Election 2012 and the Romney Message

The 2012 Presidential election season in the United States is over.

Mitt Romney has taken his place among names such as Bob Dole, Barry Goldwater, Michael Dukakis and Calvin Coolidge to name but a few. I am referring of course to the long list of one-time U.S. Presidential candidates who, despite great effort and high hopes, would be destined to ultimately fall at the final hurdle.

Despite millions of dollars being thrown towards Romney’s cause, his seemingly endless campaign events, the media’s widespread reporting of a tight race between himself and the incumbent President Obama, and many within the Republican Party confidently predicting a Romney “landslide” victory, the result turned out to be very different.

It turned out to be a comfortable and pleasing night for the President that saw him winning the popular vote by a clear margin and nothing other that an absolute rout when it came to securing the swing states that both candidates had been so competitive over (Obama won eight out of a possible nine).

An election night that had been predicted by many to drag on, possibly even into the following day, was in actual fact over before midnight. Mitt Romney’s flirtation with the White House was over and President Barack Obama had become the fourth Democratic President in one hundred years to earn a second term.

So, where did it all go wrong for Mitt and the G.O.P?

It could be that in the end, it all came down to a matter of vision, or maybe more accurately, the wrong type of vision. It’s not so much the vision that the G.O.P. had for the direction America had to go in –  although many found that a concern also -but their assumption that the rest of America would be in widespread agreement. The overall idea that Mitt Romney would peddle to likely voters was “let’s go back”, “let’s take back America”, “let’s restore”, let’s get back to “the good old days”.

A case in point would be his acceptance speech for the nomination given by the candidate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa back in August.

That night, Mitt Romney took to the stage and spoke so fondly of a pre-Obama America.

For Romney, America was “when we go to work in the morning and see everybody else on our block doing the same”. It was also “that good feeling when you have more time to volunteer to coach your kid’s soccer team, or help out on school trips.”

And there it was. All laid out. America the beautiful, a neatly packaged picture of a rich suburban ideal of white picket fences, garden sprinklers, little league baseball and Sunday afternoon barbeques with the friendly neighbors from next door.

Sounded good right?

Sure, but there would be a problem when it came to trying to trying to peddle this picture of a prosperous past to the average voter.

The problem was that not everyone held that picture of the past that Mitt Romney was so eager to share. One thing that we did know at that stage of the election was that Romney was going to have to secure the votes of the growing ethnic minorities and not just the group that would be loyal to the G.O.P. ticket.

Take the Hispanic population for example, where every month a further 50,000 reach the legal voting age. Not only is their past experience in America unlikely to evoke images of a country where the doors to opportunity and economic prosperity were firmly propped open, but the recent past was equally unsettling. Only a few months prior to the convention during a debate among Republican hopefuls, Mitt Romney himself had spoken of an idea for immigration reform and called it “self-deportation”, the idea that if you made life as uncomfortable for the undocumented population (illegals as they were referred to in the debate) then they would simply up and leave the country by themselves.

And what of the African American population? What would their take be on the good old days? It’s a question of how far back you want to go. Maybe we could start with the early 1960’s when President John F. Kennedy had to send the army to Mississippi in order to prevent a riot when a black student attempted to enroll at a local University there. Or how about the 1950’s where it was illegal for an African American to sit in a diner frequented by white customers? Back further? How about 1890 when new laws named after a man called Jim Crow downgraded the African American race to a “second-class citizenship” leading to mass racial violence towards those of the black race that went unhindered or were even encouraged by Government authorities.

To sum up, any suggestion that America “get back” or “be restored” to the glory days of yester year was always going to be a tough sell to the growing ethnic voter population.

Perhaps we can now look upon it as unsurprising that they would eventually break in huge numbers towards a candidate whose own campaign slogan was the single word “Forward”.