WI Mitt Romney Nominated in 2008

How does the election change if Mitt Romney is nominated by the Republicans in 2008? Who does he choose as his running mate? How does this change the election? (Doubting he wins, and so...) Who is nominated in 2012? Wasn't Romney the last of the establishment choices, so to speak? I mean, I doubt McCain runs in 2012, so who takes the nomination? How does THAT change the election (of 2012)??
 
Lots of bitterness between Romney and Huckabee. So, I'm not sure he chooses Huckabee.

If Romney wins, he'll lose, badly, to Obama and won't be as viable of a candidate in 2012, so, that opens the doors to ... who? Any of the major candidates who opted not to run could have knocked off Romney (Christie, Bush), so, I doubt any of them jump in with Romney passing.

Maybe Perry does better and wins the nomination? I think he'd lose worse than Romney - maybe even by McCain-like levels.
 
I feel like we've had this thread before and everyone agrees Romney does worse given the matters of the collapse.

Really? Worse? I would think he would try to differentiate himself from Bush and say that he of all people knows how the economy works (unlike McCain who was foreign policy heavy). You know, I thought he'd, if anything, do a bit BETTER.

Don't suppose there's a link to the old thread?

Lots of bitterness between Romney and Huckabee. So, I'm not sure he chooses Huckabee.

If Romney wins, he'll lose, badly, to Obama and won't be as viable of a candidate in 2012, so, that opens the doors to ... who? Any of the major candidates who opted not to run could have knocked off Romney (Christie, Bush), so, I doubt any of them jump in with Romney passing.

Maybe Perry does better and wins the nomination? I think he'd lose worse than Romney - maybe even by McCain-like levels.

Who DO you think he would pick, then?

And might it leave the possibility for Huckabee running again in 2012, or is that unlikely? I'm sure there's got to be someone who could take it from Perry. Christie might actually be drafted by the establishment despite his inexperience, don't you think?
 
McCain had respectability across the board. Albeit he did end up squandering it. He was a moderate, had an honorable service record, could work with others (there's a word for that which I can't recall given we've had nearly eight years of a Washington militantly without it), and enticed Republicans, Independents and Democrats. He was seen as who we should have had instead of Bush for most of those eight years of the Bush administration. The part where he squandered it was by going hard to the Right to win the election and totally undermining all that.

The thing about 2008 is that any Republican that years is like a Republican running in 1928. It doesn't matter who ran, nor how respectable a candidate. The Democrat is going to win thoroughly; it was totally an issue of whoever won the Democratic nomination was (but maybe not) going to win the presidency. And this was a time when even the people who would become Tea Party people would support Obama or Clinton (before the news/political sphere made everyone think they were living in some kind of movie version of reality). Not to say the seed of that type of Conservative movement wasn't already there; I recall people losing their minds, and "redistributing the wealth", "Socialist" and talking about "he's gonna be shot anyway" and all that. But it wasn't so loud and widespread and serious.

Romney honestly had none of whatever McCain had. He won't inspire the base, and he'll be seen as a sign of what was wrong at the moment; the extremely rich who tanked the economy, and how the Republican party is in that camp. That is what the election will become. You can cry "Socialist" all you want, and it will stick because that whole socio-political sphere is what it is in America (which is a hell of a lot of people who have opinions but not the cognition to properly form them) but that image of Romney as ultra-wealthy, privileged and out of touch is going to stick. And what is Romney going to say? He can't connect with the concerns of America in 2008, which is the economy and a major recession. He can't connect to people worried about their jobs and their economic well beings, or who already lost their jobs. He has to and will fail at doing so miserably.
 
Hmm, so it looks like any Tea Party like formation is going to swing pretty hard in 2012 to nominate a conservative, yes?
 
It depends on how it progresses. It's hard to really get a grip on something that is history, history that you've seen develop to this outcome, and recent history. It just sort of happens and you try to recall what exactly was in 2008 and how that developed in 2009 and how it became what it was this year or a few years ago. It's gradient; it's hard to pin down.

An important thing to note is that this type of Conservative hard hate like there is was always there; I am in a Conservative area; I recall this in 2008. As I said, I recall accusations in my school and social sphere that he was a Socialist and wanted to redistribute the wealth and this and that. It was a disdain. But it wasn't this serious. It may be best described as similar to the sort of normal revulsion and/or ire you'd get to/for anything Liberal or if you said you were a Liberal in those areas and to those people, albeit more focused as it had a target and wasn't something with nebulous targets. And Obama lost the vibe of support (or whatever you want to call it) he had in 2008 as the years went on, which lent to what is the Tea Party. I think it was around then, but wasn't anything I or most people knew of or which had collected all the similarly lost people it ended up collecting. (That being the people who were mad at business and the war and the government and everything really of the establishment as it existed (due to what existed due to the Bush years), and were sort of lost really but who had a Conservative color to them).

What the Tea Party could be could range from countless different things. I think that will be a topic we'll end up discussing some years on and will discuss for decades to get an understanding of what could have been and what it really was and what it all means. Ideally, the Obama administration could have nipped it in the bud had it been more successful; it wouldn't have fermented and festered. And I do use those terms because I find it a very negative thing; I don't care if you believe in small government or low taxes. When you discuss violence graphically and flippantly, among all sorts of things, that is my problem. And I'm around these people first hand so I know what I'm talking about.

It's an issue of success and backlash. Those had to be carefully measured out. Success builds up the opposition (but that opposition comes out of preexisting elements as well), but can also defuse it as time passes; failures unleash that opposition that was built up. It depends how an alternate Obama campaign and presidency would go.

Bear in mind too that the McCain/Republican campaign in 2008 created and whipped up what has existed ever since in the opposition to Obama. Those campaign ads and all were where that stuff originated. A Republican party running Romney would be something different in some ways.
 
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Btw, this is the only site that terrifies me because any time I post possible key words that someone could monitor me based on, my internet slows down as if someone is monitoring me. This is what is happening right after I posted that.
 
Btw, this is the only site that terrifies me because any time I post possible key words that someone could monitor me based on, my internet slows down as if someone is monitoring me. This is what is happening right after I posted that.

All is according to plan :p I sometimes worry about having "confederate" and "Nazi Germany" so much in my work browser history.

Thanks for posting what I couldn't on my phone.
 
Romney had the clueless rich guy problem. sSo I agree he would do worse than McCain. He does not have to mend fences with social conservatives as badly as McCain did .SO the running mate is an interesting question. Maybe Pawlenty.
 
Romney would not A) Choose Sarah Palin as his VP and B) shut down his campaign or make other rash statements during the financial crisis. So, Im going with the thesis that he does better than McCain. But good enough to win? I'd still wager on BHO.
 
Romney would not A) Choose Sarah Palin as his VP and B) shut down his campaign or make other rash statements during the financial crisis. So, Im going with the thesis that he does better than McCain. But good enough to win? I'd still wager on BHO.

Without Palin as his VP, McCain would have done much worse. IIRC, there were polls showing him losing Montana and the Dakotas before he chose her. The base did not like McCain, and she fired them up like nothing else.

And Romney could easily have some sort of "47%"-type statement during the financial collapse that would be worse than anything McCain said.
 
The irony here is that Romney, who had difficulty convincing conservatives in 2012, became the de facto conservative to challenge McCain later in the 2008 Republican Primary (prior to the California primary).

That shows you just how extreme the GOP lurched from 2008 to 2012.
 
For reference, one could look at the actual polls, which generally showed Romney performing about 10% worse than McCain. Some of that was name recognition, but a lot of it was just that 2008 was a bad time to be a Republican, and McCain was by far the most electable one still.
 
Palin helped in the conservative states, but she certainly hurt in states like Florida, where McCain had a legitimate shot of winning before he picked her.
 

DTanza

Banned
Romney ran to the right of McCain and was everything the country hated during the economic collapse. A clueless old money guy who knew nothing about what it's like to be working class or even middle class, and who made a fortune on shipping jobs overseas and predatory capitalism.

He would absolutely do worse than McCain. Hell, even the polls at the time showed him doing worse than McCain, which the McCain campaign hit him hard on.
 
Palin helped in the conservative states, but she certainly hurt in states like Florida, where McCain had a legitimate shot of winning before he picked her.

Which is why McCain led or tied every single Florida poll after Palin's nomination until mid-September? And even then he still won most polls until late September?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State...ed_States_presidential_election,_2008#Florida

Look at the rest of that page. McCain kept his polling numbers up until late September in Ohio and Virginia. He kept it close in Pennsylvania until late September. He dominated North Carolina and Indiana as well until that point.

Then go look at the National Numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natio...#Two-way_contest:_Barack_Obama_vs_John_McCain

Obama led in the overwhelming majority of polls by a good margin until the Republican convention, and then McCain became competitive until the financial collapse.

It's an easy narrative to create around someone like Palin, that she hurt the ticket, but the polls show that she did not hurt McCain's polling numbers. They simply collapsed alongside the US economy.
 
Romney ran to the right of McCain and was everything the country hated during the economic collapse. A clueless old money guy who knew nothing about what it's like to be working class or even middle class, and who made a fortune on shipping jobs overseas and predatory capitalism.

He would absolutely do worse than McCain. Hell, even the polls at the time showed him doing worse than McCain, which the McCain campaign hit him hard on.

100% correct. If Romney somehow got the nomination (McCain commits a mega-blunder or dies or something), Obama would just use the same strategy he did in 2012; call out Mittens on everything DTanza mentioned. Except in 2008, due to the financial crisis and the fact that opposition to Obama hadn't had time to crystallize, it would work better than it did in 2012. Romney would get absolutely squashed.

On a side note, I find it funny that there are two political figures with the nickname Mittens: Romney, and the leader of one of the major power blocs in EVE Online, the Mittani.
 
I watched almost every 08 primary debate. I remember Romney being a much worse campaigner than in '12 and the only candidate who amazingly found a way to come off more condescending than Hillary. When a political junkie friend of mine was writing an explanation of why he hated HRC and wanted Obama, he began: "Other than Mitt Romney, she is the very personification of a poll-driven politician..."

He was also WAYYYY more "clueless rich guy". Bunch of weird, stupid, lulzy gaffes.....the dog tied to the roof of the car, using a Pro-Castro slogan during a speech at a Cuban Exile dinner, claiming to be a lifelong hunter when he'd done it twice, praising Battlefield Earth, endorsing Hitler's energy policy.....

"In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."
(May 5, 2007)

He said that during a commencement address at Regents University. lol what the hell is that? dafuq did i just read?

But the worst was that gaffe w/ his sons where he had the nerve to equate the honor of military service to working for his campaign. That hurt really bad in a GOP with no shortage of veterans during wartime. There was a CNN debate soon after where a vet (w/ a son in Iraq iirc) from the audience angrily grilled him about it and Mitt could only respond with this stonefaced talking point apology....it was absolutely brutal TV and one of the most cringeworthy moments in the GOP debates.

Mitt simply wasn't ready for prime time imho.

There was a wistful article during the 08 RNC where a journalist chatted with a pair of failed GOP POTUS candidates off-the-record at a bar. They both cheerfully admitted that they wanted the job for personal glory, but McCain - to their utter amazement - sincerely wanted to help his country.

John McCain if nothing else is a patriot with an truly amazing life story that will make for a HELL of a big budget biopic someday. It was his turn.

btw Pawlenty was the "safe" VP pick, but considering the circumstances under which Palin was chosen (desperate need to shake up the narrative after a epic DNC, desire to cynically cash in on women that wanted Hillary, Googling around for Republican women in elected office) I could actually see Romney or any other 08 GOP candidate making the same error as McCain.
 
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