Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:49 am
Mitt Romney is taking zero responsibility for being routed by Barack Obama. Instead, Romney is blaming Hurricane Sandy for killing his momentum.
Stuck near the middle of a Washington Post story on Romney’s life after the election was this little nugget, “At the Wednesday breakfast, Romney told the donors he believed Hurricane Sandy stunted his momentum in the final week of the campaign, according to multiple donors present.”
Some Romney supporters are blaming Chris Christie, while others are blaming the Romney campaign itself. Election defeats are personal rejections, so it would be not surprising that Romney would look for an external factor, like the weather, to blame. However, the candidate and his campaign consistently demonstrated a misplaced confidence and arrogance throughout the entire election year. Mitt Romney ran his campaign like he was always winning. The truth is that even after the first debate, Mitt Romney was never winning.
Romney himself bought into the illusion of Romentum that his campaign created for the media. It took a week after the first debate for all the polling to come in, but Romney’s momentum was effectively stopped a day after the first debate when the news broke that the unemployment rate had dropped to 7.8%.
After the good economic news, President Obama’s lead in the swing states returned to small, but consistent margins that he never relinquished through election day. Hurricane Sandy didn’t stop Romney’s momentum because he never had any. The Jeep lie doomed him in Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were never really close. Obama locked up Iowa and Nevada during early voting, but Mitt Romney was so self deluded that he thought he was going to win even though the objective data was pointing to a loss.
Despite the fact that Obama’s approval rating was at 50% or higher nationally and in many battleground states, the Romney campaign still assumed that the country did not like the president. The Romney campaign was inept, slow to respond, unprepared, and run by a candidate who acted like a chief executive instead of man among equals asking for support.
Hurricane Sandy allowed Obama to demonstrate his competence as the leader of the country. It is debatable whether or not Obama’s performance before, during, and after the storm helped him. The president was already leading, so if anything, his performance after Sandy confirmed what a majority of the electorate was already leaning towards doing.
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party refuse to face the fact that it was their decision to alienate African-Americans, Latinos, working class Rust Belt voters, and women that cost them this election.
Even though the cameras are gone and the campaign is over, the one consistency remaining is that Mitt Romney continues to lie.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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