Howard Fineman pretends to know what’s best for the tea party and plays into the hands of the establishment by issuing back-pats for Mitt Romney.
The show did not delve into whether the GOP candidate had a legitimate complaint about Virginia’s ballot access laws which will only include the names of two Republican presidential candidates on the ballot for the state’s March 6 primary.
Yes, apparently it’s “megalomania” to be upset when ridiculously stringent rules for ballot legitimacy are changed mid-game (a must-read post on this). Basically, the rules for the Virginia’s primary ballot access are more complicated than those of Whack Bat:
Perry wasn’t called names for objecting to VA’s oddball rule change most likely because he isn’t nearest to Romney in the polls. Newt Gingrich is a larger-than-life beltway candidate, but he’s not the establishment’s choice for this race. They’re squarely behind Mitt Romney this time [my emphasis]:
“A lot of us who normally would have been in this presidential race a long time ago, have been waiting for Christie to make a decision,” said Georgette Mosbacher, a Republican uber-fund-raiser and former finance co-chair of the Republican National Committee who was among a group of Republican bundlers hoping to convince Christie to enter the race. “I think tomorrow, we’ll be contacting one another and probably put something together with Romney.”
That oldie-but-goodie afore-linked article, by the way, gets better the further down you read. Like here, when they tried justifying soul sales:
“The speech I gave to my conservative friends was, if you pick somebody who makes you 100 percent happy, you only get 47 percent against Obama,” said Catsimatidis. “We have to capture the middle in order to win and make a change in this country. Ninety percent of them stood up and said, ‘You’re right.'”
What good is principle if you sacrifice it to win? You’re not winning on your principle because you didn’t enter that horse in the race; you’re winning on a compromise of that principle. You can tell yourself that it’s a “strategy,” a strategy to inch us ever closer back to that place of simple government conservatism, if doing so makes you fall asleep easier at night. Compromising your principle to present less of a difference between yourself and your opponent isn’t a strategy, it’s forfeit. You’re not winning on your merits, you’re winning on theirs. It’s almost as if the establishment’s strategy was devised entirely by the Democrat opposition: be more like the other guy to win. Be Democrat-lite. That serves Democrats, not Republicans. The GOP establishment thinks that you won’t notice if they dress it up with a shiny red “R” by the name. It’s not like the Devil can quote Scripture or anything, right?
It’s frustrating to see so many Republicans simply throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel for Romney because they have such low political self-esteem. That’s what this is: it’s a self-esteem problem. We think we can’t do any better than what we have right now and we lack the self-confidence to try.
The right has an inferiority complex (or we’re sadists) and people like Howard Fineman and the MSM can’t get enough.
The battle for conservatives isn’t the general (have you seen Obama’s approval ratings?), it’s the primary. The first and best blow that The One can deliver to the GOP is by nudging the establishment to nominate a candidate that cancels out his own faults. Nominate a guy who drafted the blueprint for nationalized health care and you remove health care ammunition from your stores in the general. Nominate a guy weak on immigration and you remove that weapon from your arsenal. There isn’t a bogeyman against which the DNC can pit Obama; aside from congress–whose own approval rating is tanking so it’s useless–their second best choice is to make unnoticeable the difference between Obama and the GOP nominee.
Much of the media has been complicit in this; They use their column inches and broadcast time to take out the more conservative candidates and baby the chosen ones at the debates. They blow up stories about painted rocks on leased-out hunting grounds and stories sans Gap dresses; they fabricate narratives about the employment of other candidates and protect the current administration. The majority of the GOP primary candidates are too scared to go negative on Romney because deep down, they’ve given up too and are hoping for a job in a possible Romney administration.
It’s hard to believe in candidates that sometimes don’t inspire belief in themselves. It’s hard to believe in victory when a portion of the right has such shaky belief in it that they’re willing to make a deal compromising the soul of conservatism for the shot at a win.
I hope that I’m proven wrong, I really do. I don’t like divide on our side. But the debacle in Virginia–and the subsequent reaction to it by some in the media — isn’t doing much to allay my concerns.
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