Monday, November 5, 2012

The Five Most Tedious Talking Points of 2012

The presidential campaign will soon be over, at least for a few weeks between the last recounts and the beginning of 2016 fever.
Soon I will be able to watch a music video without first wading through Mitt Romney’s unguarded musings about the “47 percent” or Barack Obama’s dangling participles about who didn’t build what. But before I wave goodbye to these happy memories, I’d like to pay tribute to my least favorite talking points of the 2012 campaign.
1. If you criticize or fail to support Mitt Romney in any way, you are objectively supporting Barack Obama. Some version of this argument is trotted out in every election cycle. It is probably not even true of most right-leaning people who literally plan to vote against Romney by casting their ballots for a third party: in my experience, those truly open to voting for the Republican ultimately will unless he no longer stands a legitimate chance of being elected. Most others would vote third party or not vote no matter what.
I’d take the argument more seriously if it typically came from conservatives and libertarians who would hold Romney’s feet to the fire once he is safely elected. As my friend Phil Klein put it in his ebook Conservative Survival in the Romney Era:
In the coming months, those of us who criticize Romney from the right will be told we should save it until after November, or else we’re just helping Obama. When we do so after the election – should he win – we’ll be told he deserves a honeymoon period and needs to rack up a few accomplishments first before moving to items on the conservative agenda. Eventually, it will be that we can’t weaken him before the midterm elections, and then later, that we have to loudly support him, or else he’ll lose reelection to an even worse liberal boogeyman (or boogeywoman) in 2016.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-five-most-tedious-talking-points-of-2012/

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