 2012

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.

7 comments:

  1. I agree, except maybe on the immigration thing. It seems to me to be a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing for conservatives. If conservatives oppose mass, unlimited immigration, Hispanics will vote against them in greater numbers. On the other hand, if conservatives support mass, unlimited immigration, Hispanics will still mostly vote against them, simply because Hispanics tend to support socialism (look at their own countries), and will do so even more when they immigrate in numbers too large to assimilate. It seems to me they should've taken a strong stance on immigration before it was too late to do anything about it, but now they're screwed.

    The only possible solution I can think of is to try to counterbalance it by encouraging mass immigration from nations where the immigrants tend to vote conservative.

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  2. It's worth pointing out that there is now more immigration from Asian nations than there is from south of the border. So, that will eventually be helpful.

    On the other hand, there were a number of different approaches to the immigration out there that came down between the two extremes. There was Marco Rubio's position, Rick Perry's and Newt's.

    As it happened Romney trashed the Perry and Newt plans for being soft on immigration... and paid a price.

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  3. I've profoundly disliked Coulter ever since GW Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers back in 2005. Whether Miers was a good candidate for SCOTUS or no, Coulter's sneering elitism at that time was a match for any Ivy League chauvinist leftist out there.

    Along with Peggy Noonan, she's right at the top of my with-friends-like-these list.

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  4. My grandparents fm Mexico. 5 sons, including dad, fought in WW2. History shows what happens to polities that can't control Borders, Demographics, & Immigration. They deliquesce. -- Rich

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  5. Here's a look at some numbers that confirms what I'm saying: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/332916/why-hispanics-dont-vote-republicans-heather-mac-donald

    Conservative outreach to Hispanics, assuming that it's even possible, should focus on the main reasons most of them vote the way they do: economic and social issues. Increasing support for immigration will simply lead to more Hispanics who will still hate conservatives for their economic and social positions.

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  6. Stuart:

    It's worth pointing out that there is now more immigration from Asian nations than there is from south of the border. So, that will eventually be helpful.

    Color me unconvinced. Asians voted for Obama by even greater percentages than Hispanics.

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  7. The data suggests that you are right: thank you for correcting my overly optimistic misinformation.

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