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This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
My understanding of American presidential elections is that they have always pretty much been a no-holds-barred cage match, behind the scenes, with both parties (not their ticket headers but lower figures) continuously accusing the other party's candidate of everything under the sun and negative campaign galore being the theme of the day.
However, there's now a suggestion that in this particular election, with this particular candidate, the Dems should have refrained from all this and, in effect, fought with one hand behind the back, that there was something particularly ungentlemanly about going after Romney in the typical way. And the people claiming this don't even really like Romney all that much!
The articles on Romney painted him like he was a cross between Giga Hitler and Satan, while he's a bog standard conservative who mildly disliked the gays. He is the very definition of milquetoast.
I wasn't even a conservative back then and even I saw the absolute bullshit that was going down. If he being such a nobody got the treatment he did, there was literally NO upside to trying to be moderate.
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So, despite what the other people are saying, I think what upsets the sort of anti-anti-Trump person that talks about 2012 the most isn't the just-so story about Romney being this honorable man the evil Democrat's attacks, that were so wrong and beyond the pale.
It's that 2012 was the first time the Democratic Party realized they had a national majority and acted that way in a national campaign. The reality is for the previous 30+ years, from Carter on, the Democrat's basically agreed with the Republican prescription of things, they just wanted a slightly kinder way of doing it - yes, crime is out of control. Yes, welfare is bad. Yes, government is too big, but the GOP are run by crazies who won't cut the right things. That was basically the Dukakis/Bill Clinton/Al Gore/even John Kerry argument.
Obama shifted that, but 2008 wasn't much of a nasty election because McCain liked Obama and vice versa, and people realized the GOP were doomed. But, in 2012, the Democrat's did thing they hadn't did in deciades - talked about how maybe, very rich people weren't perfect ideals of greatness who deserved all the credit for everything.
It helped that Mitt Romney said he liked to fire people, had shut down companies to get rich, and attacked half the population as well, basically 'deplorables' (unlike Hillary, who only attacked half of the Trump voters, so about 25%). People also forget in the post-2012 election, he basically blamed his loss on people (specifically minorities) wanting free stuff before he calmed down.
Now, I know the pushback will be "well, liberals love him now," and as the resident left-wing partisan Democrat, we don't love Mitt Romney, we just accept a right-wing neoliberal is better than a wannabee fascist, and Romney's one of the last Republican's who have actual ideas. Plus, 2012 Republican Nominee Mitt Romney wasn't really what Mitt Romney wanted to be, and he'd admit that to you today. He just couldn't run and win a primary as either 2006 MA Governor Mitt or current day pro-BLM pro-child tax credit anti-insurrection Mitt. I still don't think he's a good guy, I think his wealth should be taxed, and in a perfect world, his many, many children would not get much inheritance from him.
As for the rest, the petty BS people get hung up on happens in every Presidential election - Carter almost lost because he was slightly honest in a Playboy interview, the supposed liberal NYT turned Gore into some serial liar, and peopel already went over the Swift Boating of Kerry.
I also don't regret stopping him from massively cutting people's taxes, passing right-wing social policy, and so on. Be better than the petty wannabe fascist doesn't make you good. Respecting the will of the people isn't a high bar to clear, so I don't need to give him cookies.
But yes, to a certain brand of conservative who was used to the Democrat's being the Washington Generals, where they got most of their policies passed even when the Democrat's won, 2012 was the first time in their political memory the Democrat's actually punched back, and they've never forgiven Obama for doing so, which is why they'll talk themselves into supporting Trump, again.
Your chauvinism is showing. What makes an idea "actual", besides it "actually" being a Dem policy position?
No, like JD Vance & Josh Hawley have ideas, too. They're dumb ones, but they do.
But, folks like Tuberville, MTG, Boebert, and the rest of the newly arriving Trumpian Senators and Representatives just don't. Like, at the top of each party, the knowlesge level is similar, bu even the most down the line hacky Democratic politician could tell you a decent amount about their pet policy, whether it's ya' know, health care or child care or taxes or whatever.
Ah, so plenty of Republicans have "actual" ideas. You just think there are some loonies on the fringe. And of course, you can't find any loonies on the fringe of your own party. Yeah, that's not the same perspective that's been expressed by partisans on both sides since, well, forever. Yawn.
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The reasons that Romney was a clear escalation are many:
Overall, the Romney attacks exposed a pathological desire to grip power that was like Nixon on steroids, except without the real enemies.
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Centrist types frequently argue that Trump is a person of bad character, and that his bad character should be a matter of concern to his supporters. Romney is brought up as one-half of a refutation of this argument (the other half being noted rapist Bill Clinton), demonstrating that any Republican will not only be accused of bad character, but that the accusation will stick, regardless of their actual character, while any Democrat will be presented as heroic and that presentation made to stick, again regardless of their actual character. Romney is the Republican example because he was widely perceived to be the cleanest-cut, most virtuous candidate Reds could possibly have gotten, probably the most virtuous candidate either party has had in a generation or more, and it made precisely zero difference and arguably handicapped his ability to fight and win. It follows that such arguments should not be taken seriously, either now or in the foreseeable future. Good-faith conversation about the character of the candidates is impossible, at least across the aisle, and probably at all, and those who think otherwise are either ignorant or deceiving themselves. The fact that, having smeared him, Blues went right back to pretending they preferred him is merely the icing on the cake.
This argument does not rely on liking or supporting Romney in any way. I think it's a decisive argument, and I voted for Obama.
More generally, this is one of a class of arguments demonstrating that the basic assumptions civil society is built on do not hold, and that cooperation across the tribal divide is not positive-sum.
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Some of it's literally just me, and just used as an example over other cases like Palin or Dubya because Romney's more recent.
That said, just because it looks like harsh weapons sometimes get used doesn't mean that there are no rules, or motions about rules that people 'should' follow. LBJ's famous (alleged) pigfucker politics weren't exactly shared as aspirational goals -- note this summary is from a clearly progressive partisan Dem! And we do not see many serious attempts to call random politicians literal pig-fuckers today, and indeed that progressive partisan Dem mostly does not highlight statements from either serious politicians or their cutouts.
Part of that's because 'no one would believe it' (uh...), but the bigger part is that after a certain point this is the sort of thing that gets the Wohl's convicted or Project Veritas driven to bankruptcy. There are rules, as arbitrary and ill-enforced as they might be.
More critically, there's a point where the published violations of those rules would be more costs than the benefits might hold. It's like the people who wonder why Peter Thiel doesn't just hire private detectives to ruin the lives of everyone who pisses him off: the very act of trying to hire them would be a far bigger story than anything they could come up with would be, in ways that would undermine anything they could come up with. Scott Alexander might call this a specific form of bounded distrust, and while I don't particularly agree with his analysis, it's not completely wrong, either.
The flip side to 'Bounded Distrust' is that, even assuming it to be true, those bounds are not set in stone or engraved into golden plates, and the 2012 election was either a major shift or the revelation of a major shift, here. People point to the 2008 Swiftboating of Kerry, and maybe th at was another shift, but it was one where a rando PAC made allegations. We did not have a handful of plausibly connected cutouts claiming Romney would put "Black people back in chains"; we had the sitting vice president of the United States do it. We did not have some sketchy tabloid mag claiming Romney did not pay taxes; Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor and made his case.
But probably the more damning bit is that Romney made no small part of his public persona his decency. There's a (fair!) argument that this was always skin-deep: 47%, and all, and I've got a draft post I've been working on pointing out how much he was just as prone to snickering about his opponents as Trump was, just behind their backs rather than to their faces. Yet he made a large number of costly commitments to that skin-deep 'decency', while no small number of partisans on both sides were talking up how vital it would be both for the Republican project and for the American democratic project as a whole to elevate discourse.
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The thing is that the romney campaign didn't reciprocate with those punches, and instead held their tongues.
It reminds of that utterly lame-ass attempt by the McCain campaign in 2008 to attack Obama by bringing up his association with Bill Ayers, of all people. Very obviously it had to be a white dude in any case.
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The attacks on Mitt don’t seem particularly out of bounds, but the attacks on his family were a major escalation from previous norms and there’s definitely some 2012 campaign issues that play into it.
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You're right, you wouldn't expect any different from the campaign and the partisans. The difference was the way the media treated it, the nauseating network of "fact checkers" and "journalists" who willingly, even gleefully participated in the smear job. It was no campaign worker but a "journalist" who used the debate forum to harangue and "correct" Romney's facts - erroneously! It was not just the Obama campaign and the DNC that mocked Romney for saying that Russia was the top geopolitical foe, it was also newspapers, magazines, late-night shows, and even straight news programs. What the Romney stomping clarified is not that Republicans would be subject to completely unfair smears from their opponents. It clarified that the media was also an opponent, and one so powerful that it could not possibly be defeated without attacking it directly. That is what Trump was not afraid to do, and that is why he won.
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Because they refute a common talking point -- that if the Republicans would just run someone Respectable, their candidate would be treated with respect by the media. Sometimes Romney is even given as an example.
Oh, yeah. Now Romney is the Only Good Republican because he criticised Trump. All the "Why don't the Republicans run someone like Romney?" stuff makes me choke, because we saw exactly what happened when they did run him.
I mean, you couldn't get more bland milquetoast than Mitt, and the more I think about him, the more I think that he was the Republican version of Barack Obama (wait, don't run away, I may be crazy but I'm going somewhere with this): the young (in political terms) guy with the aura of hopey-changey who was going to do all the right and good things for the country and would be a change from the existing political structure. First Mormon Ever, as a parallel with First Black Ever. And what happened?
Binders full of women as a talking point about how he was a sexist misogynist (years later, this was quietly rowed back on as what he meant it in the first place, but that was after he was well beaten and a new bogeyman had replaced him)
Animal cruelty to poor doggie-woggie
Going to establish a Mormon Theocracy (just like JFK was going to hand the White House over to the Vatican)
Monstrous capitalist eater of the poor (the unfortunate 47% remark plus Bain Capital connection)
Op-ed in British newspaper from progressive think-tank member about how he was not only a bad politician but a bad person
So yeah, tell me again about "if only the Republicans would run a Nice Guy". And I don't even like Mitt, or think President Romney would have been anymore than a mediocre not terribly bad, not terribly good president.
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Sometimes it's even the exact same people.
I have, in my life, a mainstream progressive democrat, who occasionally complains that the GOP won't run someone who she disagrees with but can respect, "like Mitt Romney". She gets quite upset when I point out that I have screenshots of her saying that she would "never vote for a dog murderer" and never quite squares that circle.
It doesn't matter, though, because she develops amnesia again a month or two later and says the same thing.
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I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.
The resulting comment chains to your statement is yet another example of the problems caused by using words such as "most" and "some" because those words are vague and can be interpreted in so many ways.
At this point, I say you should put a percentage estimate with your confidence on that estimate (e.g. I am 90% confident 5% of Romney voters voted for him because they didn't like Obama being black) and this should reveal what you really think about the matter. And if your estimate is reasonable it should take some heat off your back.
As I said earlier, I am 100% confident that some Romney supporters voted for him out of anti-black animus, and some Obama supporters voted for him out of anti-white animus. The numbers are probably quite small in both instances. But I disagree that that is the source of the heat.
You haven't actually done what I suggested.
What percentage of people that voted do you think did with that as their primary motivation to do so? 0.1%, 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? You can even give a number range, like 1 - 20%. If you can't do this then you're speaking with no conviction in your thought.
You might be thinking why does this matter? Well, it matters because it reveals your motivation for making that statement. If you think 50% of voters did so with racism as their main priority, it tells me that your view of the world is flawed and I should view any argument/statement you make with more scrutiny. If you think it's 0.1% of the voters, then why did you even bring up the point? It's so miniscule that it's irrelevant. You failed to provide any other reason for why people might be against the opposition candidate other than the race factor so it's reasonable to assume that you think racism is a significant enough contributing factor.
When you're providing an explanation for something but that explanation is like the 8th or 9th in the list of reasons that matter and you provide no other reasons, and nobody else has provided the more likely reasons, well it seems to imply you have some kind of agenda or you want to push some kind of perspective. It's poisoning the well, and it's not conducive to a productive conversation. There probably is something interesting and insightful in the point you brought up, after all I've seen some amazing conversations here based on disagreements but the resulting comment chain so far has not been enlightening on anything of substance other than the nature of your character at this moment in time.
The charitable view is that you just some off-hand remark you made without giving it much thought, but the fact that you continue to argue rather than saying it was just some careless wording on your part seems to suggest something else. I get that it's human nature to get defensive, especially when you get piled on like this, but it's not doing you any favors here.
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So I'm defending Mitt Romney (God help us and save us) because I'm an anti-black racist? Good to know!
As I said, only some people who are defending Mitt Romney are possibly motivated by anti-black racism. Just as some people who supported Obama were anti-white racists.
You can probably find someone who voted against Obama because "I don't want no nigger president" or something of the sort. But, you know who the only candidate who managed to (briefly)bump Trump out of his frontrunner spot in the 2016 primary was? Ben Carson. You know, the sleepwalking black brainsurgeon. Herman Cain was a grassroots star, too. So was Allen West. Yes these people were crazy, but the tea party loved them. On the other hand there were lots of white liberals and rinos that they hated.
Everything we know about the backlash to the Obama administration points to it being driven by traditional values, tribal dynamics, and the rural-urban divide, not anti-black racism. 'Obama is unamerican' was a sentiment driven by him being a liberal(how many times does Trump say 'Americans vs socialists' or something similar? It's a lot) who grew up in Indonesia and was married to a woman who openly said she'd never been proud of America before.
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Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is. Especially when that group is "this forum," please.
I didn’t say anyone is "bad." I was describing their possible motivations, not their moral value as people. For example, Trump was right to say that there were "very fine people on both sides" at Charlottesville; in fact, the vast majority were probably perfectly fine people. Even James Fields's actions were perfectly understandable, even if they were morally wrong. I have known of ]gang members who have done terrible things, but who are not terrible people](https://oaklandvoices.us/tag/lam-vo/page/2/). Whether a person's actions are wrong does not mean that the person is a "bad person," and indeed with some exceptions, claims about the moral worth of individuals are meaningless, at best.
I didn't say that you said anyone is bad. I modded you for violating the rule against weakmanning. Since you were apparently confused by the shorthand, here is the rule in its entirety:
You broke that rule, and in particular the group under discussion was this forum, which I am particularly protective of, as we have discussed.
Don't.
Yes, you did: "Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is."
If ascribing motives to people who post here is considered against the rules, fine. But I suggest clarifying that in the rules, because the rule you quote explicitly endorses ascribing motives to the common behavior of groups: "let's talk about the underlying reason why congressmen do this sort of thing regularly".
Which word in that sentence you quoted is the word "say" or "said?" Can you bold it for me?
"in order to show." What did you mean, if not that I was saying that the group is bad?
That you had violated the rule against weakmanning.
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It's only weakmanning to show how bad a group is if you assume that Gdanning thinks there is something bad about disliking Obama for his skin color.
I haven't assumed anything. But if you're suggesting that Gdanning should have been modded under "speak plainly" instead, your suggestion has been noted.
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... do you have an example person you're highlighting, here? Because that's a pretty serious charge to just be throwing out for The Implication, especially given the previous poster was specifically talking about people on this forum.
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It's extremely interesting how your go-to response to any claim you dislike is to demand evidence, or else discard it as invalid, but have no issues with divining the true motives of people you never even debated on the subject.
If you really know what is the point of bringing up attacks on Romney, even if you don't like him, it's to argue against the claim that attacks on someone more populist are justified. Any Republican will always be literally Hitler.
I have evidence, because I have been on here a while, and just as there are some commenters here who clearly have issues with Jews, there are some who have issues with blacks. Not all, nor even a majority, but some.
And, for the record, I demand evidence for claims that I like. I am not a fan of Justice Alito's jurisprudence, and so it would be great to dismiss him as a "partisan hack," but alas I can't, without evidence. Do you form your beliefs in a different manner?
Normally I wouldn't do it, since I find these sort of requests disingenuous, but since you insist the above is a valid approach, can you please link the evidence that the same people objecting to how Romney was treated are the same people who have expressed a problem with black people?
That doesn't mean your demands for rigor is in any way balanced.
Of course, evidence is just one of the factors that shapes my beliefs. I think very few people base their beliefs solely on evidence, nor do I think it's healthy to do so.
Perhaps, that is a red herring. The issue is whether it is unhealthy to base belefs on a complete lack of evidence, or on things that purport to be evidence, but are not.
I don't think I every met anyone who did the former, and practically everyone is guilty of the other to some extent or another. Arguable the latter is even a good reason to not base your beliefs solely on evidence.
That doesn't make it ok, and the proper response when someone points out that one has fallen victim thereto is thanks.
So how come you haven't thanked me for pointing out what you considered to be evidence that some of the people complaining about Romney's treatment actually have a problem with Obama's skin color, is not evidence of that?
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Part of it is probably that Scott Alexander wrote specifically and eloquently about how unfair the attacks on Mitt Romney were, so their unfairness has become fixed as a fact in our minds more than potentially similar attacks in previous presidential elections.
At the time, I thought some of the enthusiasm for Obama was way more embarrassing than any attacks; tingles up legs and Indigo Star Children Light Workers? 🙄
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