I hope the GOP fails entirely, so it can be replaced by a new party that advocates social liberalism and (true) fiscal conservatism.
Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
He wasn't as "cool" as Obama, though.
Unfortunately, issues have very little to do with the outcome of national elections. It's mostly about party identity and other groupthink cue following like hipness. It's not very surprising that our news media continues to be less and less distinguishable from our entertainment industry.
>Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
Was he? McCain had always been kind of a moderate -- he only went crazy to secure the 2008 Republican nomination after the failure in 2000, and apparently once you go crazy it sticks. And Romney was the same way: He sure didn't look very socially liberal to moderates during the 2012 primaries.
It seems like that's what doomed both of them, actually. To get the nomination they each had to move substantially to the right of their own previous positions, which convinced just enough of the base in order to secure the nomination while alienating the moderates. Then the general election comes around and neither the moderates nor the extremists like the candidate because he at one point or another expressed a number of positions they strongly disagree with.
Romney also had a couple of issues McCain didn't: He was a notorious Wall St. guy running at the bottom of a recession notoriously caused by Wall St. guys, and he was running following the 2010 census which gave more electoral votes to typically Democratic population centers nationwide (which, unlike the Congressional elections, couldn't then be gerrymandered by Republican state governments for the presidency since states typically don't allocate electoral votes by district).
The problem is that the same process is likely to play out again. Fox keeps giving airtime to the Huckabees and the Trumps to try to get out the base against the Democrats, but with those people going to the polls and voting on those issues, it makes it impossible for a moderate Republican to get nominated without taking positions that alienate moderate voters, and then they lose the general election.
Am I the only one that remembers that Bush ran as a moderate in 2000 and won? It was only after 9/11 that he went cowboy, and then only won in 2004 by beating the terrorism drum that has, by this point, worn out and lost its effectiveness.
I certainly don't mean to imply we need another Bush, but at some point the Republicans need to realize that pandering to crazies loses elections. (And in the meantime I'm happy to help them realize that by not voting for them, and I don't think I'm alone.)
Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
He wasn't as "cool" as Obama, though.
Unfortunately, issues have very little to do with the outcome of national elections. It's mostly about party identity and other groupthink cue following like hipness. It's not very surprising that our news media continues to be less and less distinguishable from our entertainment industry.