Chances are that Mitt Romney's comments about his fellow Americans as "takers" wouldn't have changed the attitude of his party in the least if there hadn't been such a strong negative reaction from the public. But there it is: the Republican party stuck with a loser-candidate who saw us all as moochers, a Republican party now stung by a landslide loss and looking for friends.
Despite their insistence during the election that Romney’s position on entitlement in America was accurate, the new consensus among the GOP politicians, if not their pundits, is that Romney’s statements could not be more wrong.After several prominent Republican governors expressed their disagreement with Romney’s statements, the hits have continued coming. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, considered at one point by the Romney campaign as a possible running mate, said on Friday, “You can’t expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive. You have to talk about themes, policies that unite people, and play to their aspirations and their goals and their hopes for their family and their neighbors.”
Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor and another potential running mate for Romney, though silent on Romney’s 47% comments, likewise shot-down Romney’s “gifts” theory. ...Think Progress
Well, not everyone in the Republican party is trying to be a grown-up.
"Thank goodness... for Mitt Romney, who in a conference call with donors said he got beat and beat bad, that his campaign was lacking, that his gut on the big issues was probably off, that he shouldn't have allowed his campaign to become (in the grandiose, faux-macho lingo of campaign...) an air war and not a ground war, and that they were smoked in get-out-the-vote. He added, with an eye to concerns larger than his own, that he wanted to help the party analyze and define what didn't work in 2012 so it would be stronger in 2016. Sorry. Kidding! He didn't say that." ...Peggy Noonan, quoted at Political Wire
Still -- in the end -- we can thank Mitt for facilitating what appears to be a rift between the Republican party leadership and its parasites.
Obama doesn’t have to do anything at all to profit from the enormous, well, gift he was given by Mitt Romney when his erstwhile opponent explained his defeat by referring to the “extraordinary financial gifts from the government” that Obama allegedly handed out to his “base.”
Because so many Republicans felt compelled to renounce Romney’s alibi, they had to break with the talk-show far right that actually sees the election just this way. ...EJ Dionne, WaPo
In that move lies the possibility of ending at least the endless exaggerations and fury of extreme partisanship.
The GOP thus moved toward a political language more like Obama’s own. This alone could ease the harsh polarization that characterized the last four years.Obama should take that opening to relieve an anxiety felt across the partisan and ideological divides. For much of the last decade, Americans of very different stripes have been haunted by the fear that our country is in decline. If Obama is looking for a single, unifying objective, it should be to make sure that by the time he leaves office, the vast majority of Americans will have abandoned their declinist fears. He should want conservatives and Republicans, no less than liberals and Democrats, to perceive their nation as on the move again. ...
...Conservatives and liberals will still be battling each other in 2016. But if the arguments take place in a more confident and optimistic country, they will be simultaneously more constructive and a good deal less nasty. Obama’s task is to get us there. ...EJ Dionne
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