Jim's Blog

Mitt Romneycare tells us:

In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler – closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and thousands of workers – he did it to try to save the business.

Now that is an unusual strategy for winning elections.

This shows us why a Republican Party socialist can never beat a Democratic Party socialist in an election. If you are going to oppose a Democratic Party socialist, have to oppose socialism.

This is politics 101. If you tell the voters that your opponent’s policies are so wonderful that you will be just the same, only better, they are not going to be impressed.

Whatever it is that is most characteristic, distinctive, and controversial about your incumbent opponent, you have to say that that prominent and controversial characteristic stinks mightily. You have to say that your opponent is no damn good because his most prominent and distinctive controversial characteristic is no damn good, that Obama’s socialism is destroying this country. Instead, Governor Romneycare sounds like the conspicuously fake opposition that communist parties would sometimes run against themselves, which fake opponents would not only lose by 0.1% to 99.9% but would quite genuinely lose by almost as much.

Paraphrasing: Oh, no I am not a greedy selfish capitalist, I am almost as kindly and benevolent as the great Obamessiah himself.  I save jobs just like the benevolent Obamessiah does.

The right answer, of course, would have been that Bain Capital took care of the destruction side of capitalism’s creative destruction, that for well run firms like Apple to exist, badly run firms have to be shut down and their assets sold to the highest bidder – which story would sound a whole lot better coming from someone responsible for the creative side of capitalism’s creative destruction.

If a presidential candidate cannot say that Obama’s socialism is ruining lives and destroying jobs, that candidate is not going to win against Obama.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 13:26 and is filed under economics, party politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.