Why Romney Lost

By -
I happened to have to research the famous "you didn't build that" quote; I was stunned once again by how the right-wing punditry deliberately distorted what was the obvious meaning of that speech. Here is a good summary of the "controversy" (aka smear campaign) with a great clip from Jon Stewart -- make sure you watch the Obama-Romney mash-up at the end.The bottom line: when you best campaign strategy was to generate bat-shit crazy misinterpretations of your opponents statements ("grade-school Marxism"!), you really have no campaign of which to speak.

Comments

  1. Ken B12:55 PM

    Romney did about as well as any republican could I think. The GOP brand is tarnished these days. He managed to convince that he was a serious, capable, basically decent guy. Considering some of the scariness we saw from the Santorum/Bachman/Gingrich types, that's an achievement.

    The election might or might not have gone otherwise had it been over Obamacare, or had Romney been more radical on the economy. Instead he banked on "I'm not scary" being enough. Maybe at $4 or $5 gas it would have been. With social issues to the fore, it never had much chance. Alack and alas.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more