Why Romney Cannot Win

You all probably remember my good friend Michael van der Galien. He's the guy who wrote an 'ironic' post about the star qualities of Gov. Palin which led to a little back and forth between C4P and his site, Poligazette.

In all seriousness, Michael actually is a good friend of mine. He may be wrong about one big thing (i.e. his blind, uncritical support for the Mittrosexual Man), but he is right about a lot of other things. If I'd have to pick a man to stand next to me in the trenches to defend life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the socialist hordes of Obama & Co, Michael would probably be that man. But even the best of friends can have the odd argument, and well, he's asking for one with his latest post.

Unable - or is it unwilling? - to see the WaPo poll for what it is, namely a politically motivated push poll cut out of whole cloth for the purpose of 'phraming' Palin's farewell speech as Governor this coming Sunday as being merely another step on the inevitable road to oblivion, Michael decides to act as if the poll contains actually relevant pieces of data. I mean come on Michael, you're a serious citizen journalist. A poll that oversamples Democrats vs. Republicans by a good four or five percent (33D 22R), and that doesn't even use registered voters, let alone the infinitely more reliable category of likely voters, is not a serious poll and doesn't deserve to be treated like one. You know this as well as I do (as does your friend AP, whose anti-Palin hackery is getting beyond the stage of deeply tiresome), and still you decide to write about this poll as if it is divinely inspired. What possible motive could you have for this, apart from trying to promote the cause of your candidate by trying to damage that of one of his main contenders?

Well, two can play that game, Michael. In fact, I'll have a lot more to work with than you do. I'm not referring to the many serious objections to Romney's candidacy (his disastrous healthcare reform project in Massachusetts, his anti-Reagan statements in the early nineties, his flipflopping on a key issue like abortion) or the non-serious ones, like the fact that he's boring (as in: 50 people, Michael. 50. And half of them were probably on Romney's payroll. Then again, boring men sometimes do end up winning their party's nomination. They always lose in the end, but that's another matter), or the fact that he's a Mormon (who cares - apart from Mike Huckabee, that is?).

No, I'll limit myself to the most serious, and potentially most deadly, objection to Romney, which is that his own party's voters simply don't dig the man. Just look at the data from this poll by Democratic pollsters PPP (before you ask: it's a registered voters survey, with party ID 42D, 35R, 23I - a reliable survey basically, unlike the one you used for your post). The figures make pretty devastating reading for Romney-fans. Among all Republican voters, Romney is 12 points behind Huckabee, 22 points behind Palin. Among conservative Republicans (75 percent of the electorate in the GOP primaries), the gap with Palin is even wider: 23 percent (81-58). Oh and before you get your hopes up about Romney somehow making up this astronomical difference through his support among moderate Republican voters: forget it. Even among what should be his core constituency, Romney trails Huckabee by 8 percent and Palin by a whopping 19 percent.

Face it Michael: Romney's toast. He's a flipflopper, a fake, a phony, a guy who can't even decide which state he's supposed to be from (is it Michigan? Utah? Massachusetts? You tell me). People smell his fakery a hundred miles away, and they avoid it like the plague. That's the reason only 50 people showed up at that campaign event in New Jersey, that's why he finished third in the weakest presidential field the GOP had produced in the past hundred years or so. And that's why he's trailing the other main contenders for the 2012 nomination by at least ten percent - even among his supposed core constituency of moderates.

Three years is plenty of time to take away any lingering doubts voters may have about Palin's fitness for the presidency. But all the time in the world won't be enought to convince conservative Republican voters that Romney is really one of them. Because deep down inside, he simply isn't.

Now Michael, if you want more of this, all I can say is: bring it on. But I suggest you use the rest of this weekend to ponder the deeper meaning of Reagan's 11th Commandment. There is a war on for the soul of the American project, with an ultraliberal in the White House who is determined to change his country into a European-style social democracy, but for some reason moderate Republicans like yourself are more interested in fighting Gov. Palin. It reminds me of that old Churchill anecdote when an young backbench MP approached the great old man, pointed at the Labour benches and asked him what he thought of 'the enemy'. "The enemy?", he answered. "My boy, that is the opposition. The enemy is seated behind me."