Last Sunday morning, four of the Republican Presidential hopefuls made appearances on Sunday Morning Talk Shows. Rep. Michele Bachmann was on ABC’s “This Week” with Christiane Amanpour; Herman Cain went on CBS’ “Face the Nation” with Bob Schieffer; Rep. Ron Paul appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley and Texas Governor Rick Perry was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
GOP Elite-proclaimed frontrunner Mitt Romney was nowhere to be found.
Not that he hadn’t been asked. During Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace looked straight at the camera and said:
With Gov. Perry’s appearance, we have now interviewed all the major Republican candidates in our 2012 one-on-one series except Mitt Romney. He has not appeared on any Sunday talk show since March of 2010.
We invited Gov. Romney, but his campaign says he’s still not ready to sit down for an interview.
How brave.
On NBC’s Talk Show Meet the press, White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe said the following about the former Massachusetts Governor:
Mitt Romney continues to have 75, 80 percent of his party looking somewhere else. And so it’ll be interesting to see if he can turn that around.
Host David Gregory then asked:
Will he be a diminished candidate if he’s the nominee?
Plouffe replied:
Well, here’s–we’ll see what happens in the primary. I’d make, I’d make two points about him. One is he has no core. And, you know, every day almost it seems to be we find another issue. You know, he was supportive of doing things like a cap and trade agreement, now he doesn’t think that, you know, climate change is real. He was to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights issues, now he wants to amend the Constitution to prevent gay marriage. He was an extremely pro-choice governor, now he believes that life begins at conception and would ban Roe v. Wade. So you, you look at–issue after issue after issue, he’s moved all over the place. And I can tell you one thing, working a few steps down from the president, what you need in that office is conviction, you need to have a true compass, and you’ve got to be willing to make tough calls. And you get the sense with Mitt Romney that, you know, if he thought he–it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.
The sad thing is, Plouffe is right.
Newspaper Columnist George Will, seen by most Conservatives nowadays as a voice for the “Establishment Republicans”, wrote the following in his nationally syndicated column, “Must Conservatism Settle for Mitt Romney in 2011?” :
A day after refusing to oppose repeal of Kasich’s measure, Romney waffled about his straddle, saying he opposed repeal “110 percent.” He did not, however, endorse the anti-mandate measure, remaining semi-faithful to the trans-Appalachian codicil pertaining to principles, thereby seeming to lack the courage of his absence of convictions.
Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate. Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.
Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from “data” (although there is precious little to support Romney’s idea that in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants is a powerful magnet for such immigrants) and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) “competence,” not “ideology.” But what would President Romney competently do when not pondering ethanol subsidies that he forthrightly says should stop sometime before “forever”? Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?
Excellent question, Mr. Will. The answer, of course, is NO.
Despite the wishes of the Main Stream Media, the GOP Elite sitting on their bar stools up in the Northeast Corridor, and all those “fiscal” Conservatives anonymously blogging from their moms’ basements, conservatives in America’s heartland have had their fill of “settling”.
If you doubt my words, please reference the 2010 Midterm Election results.
And, despite an all-out assault of insults, inferences, innuendo, and false comparisons to the Communist-sponsored Occupy Wall Street protestors, by the aforementioned miserable life forms, Tea Partiers are still alive and patiently waiting to pull the lever in the voting booth at their polling place on November 6th, 2012.
In 1996, Conservatives were told that we had to settle for Bob Dole as the Republican Presidential Candidate.
In 2008, Conservatives were told that we had to settle for John McCain as the Republican Presidential Candidate.
And now, we’re being told that we have to settle for Mitt Romney as the Republican President Candidate.
For those who want to “settle,” go ahead. For my part, I’ll side with this American:
We’ve got a slam-dunk here to have a meaningful conservative candidate with a landslide sweep, which would mean a mandate to do serious rollbacks of what’s happened the last two and half years, the last 50 years. This is no time to be electing moderates. This is no time to be electing mishmash. – Rush Hudson Limbaugh 10/18/11
