Mitt Romney & 25%

I've held off commenting on the GOP candidates for a while. Its not that I don't have very strong thoughts on them, but I wasnted to see what voters had to say before I actually put my 2 cents in. Ok...with Iowa under our belts and New Hampshire looming...here are my thoughts.

While he may have won the Iowa Caucuses by a slim 8 votes (there are doubts about that as well), Mitt Romney has a 25% problem. He can't seem to rise above that level of approval...out side of New England. In New Hampshire, he's at 40% according to recent polls, but that doesn't really mean much. He's been campaigning in NH for almost a decade, and spent upwards of $100 million dollars in that time.

Yet, he can't get above 25%. That should have alarm bells going off with the Republican "elite" leadership in and out of Washington. But it doesn't. He's the annointed favorite. Look at it from the opposite view, 75% of GOP voters don't like him. That's shocking. For over a year, we've been flailing about, flitting from one candidate to the next, tryiing to find, NOT ROMNEY. In DC...they don't see that. But, it could be the "elite" party leadership is sadly out of touch with the base. They keep talking about "electability", yet that's a myth.

But if 75% of GOP voters want someone else as the nominee, doesn't it follow that Mitt will have trouble getting that all vote in the fall if nominated? ...

That's from Mike's America blog.and goes to the heart of the issue. Most of the rank and file don't like him, don't want him and won't vote for him, because at heart, they just don't trust the flip-flopping SOB. Mike Walsh in NR said recently,   

 As I said on the most recent NR cruise, if Romney is the nominee, he will lose. He has no idea what Axelrod & Co. are capable of, nor of the depths to which they will stoop to destroy him. They will attack him as a flip-flopper, as a panderer, as a rapacious and heartless one percenter, and, yes, as a Mormon. They will damn him with faint praise as a liberal accomodationist, as the spiritual father of Obamacare. He’s a gentleman in a mug’s game, and this is no time for gentlemen.

He hasn't yet taken an issue that he's not flipped in since he was governor of Massachusetts, one of the MOST LIBERAL STATES IN THE COUNTRY. A conservative there is a liberal pretty much everywhere else (excepting the West Coast or NY).    Another Micheal (Greene this time from the Boston Herald, Romney's back yard).

I’m ready to sell out, too. Like you, I’m ready to abandon my conservative principles, ignore Mitt’s big-government legacy and his obvious disdain for the right — if it means a guaranteed winner in November.

But before I lift my conservative skirts for another H.W. Bush/Dole/McCain moderate because I’m supposed to suck it up and “back a winner,” is it asking too much to expect the guy to, you know, win something first?
...
No, Mitt did not “win” Iowa. Winning is not getting eight more votes than a guy who, until recently, was best known as the victim of a campaign on Google to turn his last name into a disgusting sexual reference (trust me — you don’t want to know).
Winning is not spending 12 months and $10 million in Iowa in 2008 to get 30,021 votes, then campaigning another four years, spending another $2 million  . . . and getting just 30,015 votes.
Four years ago, Romney could blame his lackluster 25.1 percent on the fact that he’d never run before and faced formidable opposition: a longtime U.S. senator, a successful two-term Southern governor, a Tennessee movie star.
But this year, Romney is running against the cast of a bad TLC network reality show — and he’s still at 25.1 percent!
How do you go from running against McCain, Huckabee, and Thompson to running against Perry, Bachmann and Paul and getting fewer votes? When one foe is an angry former speaker who’s been married three times, took money from Freddie Mac and shares a name with a Star Wars villain, you should be running up the score.

And no, don’t say “it’s just Iowa.” Have you checked the latest polls? Less than 48 hours after Iowa, Rasmussen’s national poll had Mitt at just 29-21 over Rick Santorum. In South Carolina — which has picked every GOP nominee since Reagan — Romney’s stuck at 20 percent and he’s losing in Florida, too.
No doubt newer surveys will reflect rising Romney strength. But the fact is that Mitt vs. The GOP Klown Kar should be a cakewalk.

He was for health care before he was against it...and that's a huge problem. While I support his stance purely on 10th Amendment grounds alone(the states have the constitutional power to enact such legislation), the fact that he was the architect of the MA health care debacle (and steeply rising prices there), it will be difficult for him defend his position nationally. I'm predicting today, that if Mitt Romney is the GOP nominee, he will lose in November's general election.

From Mike's blog,

Republicans have the unfortunate habit of nominating the guy who came in second in a previous contest. That's how we got Bob Dole and John McCain. Neither of which had the stuff it takes to fight it out with the political thuggery that will be headed our way in a few months. Apparently, I am not the only one who worries whether Mitt would be the best nominee just because he came in second last time around! But I'm glad to know that guys named Mike seem to be making a lot of sense!

...and that's the problem, instead of picking winners, we in the GOP tend to go with last round's loser.  Mitt Romney will lose