Straight out of the now-I've-heard-everything file comes conservative columnist Michael Reagan's explanation for why Romney lost the election: George W. Bush was missing-in-action.
Yup, that's it. If only the architect of one of the worst foreign affairs debacles and the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression had actively gone out there and campaigned for the Republicans, we would be singing hail-to-the-chief to Romney instead of Obama come January.
This is how Reagan sees it:
Democrats have been blaming George W. Bush for the last four years. Now I think it’s time for Republicans to start blaming George W. for the next four years.
Reagan acknowledges the other reasons why Republicans believe Romney lost - his moderate stance on issues and poorer-than-expected Republican turnout - but really it's all so much simpler than that. GWB was simply
no en casa.
You can make an honest argument that G.W. was as much to blame as anyone else for our being unable to defeat an incompetent incumbent of historic proportions.
Now here's an
irony of historic proportions. Calling Obama an incompetent incumbent of historic proportions
while speaking in defense of George W. Bush!
For four years Barack Obama has blamed the Great Recession on G.W. and used his presidency as his excuse for why the economy is taking so long to get fixed.
Probably because Bush WAS responsible for the Great Recession, or doesn't Reagan recall the epic monthly job losses Bush handed to Obama on his way into office?
Reagan thinks Bush should have made an appearance at the Republican Convention, and traveled to battleground states as an "enthusiastic surrogate" for any number of down-ballot candidates. Of course, Reagan leaves out the inconvenient fact that said candidates would undoubtedly have run screaming into the hills to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Bush.
G.W., the ex-cheerleader, was nowhere to be seen or heard during Romney’s campaign. What’s worse, he didn’t even defend his own economic record. He let the conservatives on talk radio and at Fox News do it.
Wow, no wonder Reagan's pissed. I wouldn't want to have been stuck with that job either.
Last I checked, 121 million Americans voted on Election Day. That left us Republicans with 101 million people who still needed to hear our message about who’s really to blame for the broken economy of 2008 to 2012.
Yea, but how would that have helped
Romney?
We griped and moaned and pointed to Obama, but the mainstream liberal media were too busy protecting their hero to fairly tell our side of the story.
And what side is that? That the Bush administration frittered away a budget surplus in the name of massive tax cuts and two unfunded wars?
And speaking of surpluses, Reagan doesn't understand why Obama could use Clinton as a surrogate but Romney couldn't use Bush.
Bill Clinton became Obama’s best propaganda weapon. When Clinton claimed that no one, not even a super-genius like him, could have solved the economic problem G.W. Bush left Obama within four years, every voter in America heard it. Even Jimmy Carter was hauled out of mothballs to help the Democrat cause.
This is how Reagan envisions Bush should have stood up and set the country straight:
We should have had G.W. standing up and saying, “This is bull. I’m tired of this. This is what I did or did not do with the economy as president. The real culprits are Dodd & Frank and four years of Obama’s failed policies.”
He even blames Bush for not speaking out on Benghazi. Really? The man responsible for the giant clusterf*ck that was the Iraq war attacking Obama on Benghazi? Great strategy there, Mike.
Reagan ends with a rhetorical question that pretty much speaks for itself:
The question I’d like to ask my fellow conservative Republicans is, if G.W. isn’t willing to stand up for his own presidency, why the heck should we?
Why, indeed?