Correcting for Romney

During a fairly good part of the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney polled at a slight lead.  If memory serves, he was leading by 2-3 points much of the time.  His best polling likely came after the first presidential debate, when Barack Obama looked awful and performed worse, showing little command of the issues and incapable of defending his atrocious first term.  Never a good speaker sans prepared text anyway, he was particularly bad against the more polished former governor.

Of course, Romney's later references to the 47% of Americans who don't pay income taxes were successfully spun by the left and the press (repeating myself, of course) as some kind of insensitivity.  We can point out that the remarks were perfectly accurate and therefore reasonable, but the media were not exactly going for accuracy and fairness at that point.

I would share that Romney, gentleman that he was, was given the opportunity to end the campaign precipitously in a later debate.  He had the last summary comment of the last debate, and could simply have ripped the Obamists' lies about Benghazi, the garbage about the "video", and landed the last blow of the campaign.

Gentleman that he was, though, he did not prepare such remarks and did not deliver them.  Handed a free pass to demolish the White House's lies, he declined it.  I remember feeling at the time that if Romney didn't win, he had only himself to blame, having blown a big opportunity to put Obama where he could not recover.

But I also remember that I saw Mitt Romney as a guy who could really do some good in the nation and the world, that he was someone who had a track record of fixing things, who cared about things like budgets the way a businessman did, and who respected the taxpayer dollar.  I looked forward to a Romney administration.

As we know, Romney was not a big fan of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, saying some rather unpleasant things about him even though the governor was not running for anything then.  It was quite ironic that Romney ended up high on the list to be Secretary of State, and as much a commentary on President Trump as it was on Romney himself.

Did the USA view the Obama years as disastrous as they actually were?  I don't exactly know, but I certainly believe that while Hillary Clinton was a historically bad candidate, the Republicans, voluntarily or not, intentionally or not, ran a candidate in Donald Trump that we subconsciously realized was a version of the Mitt Romney that we should have elected four years earlier.

Romney ran as a businessman who understood the real economy (as opposed to the mythical, utopian one, envisioned by the professorial, petulant Obama).  He lost, but that was for having failed to take advantage of electoral opportunities given him, not for a rejection of his candidacy.

In other words, Donald Trump was effectively the correction for the mistake perceived by the voters that they had made in not electing Romney four years previously.  It's overlooked a bit, perhaps, by the new president's bigger-than-life persona.  But the notion of sensible approaches to economics, taxation and even foreign affairs that a deal-making businessman would bring, well, that was a 2012 theme as well.

Since the governor didn't win, history will be unable to record whether a Romney presidency in 2012 would have reached most of the same achievements that the Trump Administration will; we can't assume what the previous election results would have meant.  But we can stop and realize that the nation seemed to recognize it missed an opportunity and, however different Mr. Romney and President Trump may be as people, they both offered the nation something it now knows it was seeking.

Similarities and differences, but one particular something in common.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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