My Comment :
Wonderful Article in the "American Spectator" : a big list of pundits, analysts, strategists, commentators, that believe Mitt Romney is a very weak candidate against Obama. ( including Conservative Prestigious Magazines and Publications )
Mitt Romney is a Republican born rich who got richer by moving money around -- a millionaire plutocrat who can't relate to "ordinary" Americans or to the "Reagan Democrats" (old-ethnic. i.e. Italian-American/Polish-American, etc.) ...... another Republican political/dynastic legatee.
"If you aren't inspirational, you aren't inspirational, period, meaning you don't inspire the middle either. It's also true that millions of voters really can decide to stay home; remember that Karl Rove estimated that up to 4 million expected Evangelical Bush backers stayed home in 2000 after being disgusted by last-weekend news that Bush had had a drunk driving arrest way back when. The result, of course, was a race that took six extra weeks to decide".
American Spectator
Why Romney is Weak vs. Obama
January 13, 2012
By Quin Hillyer
Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom. This conservative institution was founded on the principle of securing individual freedoms as embodied in the United States Constitution and state constitutions. It tends to focus on neoconservative and Republican/libertarian values.
Hillyer is a classical conservative; his writings maintain the principles of limited government first theorized by James Madison and most closely held in recent years by Ronald Reagan. Hillyer’s writings are also respectful of the Madisonian contribution to American liberty and politics. His writings distance itself from the single-issue focus of some religious conservatives, and is especially distrustful of big government conservatives, particularly over taxation and deficit spending policies. Among a number of columnists, including that of George Will and Charles Krauthammer, Hillyer was resolutely critical of the spending policies of Bush administration. Hillyer has also expressed concern of the administration of Barack Obama.
In addition to politics, Hillyer has written frequently on U.S. Supreme Court nominees over the last two decades. He has strongly supported many Republican-nominated candidates, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, but took the Bush administration to task over the proposed appointment of Harriet Miers in 2005. Hillyer is a frequent contributor to the Court-centric web site Confirm Them.
Why Romney is Weak vs. Obama
Some excerpts :
Against all of that, all Romney can offer is a supposed greater acceptability to the educated, less culturally conservative, right-leaning economically, urban and suburbanites who are being targeted by Obama in places like Virginia and North Carolina. But the key thing here is that while these folks may be more socially liberal, they tend to vote more on the basis of their slightly upper-middle-income economic expectations rather than on social issues, and they'll vote either for or against Obama based on those analyses regardless of who the Republican nominee is. But it is the blue-collar worker, or small-business retailer, who (polls show) votes more often on cultural cues (not necessarily social issues per se, although that is sometimes the case, but more on stylistic cultural cues and concerns) than on other factors. Again, this is obviously a gross over-generalization (as is most 30,000-foot-level political socio-analysis), but these are indeed, as Rick Santorum keeps saying, the people who swing elections in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Missouri. They are far more likely to swing behind Santorum (or Gingrich, or Perry) than behind the stiff rich guy with a "weird" religion and no middle-cultural social affinities ("shooting... small varmints" and flipping on homosexual "marriage").
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Candidates with higher name ID (especially with low current "hard negatives" like Romney) can be expected to do far better than ones with low ID, low familiarity, etc. Thus, it is highly instructive that in recent polls in both Florida and North Carolina, Rick Santorum did almost exactly as well (margin of error) against Obama as Romney did, despite Romney's far greater familiarity to voters.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, Romney just can't campaign against Obama's single biggest vulnerability, Obamacare. There are just too many similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare, too many bad results from Romneycare (busting the budget, etc.), and too many video clips of Romney from six years ago saying that he hoped that even the individual insurance mandate would become a "national model." This will absolutely hobble Romney's campaign. In fact, it might be an insurmountable problem.
All of which is to say that Willard Mitt Romney has very low growth potential in a general-election campaign against Obama. His downside might be not as low as John McCain's was, four years ago, but his upside is negligible. As Larry Lindsey's analysis (mentioned above) explains, this can be an easy recipe for what I call a "respectable loss." But a loss is a loss is a loss. Romney is a weak general-election candidate who isn't likely to get any better.
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