A Vote For Romney Is A Vote For Obama

Recently, a friend statused the following on Facebook:

Remember during the election for pres on nov 12 a vote for Ron Paul is a vote for Obama. I think Ron will be voting for the republican candidate himself because he does not like Obama either. I am just saying make ur vote count and don't pencil in Ron Paul and waste a vote to get Obama out of office.

My response to this status turned into my previous post on how the GOP can't win without a Ron Paul nomination. My conclusion:  "If, on election day, Ron Paul has to be written onto the ballot by voters then the GOP has already lost." Furthermore, a vote for Mitt Romney IS a vote for Barack Obama. 

Many people are under the illusion that Mitt Romney has the best chance to beat Obama. If you believe the latest Rasmussen poll, 51% of Republicans think that Romney is the best bet for beating Obama. There are plenty of lies, damned lies and statistics in this report, but that's no surprise. What is noteworthy, however, is that 56% of Republicans think "best chance to beat Obama" is the most important factor. The correlation between people who think "best chance to beat Obama" is the most important thing and people who think Romney has the best chance confirms what I said previously: "The only positive trait that Mitt Romney has is that it is believed he can beat Obama." This belief is purely a statement of faith though. It is devoid of any knowledge of history. And as if to prove the old saying, the GOP is hellbent on repeating history. Mitt Romney is just the next candidate in the growing line of moderate, neo-Conservative Republican losers. 

In 1992, George H. W. Bush was the first of the modern moderate neocon losers. Sure, he talked "family values" but everyone knew from his record that he wasn't actually socially conservative. During his Vice-Presidency, and before, he was pro-choice, and his fiscal policies were moderate, at best. He won in 1988 on the momentum, albeit fading, of the Reagan Revolution and because he was running against a Massachusetts Governor named Romney Dukakis. But during that campaign, Bush famously promised "Read my lips: No New Taxes." But his moderate core got the best of him, and during his first term he raised taxes. Not only that, he introduced the whole globalist concept of a New World Order and signed NAFTA. No amount of family values could save him once his true moderate neocon side had been revealed. 


In 1996, Bob Dole was the next moderate trotted out. Only this time he was running against an incumbent Democrat who had a mildly rocky first term and whose party lost big in the mid-term elections. That doesn't sound familiar at all. Bob Dole inspired zero enthusiasm in the Republican party getting 22% fewer votes than George W. Bush did 4 years later. The Dole nomination, like the Romney candidacy, had an air of inevitability to it, as if it was finally his turn. Nobody was excited by him.  But Dole's claim was that he had the best chance to beat Clinton. Here is some news coverage from the time:

"The results boosted Dole's claim that he has the best chance to beat Clinton as 3,400 delegates and hordes of national media prepared to gather in Orlando this weekend for Presidency III, the Florida Republican straw poll."

"For some, it was truly love at first sight for Pat Buchanan. Others admitted affection for Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes but figured only Bob Dole could beat Bill Clinton."

And the GOP voters fell for it. Dole lost by almost 10% in the popular vote and 40% in the electoral vote. It was a resounding defeat.

The GOP changed their strategy somewhat in 2000 and ran on a far less moderate, less neocon platform. George W. Bush promoted a "humble foreign policy", a pro-life agenda, reduction in the size of government, across the board tax cuts and so on. And while it was a close race, he ultimately prevailed. Unfortunately he turned out to be one of the biggest spending, big government, military adventurists of a generation after 9/11. During his administration, the neocons became the dominant force in the Republican party. Their rise to power culminated in the nomination of John McCain in 2008.

I don't need to spend much time on McCain. Most people can remember back 4 years and the dismal failure that was McCain-Palin. The bottom line is that he was very moderate, very "electable" and he lost by 10,000,000 votes to Barack Obama. The worst defeat in electoral votes by any presidential candidate (including a politician from Massachusetts named Romney Kerry) since Bob Dole's humiliating defeat.

So back to the Facebook status at the top. The message is that if Ron Paul is written in on a ballot, it is a vote for Obama. The exact opposite is true. Writing in a vote for Ron Paul, if it comes to that, is a vote against Obama. It's also a vote against the moderate, neo-Conservative candidates that the GOP keeps trying to push forward that can't win. In the last 20 years, they've proven time and time again, that going with the moderate, the guy with the perceived Best Chance to Beat the incumbent democrat or the guy who whose turn has finally come is the way to lose. But somehow we are supposed to believe that this time is different. It's not. A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Barack Obama.

-Addendum: I didn't talk about Ross Perot (what is it with Texans bearing the initials RP?). But in the case of the Dole defeat, you could move every single vote for Perot over to Dole and he still would have lost the popular election and the electoral vote. In the 1992 race, Perot likely did change the outcome. However, his biggest issue, NAFTA, captured a lot of typically Democrat union votes, so it isn't totally clear that Bush would have won. You could make an argument that Perot could have defeated Clinton if he had been the GOP nominee. But with Bush being the incumbent and pushing Perot to a third party, he didn't stand a chance for victory. Paul is not going third party and there isn't an incumbent Republican. So, I would argue that a Romney nomination splits the vote that would otherwise go to Paul.

Why The GOP Can't Win (and how it will lose BIG) Without A Ron Paul Nomination

If the GOP nominates a candidate other than Ron Paul, Obama is guaranteed a second term.

Neither Mitt, Rick or Newt can beat Obama and this is nearly indisputable. Newt needs no explanation: he is absolutely unelectable. He hasn't had a good showing except his home state of Georgia and its neighbor South Carolina. He is only getting weaker with each state and is not a serious candidate, no matter how good a debater his followers imagine him to be. Santorum cannot beat Obama as shown in every national poll and by the fact that he alienates every single voting bloc of the Republican coalition except for the religious right/Christian conservatives. And while they may have admirable aims, they do not represent a bloc of voters that can win an election. If they did, Pat Robertson would have been President already. Mitt Romney inspires absolutely zero enthusiasm in the Republican base or in any of its composite blocs except for the country club/wall street Republicans. But it is precisely their enthusiasm that makes every other segment of the Republican party feel blasé about him. The only positive trait that Mitt Romney has is that it is believed he can beat Obama. This is wrong. In fact, take away "Mitt can beat Obama" and what do his supporters have? Nothing.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, has an enthusiastic, energetic and very importantly, young following that would walk across burning shards of glass for their candidate. The vast majority of these supporters are Republicans. But whereas the other candidates are ONLY attractive to one segment of one party, Ron Paul attracts the following non-traditional GOP voters: civil libertarians who might typically vote democrat but refuse to support Obama because he signed the NDAA (and note only Ron Paul in the GOP race opposed it on its indefinite detention grounds); independent non-party followers who tend to be less conservative but view Obama as no better than any of the GOP candidates and view Paul as a party outsider who speaks to their concerns; the anti-war movement types who are typically democrat but again see no difference between Obama and the rest. But Paul's main foreign policy message of "bring our troops home" resonates with them; disaffected democrats that don't fall in any particular group but feel that Obama is a failure for not following through on campaign promises to: 1) close gitmo 2) prosecute wall street 3) end bush tax cuts 4) change the tone in Washington (hope and change!) and so on. There are many democrats who feel sold out by Obama for his cozy (crony) relationship with Wall Street and his continuation of Bush's foreign policy and domestic fiscal policy. These people will never consider any of the other 3 GOP candidates because what they hate about Obama is his similarity to Republicans. 

However, Ron Paul is not similar to any of them. He actually does represent hope and change and will create a whole new generation of what used to be called Reagan Democrats who defected to Reagan after the abysmal Carter administration. But this is a double-edged sword. The GOP has a chance to establish its base for the next 20+ years by embracing a Ron Paul candidacy or it will lose a generation of voters to the Democrat party. Those young, enthusiastic and energetic Paul supporters were in large part Obama supporters 4 years ago. Paul is the only chance to bring them into the GOP tent and deprive the Democrats of their numbers for years to come. But if the GOP stubbornly sticks to its marginalizing  tactics and dismisses these voters they will likely swear off the GOP for life. The GOP will then face its own extinction since its current base is quickly aging and dying off. 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it isn't just the "blue democrats" or independents that make up the Ron Paul support base. It's also lifelong Republicans (like myself) who are completely disenchanted with a party that massively grew the size of government for the 6 years they controlled all branches. The "small government" party that added Medicare Part D, grew the size of the Department of Education, created the monstrous Department of Homeland Security and the anti-Constitution Patriot Act. The "free market" party that bailed out the Too Big to Fail banks, bailed out the auto industry and "abandoned the free-market system" (to “save” it) as George W Bush said in 2008. For those of us Republicans who believe in a limited role for Government and free market principles, we see in Ron Paul a return to the values of Republicanism that made this country the shining city on a hill that Reagan spoke of. And for those who would say Reagan's values were "family values",  you must understand that the term didn't even rise to prominence until the second campaign of George HW Bush in 1992. The platform that Reagan ran on is more closely aligned to Ron Paul than any other candidate. 

To paraphrase a quote: Republicans have been subnormal for so long that when they finally act normal, people think they are abnormal. Ron Paul is a normal Republican. The GOP can't win without Ron Paul's supporters and it can't survive if it shuts them out. If, on election day, Ron Paul has to be written onto the ballot by voters then the GOP has already lost.