Mitt Romney and Conservative Delusions

Yesterday I was driving home from work and in a fit of schadenfreude, I tuned in to Hugh Hewitt's show just to listen to him eat crow on McCain.  I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I heard Dean Barnett, filling in for Hugh, enter the right wing echo chamber and proceed to interview some dingbat from NRO and then the "Beltway Boys".   He could have just interviewed himself and gotten the same result.

What did they have to say?  Well, the theme is that Mitt Romney will be a great candidate for 2012. I don't know how much clearer we have to make this, but let me try one more time.

We don't like Mitt Romney.  Not at all.  Not even a little bit.  The more we got to know him, the less we liked him.  That's how and why he lost.  His net favorable rating, that is, his positive ratings minus his negative ratings, went down as time went on.  Again, the more we got to know him, the less we liked him.

Mitt essentially ran unopposed in the primaries.  He outspent his rivals by factors of 5-1, 10-1 or even higher.  He owned the airwaves.  Talk radio and the right wing establishment adopted him as their favorite son.  Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt and Laura Ingraham gave him 3-hour campaign commercials every day of the week.  Other than Michael Medved pitching for McCain, no other candidate had backers like this.  A key difference was that Medved was always respectful of McCain's opponents while the rest were not.

That is a crucial point.

Mitt's ad campaigns were decidedly negative.  He attacked his opponents constantly.  If his TV and radio commercials were nasty, his radio surrogates were postively vicious.  Rush Limbaugh, totally consumed with hatred of McCain, still hasn't given up his childish imitations and venomous commentary.

That's who Mitt is. That's why most of us despise him.

Mr. Clean Cut, All-American Boy

Mr. Family Man Righteous Mormon Christian Conservative was, in fact, a venomous, backstabbing, lying weasel.  He talked a good game, but when it came down to it, his campaign was built entirely around destroying everyone opposed to him. Let me make this perfectly clear.  He was responsible for the actions of his supporters in the media.

When Rush and Sean and the rest began their attack dog antics against McCain on his behalf, Mitt could easily have called them up and asked them to show respect for the man.  It's not like he didn't know it wasn't happening. While Hugh Hewitt was destroying his reputation and making an ass of himself on a daily basis for him, Mitt could have told him to restrain himself.  Mitt talked to Hugh frequently.

Mitt knew all of this was going on and allowed Rush and Sean and Hugh to destroy themselves with a good portion of their listeners for his sake.  He doesn't give a rat's rear end about anyone but himself.  The campaign is over now and Mitt was crushed in California.  He will go home to his $200M or whatever he has and Hugh and Rush and Sean will go back in to work every day and face the wreckage they created when they turned into attack dogs for Mitt.

Mitt allowed his supporters to self-destruct.  He implicitly encouraged them to become filled with hate for McCain and Huckabee as well.  After all, he kept giving them syrupy interviews as they kept slashing and burning their way across the airwaves.

Hugh Hewitt caught on the wire and machine gunned for Mitt.

So now all Mitt's dupes and proxies in the media are blathering on about him being the front runner for 2012.  What a pack of morons. Remember, Mitt was not a businessman so much as he was a salesman.  As a marketing professional myself, I could see it happen every time he did interviews for these guys.  He hooked them all and reeled them in.  When a marketer of Mitt's prowess lacks integrity, this is what you get.  What the right wing media don't seem to understand is that we didn't get hooked along with them.

We saw right through him.