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The author of What Went Wrong traveled with the Romney campaign and verifies that they were genuinely "stunned" by election night results. Republicans spent a billion dollars on the 2012 presidential election, but ran the wrong campaign, with the wrong contender, played the game poorly, and were outsmarted by Democratic computer geeks.
Romney's team relied on outdated campaign methodology (polls, focus groups, direct-mail) while Obama's team "transformed the art of electioneering with methodologies borrowed from economics, political science, and psychology." Computer-driven voter-intelligence analytic systems: the GOP needs to find out what that is before the 2016 election. Obama should have been as easy to defeat as Carter in 1980, based on his first term. But his handlers ran him as a "celebrity candidate," downplaying his record. The 2012 strategy changed little from that of 2008; it went from "blame Bush" to "blame Romney," using "fair share" tax rhetoric and positioning "the rich" as the enemy of the downtrodden. Obama's team wooed African-Americans, Hispanics, single women, union members, and youths of the "Millennial generation." Strategists cared little about "antagonizing" other voters because they didn't need them. They also disregarded the fate of America by using identity politics and focusing on themes of class conflict, to the detriment of a unified nation. Corsi notes that the nation is more divided today than at any time since the Civil War. Romney's economic views, based on capitalism and private enterprise, were solid. But in the face of government giveaways, there are groups of people who no longer believe in that system. Although social welfare programs are a failure, Corsi claims, "Spending increased more than one-third during Obama's first term" on the eighty federal meanstested programs for low-income people. Corsi's claim that "social welfare benefits are now calculated to make up 35% of wages and salaries in the United States" is alarming. Republicans can win in 2016 but only if they address each problem identified by Corsi. Marginalizing Tea Party conservatives is a bad tactic. The country needs conservative leadership to address the looming disaster fueled by the entitlement economy. They will also need a charismatic candidate to reunite a country intentionally divided for political gain. (WND Books, 2013, 274 pp., $25.95) |
Republicans nominated yet another establishment, centrist candidate. Romney failed to "attack Obama directly" (except during the one debate he soundly won), tried to please the mainstream press (no Republican ever will), and he allowed himself to be defined by the opposition.
