Just a reminder: This was the high-water mark of the Romney campaign.
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Search: Romney
Byron York goes and plays with the numbers and makes a case that relatively few people have said out loud since November. Here’s the question:
You’re Mitt Romney and it’s October 31, 2012 and a witch comes to you and says, “I can help you win 72 percent of the Hispanic vote or give you an extra 4 points of the white vote.” Which one do you pick?
Looking at the raw politics of the immigration debate, it’s amazing to me that more GOP pros haven’t asked themselves some version of this and then bothered to run the numbers to find out which is best for them.
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You know, after thinking it through for 10 minutes, I kind of welcome the idea of Tagg Romney running for Kerry’s Massachusetts Senate seat. I mean, why not?
It looks like this Tagg thing is going to happen sooner or later, so why not just get it out of the way now? I mean, it’s not like anyone ever turned a blow-out Senate loss in Massachusetts into the springboard for a national political profile just because they had barrels of money.
(Get it? “Tagged as”?)
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Courtesy of Galley Friend J.T., comes Tagg Romney explaining why Mitt Romney spent the last six years running for president:
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”
Yup, all those shots across the bow of Mitch Daniels in the newspapers where reporters somehow tracked down Jason Horowitz–who knows where they came from. Ben Smith said it was from a “rival campaign aide.” Probably from the Santorum or Pawlenty oppo shop. Goodness knows how much money those guys were spending on oppo. Not good ol’ Mitt.
Sure, Barack Obama’s reelection means higher taxes, continued unseriousness about debts and deficits, further expansion of an already unsustainable welfare state, and further war against religious liberty and the role of religion in the public square.
But on the other hand, imagine how insufferable it would be if we had to listen to stuff like that every day for the next four years. And pretend that Tagg-2024 was a real possibility.
So Happy New Year.
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I can’t be sure, but I think this guy is really just trolling Ross Douthat:
I have been explicitly told three times over the past year, by young philosopher parents, that there are philosophical insights that one simply cannot have without living through the fundamental experience of parenthood. That such an expression of pronatalist normativity exactly mirrors the sort of bias philosophers are by now so well trained not to express, about other quodlibetal forms the intimate life can take, is something that is surely in need of explanation. I suspect it has something to do with the recent, massive success of the campaign, which I support, to deheterosexualize the idea of parenthood. Once this goal was largely reached, at least within pockets of our society, the academics who found it desirable felt comfortable reverting to an evidently innate sort of conservatism. The family unit has been shaken up a bit, and the role of fathers reconceived, but in the end the nearly compulsory philosopher-dad-with-kid pictures that now clutter the faculty profile pages of departmental websites are every bit as conventionally pro-family as the ‘at home’ pictures on the now-defunct Romney-for-President website. They send the message that to be a philosopher is largely, even principally, to be invested in the bringing up of the next generation, to be doing it all ‘for the children’.
It gets awesomer. Worth wading through the comments, too.
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Nope. I still can’t figure out why voters have never warmed to Mitt Romney. It’s a mystery!
By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses.
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