Romney goes into this election, as he has lived his life – with a great many advantages. The Bush economy and the nation’s short memory of how we got here. The political press in the employ of his major financial backers. One third of the country being died in the wool racists. The list of reason why Romney should win goes on and on. The list of reasons why he will lose is short.
As people begin to write pre-mortem postmortems of Mitt Romney’s campaign, you’re going to see many question why and how, how in the world, indeed, could a candidate of Romney’s vintage be losing. There will be conservatives who are smug about Romney having never been a true crazy right-winger. There will be conservatives who try to throw him a life preserver, like bald demon Reihad Salam at CNN, whose “Why Mitt Romney Is Losing” editorial is full of floaties. For instance, Salam posits a fantasy Romney, one who actually comes up with plans to, say, regulate banks once the weak Dodd-Frank bill is burned by some fantasy Congress. On the left, Charles Blow in the New York Times says of the one-term governor’s strategy of just plain, fucking lying about what Barack Obama is doing, “Romney has to find a line of attack that works because there is a creeping feeling beginning to overtake part of the electorate that his candidacy is in trouble. The problem is that these sorts of desperate, baseless attacks only amplify the sense of panic.”
But there’s one overriding reason that Romney’s candidacy was doomed: he is a completely unlikeable prick.
The Rude Pundit nails it once again. Republicans are genuinely embarrassed that they have to support Mitt Romney.