Candy Crowley moderates Hofstra University debate

As we come to grips with the reality that Barack Obama will have another four years to exact his revenge on this country, it’s time to face a fact: Mitt Romney did not campaign like the Republic was at stake. People talk about how at the first debate, Romney destroyed Obama. True, but at the second debate, Romney was taken off his game by Obama protector, er, moderator Candy Crowley, when going after Obama on Libya. In the third debate, Romney didn’t even go after Obama on this epic fail of foreign policy. As a matter of fact, up until the first debate, he was going on and on about how Barack Obama was a nice guy.

The first lesson for conservatives: don’t nominate a candidate and urge him to refer to his opponent as a nice guy.

Not only should the challenger not want to pay compliments to his opponent when trying to beat him, but the fact is, Obama is NOT a nice guy.  He enjoys mocking his opponents, using violent metaphors, slandering his opposition, shaking his fist at the people whose paychecks subsidize his record debts, and plotting his revenge on the nation that made him rich.

Why do Republicans feel obligated to call him a nice guy? Even more, why do they feel obliged to beat up on other Republicans (a debate in Florida with Romney calling Newt Gingrich an “influence peddler” comes to mind), while calling Obama a nice guy. Calling Obama a nice guy does you no favors: it projects weakness, appeasement, and desperation to be liked by people who will never like you (John McCain come to mind for some reason).

But of course, the reason for this nightmare is that for an entire year, we were told that Romney was “electable”. Remember, if anyone other than Romney was nominated, we would lose. I remember people not liking it on the night of the New Hampshire primary saying that the “electable” candidate never wins. Sadly, I was proven right again.

As we saw with John McCain and Bob Dole:  nominating someone who thinks he is obligated to tell the world that his opponent is a nice guy is a recipe for losing an election.

GOP Senatorial candidate Todd Akin

A second lesson for conservatives: do not fail to take the Senate.

Of course, the only reasons that the pundits have proffered on this are Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They are blame the Tea Party for fielding “stupid” candidates who would dare talk about abortion. The talking heads claim that Akin and Mourdock’s comments ruined our prospects for the Senate. They blame the Tea Party for knocking off moderate candidates and for forcing the GOP to be the conservatives they claim to be. While no one is defending Akin’s comments, the rush to use them as an excuse to throw Mourdock overboard for poorly worded, but truthful comments, is quite dismaying.

Richard Mourdock

The GOP borrowed criticism from the Democrats that Mourdock said the same thing as Rep. Akin. That kind of intellectual dishonesty gets us nowhere, especially when the people who criticized Romney for the five days it took him to form a coherent response to the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare, got a tongue lashing from the same people who assured us that Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock should be thrown off a cliff.

In their criticism, the GOP also went back to 2010 to kick around Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, and by extension, the people who voted for them. Because no moderate/centrist Republicans lost anywhere, right? I mean, it’s not like Scott Brown, Tommy Thompson, and Linda McMahon lost, too, right? I notice that the people who thought it was unseemly to call Barack Obama “stupid” had no objection to saying it of our own Senate candidates, none of whom had said anything remotely as stupid as Barack Obama and Slow Joe Biden. If it’s okay to dump on conservative candidates who lose, why not equal time and to dump on a moderate, especially the one who lost twice in a row?

Whenever a party loses an election, there is usually a time where people evaluate what went wrong and adjust accordingly. But, if every time a moderate Republican fails to win, the reaction is to blame the conservatives and admonish us to moderate, then it appears that we will lose over and over again.