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I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.
I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.
Is it motte rerun week? A blast through the past of all our most frustrating arguments?
No the outrage wasn't fake, that speech was one of the final chinks in the Obama scales over my eyes that had me believing the propaganda that he was a decent guy not into the partisan bullshit. I'm pretty sure someone else has explained this situation better before, but those small business owners were legitimately outraged and rightly so. 'You didn't build that' is not a misquotation, it is precisely what Obama said, and the idea that he was referring to bridges and roads is at best motte and baileying.
Obama's an erudite guy, if he means bridges and roads or infrastructure he is more than capable of saying those words. He said 'that' because it was punchier, encapsulated all he said previously and because it illustrates his position that people who live in a society owe that society in part for their success. It was also a direct and deliberate attack on one of the red tribe's most important values, that through hard work you can get a better life. And those small business owners were correct to view it as the prelude to an attack on small businesses, because that's exactly what happened.
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Without getting into the weeds here, I think you've slightly misjudged the call of the question. The issue isn't "who started the mudslinging," or even "was the anti-Romney campaign particularly egregious" - instead what is being asked here is "what were the inflection points which activated the Trumpian base sufficiently for him to arise in 2016?" The anti-Romney campaign is one possible answer, regardless of whether the Dem's rhetoric was in part accurate, or if the heat wasn't a substantial change from what came before.
Personally I think the Romney campaign was a lost opportunity, not a Trumpian precursor; Trumpian folks did not get all that excited about Romney; they were the ones boosting Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in the primaries. A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.
Well the "uncalled for" quip does kind of point at a question of who started it, the easiest way to avoid that is to describe the smear campaign sans judgement. I feel like on this site you constantly get reminded of all the reasons why the innocent conservatives just had to rebel against the mean democrat which conveniently ignores how dems felt under his predecessor (and "we hated him too" doesn't quite make up for it)
I meant the "uncalled for" quip to describe that that there was a candidate who very obviously wasn't a racist, sexist, toxic scoundrel but was still denounced as such.
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While I agree that Romney's loss did not polarize anyone, in hindsight I do believe it had a surprising effect of ruining one of the left's most effective memetic attacks.
The DNC ran ran a lot of smear campaigns on Romney in an attempt to alienate the GOP base and activate their own.
Unfortunately, large swaths of the GOP voter base already viewed Romney as a worthless, squishy RINO who's main value was that he probably wouldn't ruin things as fast as Obama would.
On the DNC side, the voters completely believed it, and my hardcore left wing acquaintances genuinely meant it when they called him a "dog murdering polygamy cultist".
This caused two things to happen. The first is that this is probably the start of the DNC voter's hysteria floor moving from 1/10 to 6/10, and that made it considerably harder for leadership to unwind the outrage when it was no longer politically useful. This reached a peak in the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020, but remains a problem even half a decade later.
On the GOP side, it was different. The fact that the current candidate is always some variant of a dog murdering polygamy cultist, while the previous candidate is always a guy who you may not agree with, but you can respect his principles, suddenly become a Noticeable Narrative to the GOP rank and file. Once they Noticed, imthey were memetically inoculated, and immediately responded internally with some variant of "if you're going to call the most milquetoast mother fucker we can possibly find SatanHitler, then why should I believe you about anything at all? Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining".
Then, in 2016, Trump showed up, and suddenly the left could neither dial up their outrage knob enough to be noticeable, nor could they demoralize the right with appeals to respectability.
To me at least, it's a pretty clear trend line to our present circumstances.
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Yeah, none of the trump supporters I know IRL is peeved about the media’s treatment of Romney- but they remember fast and furious, the IRS targeting scandal, Obama’s guns and religion comment, masterpiece cake shop, often the little sisters of the poor, and the Obama executive actions on immigration.
I guess they weren't peeved about it because the very idea that the GOP should run a respectable, sensitive, decent etc. candidate was already such a laughingstock by that point as a consequence of the Romney campaign that it didn't even occur on anyone's radar.
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Don't forget operation choke point.
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