Much has been written here about just why exactly Willard McRomneyCare Mittens is nothing even resembling a conservative, no matter how much the Establishment Cocktail Party tries to convince us that he is, really, deep down, just give him a chance, any day now, got to elect him president so we can see what’s in him…
Blech.
However, DrewM sums up perfectly why Mittens is a disastrous candidate and, in His Imperial Majesty’s opinion, would never win a general election if he, heaven forbid, were to end up the nominee:
Every candidate gets messaging advice but as we learned with the whole “I don’t worry about the poor” fiasco, Romney’s instincts simply aren’t conservative. He really doesn’t have a default ideology that he can fall back on when new things come up. He simply tries to run through his mental lists of “messages” and tries to pick the right one. Sometimes he’s right but often…not so much. [Emphasis added]
And his instincts aren’t conservative because he is not a conservative. Never has been. And that will doom him in a general election campaign even worse than it’s giving him trouble in the primaries.
Nobody can possibly think up every question that could ever be thrown at them and, therefore, nobody can ever collect a complete set of flash cards with the correct answer to every conceivable question. It simply can’t be done.
But if you’re a conservative (or whatever other ideology you’re running for, assuming that you really are what you claim to be), that doesn’t matter. Because you have your core principles to fall back on, and those core principles, even if you’ve never heard the question before, will guide you to the right answer, “the right answer” being the answer that matches with your ideology.
It’s like math, really and yes, somebody may have told you there would be no math on the Rott, so we’ll keep it simple: You don’t have to memorize every single bloody mathematical formula ever written to be a great mathematician, we’re not even sure that that’s possible, you just have to have a firm grasp of the basics. Armed with that, you can deduce, logically, all of the rest. It all follows.
It’s the same with core principles. If you have them, finding the answer that fits them is no big problem and you will always come up with an answer that, although maybe not always popular, will always be consistent with your principles and what you’re marketing yourself as. And that’s important if you want to convince people to take you seriously enough to vote for you. If you’re obviously faking it on a bunch of questions (and yes, the average human being has a very good bullshit detector even though they may not be aware of it), how can anybody believe that you aren’t on the other questions that mattered to them where you came up with an acceptable answer?
Personally, I’d much sooner vote for a consistent candidate who agreed with me most of the time even though he managed to piss me off a couple of times too than I’d ever vote for somebody where I couldn’t even be halfway sure that he meant it when he said what I wanted to hear because of his other inconsistencies.
The best an obvious fake like Mittens can hope for is that his inconsistency and untrustworthiness doesn’t piss off potential voters enough that they’ll vote against him, and it’s a pretty pathetic candidate whose best case scenario is voters refusing to vote at all.
Thatisall.