So the campaign manager for the Mitt Romney campaign wrote a full scale apologia in the Washington Post today. Too bad that it’s premised on insane lies. I’m just going to fisk the relevant paragraph here:

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians.

Seriously? Now that may have been true when he ran in 2008, but by 2012 he had lined up every conceivable endorsement imaginable. He had the full backing of the RNC from the get go. Remember how they kept screaming that this guy was electable? For Romney’s handlers to now claim that he was some sort of outsider to the RNC political circuit just compounds the rank dishonesty that mired the candidate and his campaign.

That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination.

No, that’s why he was being called Mr Electable by every pundit and RNC consultant that Romney’s money paid for. The claim is especially rich when the Washington Post’s own Jennifer Rubin was perhaps the single biggest Romney apologist in print. Perhaps the author believes that the Post’s readers will have forgotten her incessant whining and defense of the man with whom she was smitten.

But that was indicative not of any failing of Romney’s but of how out of touch so many were in Washington and in the professional political class. Nobody liked Romney except voters.

Except when tehy had an opportunity to vote for someone else, anyone else, sure, the voters. That’s why they lurched form one “not Romney” to another “not Romney” until they all had fallen by the wayside in scandal or due to a lack of money. But yeah, they liked him, they really liked him…

What began in a small field in New Hampshire grew into a national movement. It wasn’t our campaign, it was Romney. He bested the competition in debates, and though he was behind almost every candidate in the GOP primary at one time or the other, he won the nomination and came very close to winning the presidency.

He may have bested Obama in the debates, but that’s not saying much. It certainly can’t be said he decisively won any of the primary debates.

Romney was a rotten candidate, who convinced many libertarian minded voters that he wasn’t substantively any different than Obama, and that they thus shouldn’t vote for him or the party apparatus that demanded he be nominated. That is why so many house seats were lost to Republicans, but could have been won had the Libertarian candidate’s votes gone to the Republican. Seats like those lost by Mia Love and Richard Tsei. Romney not only lost, he had negative coattails.

There is nothing to crow about in the Romney candidacy, either with respect to the candidate or with respect to the campaign. His campaign manager should be ashamed of what he did, and certainly shouldn’t be publishing defenses of it. What we need is not an apologia, but an apology.

Tags: Mitt Romney

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