While the author was gone on vacation in Washington, DC, the Republican race finally came to an end.
Now, some of you might say that Ron Paul is still in the race, but let’s be serious: Mitt Romney is the GOP Presidential nominee, with both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum having stopped campaigning.
This does not mean that Mitt Romney has an easy road to the nomination, as he still needs several hundred delegates, and has not received the endorsement of either Gingrich or Santorum.
Newt Gingrich left the race primarily for economic issues, and Rick Santorum left due to the illness of his youngest daughter, Bella, and his realization that he might very well lose the Pennsylvania Primary two weeks from now.
By both leaving the race, they remain eligible for consideration in 2016, if Romney does not win the White House, even though one would have to say that for either to believe in their hearts that they have a real chance to be President in the future is purely delusional!
But Mitt Romney now has to face the reality, that in seeking the GOP nomination and selling his soul to the right wing of his party, he has lost credibility completely among middle of the road Americans, and yet is not trusted by the right wing or the evangelical Christians who look on his Mormon faith as a cult.
So Romney cannot be sure that evangelicals and conservatives will actually vote for him in November, and therefore, could lose some of the South and Midwest.
But he also trails terribly behind Barack Obama with women, Hispanics and Latinos, and Independents, and it will be hard to recoup.
And in polls, Romney is not well liked or trusted, and comes across as distant, aloof, and not able to relate to us.
And with Tax Day coming at the end of this week, the Democrats will do their best to remind us that Romney has not released his tax returns, except for the year 2010, while providing John McCain with 23 years of returns when he was considered a possible running mate by McCain in 2008. Why not release all of these tax returns?
The answer is that it is clear that Romney has something to hide, including the reports that he has loads of his $250 million fortune in the Cayman Islands and in Swiss banks!
That makes Romney look very unpatriotic, and unwilling to do his fair share to help the nation, seeing paying higher taxes due to his good fortune, as something that a rich person should feel for the blessing that he was able to accomplish his wealth, and owes it to the country to help its future, rather than just go by the legal limitation of the minimum he needs to pay, due to accounting tricks!
Romney is now said to be “mischievous and naughty” by his wife Anne, often acting like one of their sons, but that does not ring true, and even if so, it does not make up for his unwillingness to understand the plight of the average American, and his stiffness and aloofness and reserve around people he cannot easily relate to.
Americans like to feel that they like their President, and Romney is, unfortunately, simply not a warm and pleasant personality.
That, above all, is his ultimate doom, as it was for Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, who Romney looks more like by the day–an intelligent, qualified person who simply could not relate to the American people he wished to govern.
And get this: both Dewey and Romney grew up in Michigan! Dewey’s campaign against Harry Truman in 1948 went from a landslide lead to a total collapse, against a President who gave the Republican Party “hell”. In the case of Romney, he is way behind with little prospect of recovery, but also running against an incumbent President who is copying the Truman method of giving the Republicans “hell”!