http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-reinbach/defeating-romney-ryan-ticket_b_1927819.html

Andrew Reinbach

What’s Defeating the Romney/Ryan Ticket? Romney/Ryan

Posted: 09/30/2012 10:54 pm

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…Americans understand Republican policies, judge them by the result, and reject them. It doesn’t help that Romney apparently doesn’t believe what he’s saying, that it shows, and that that makes people mistrust him. But he’s had to say what he’s been saying because that’s where the party is.

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In sum, I believe the problem is that the country as a whole — party faithful aside — doesn’t buy current Republican ideology when they understand what it means for them, that they do understand it, and that the nation disagrees with it. Republicans made this election a referendum on their policies by putting Ryan on the ticket, and the electorate is giving them its answer.

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My impression is that Romney is a decent, intelligent, capable man who’d probably make a pretty good president a la GHW Bush — non-ideological, prudent, careful. But he’s a package deal, and many in the GOP coalition have said and done things that scare the bejesus out of the country.

The country doesn’t want to empower the Michele Bachmanns, Allen Wests, and Eric Cantors of the world, and likewise it doesn’t sign on to the Tea Party’s apocalyptic views. Likewise, the urgency the Right claims it’s acting on simply doesn’t go over with the majority of Americans, any more than it goes along with its ad hominem attacks on Obama, what he allegedly is, and what he’ll be doing to the country. If anything, the never-ending din is working against them. The boy who cried wolf and all that.

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It’s actually painful — if very welcome in my house — to watch a bunch of really smart people be this clueless about what they’re doing to themselves. When, for instance, Republicans push the idea that half the country doesn’t pay taxes, the response in most minds isn’t that those people should share the burden or that they’re takers and not makers — they wonder why those people are so poor in the richest country on Earth, why Republicans want to make matters worse for them, and then ask themselves what happened to the premise of trickle-down economics, and what it’s going to mean for them. And yet, Republicans simply can’t seem to understand this.
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