Romney Insults Minorities, Women, and Young Adults for Loss

Alright, let's ignore for a moment that this was a tight election.  It was a lot tighter than many would lead you to believe and it was a lot tighter than it should have been given that Romney was the one running... and why is that important?.... that is the topic of this post.  Romney claims to understand what was wrong but the claimed understanding points to why he should have lost in a true landslide, not the shrug that nation gave while re-electing a moderate Democrat.

Romney spoke to his financial backers on November 15th and laid out his vision of why he lost.  Essentially, it's because Obama bribed minorities, women, and young adults.  And no, he doesn't mean that Obama went out and gave money to people to vote for him, he means that the initiatives Obama backed were those that minorities, women, and young adults would appreciate and would find financially beneficial to them.  Putting aside that this essentially means that Obama was better for these groups ON THE ISSUES and that he did his job in a way that these groups would approve of... a discussion for later on in this post, this is an astonishing claim.

For one thing, Romney made plenty of mistakes during the campaign.

1. He held firm with his message that he was the Governor of Massachusetts.... and every time he said anything about us, we retaliated with "you're a lying sack of sh@# and we're glad you're not our Governor anymore, now stop mentioning us you fu@#ing a$$hole".  Our education system was one of the best in the nation before you stepped in and kicked it around and it's still one of the best in the nation despite your best efforts to destroy it.  Our economy is good because we've invested wisely and have a great education system (see previous sentence).  Admittedly, our health care is almost half-way decent but 1) you're running away from the improvements you made to it and 2) again, it was already half-way decent before you came to down.
2. He ran to the far right at the start of the campaign and one of his staffers let it out that he would shake up his stances on the issues after the primaries.... yes, it's widely known that you pivot after the primaries, but you don't tell everybody about it, and you don't pivot as wildly as everybody knew he'd have to and as wildly as he did in October starting with the first general election Presidential debate.
3. Speaking of debates, while he was strong in the first debate, which was the first good step he had made since June, he then proceeded to try to man-handle the woman moderator of the second debate, got her so pissed off at him that she stepped into the debate and shut down one of his arguments.  He also spent the entirety of the second debate claiming he would create more jobs than Obama... the entirety minus 10 seconds where he repeated "Government doesn't make jobs" twice while speaking over the moderator.... classy move dipsh$%.
4. He made various public and private statements that ended up hurting him, such as that 47% of the country didn't pay taxes and therefore were going to vote for Obama no matter what he did (which is ridiculousness considering the make up of that 47% and the fact that many of them vote Republican) and his attack on the President in the midst of the Benghazi incident that came across as opportunistic and decidedly not Presidential in addition to highlighting his pathetic level of foreign policy knowledge and experience.
5. Speaking of foreign policy, his trip overseas was a disaster and yet he continued to try to attack the President on Obama's foreign policies toward Israel and the overall Middle East/Northern Africa region.
6. Because his credentials as a true Conservative were a bit shaky, he tried to sure up the base by taking on GOP wonk Representative Paul Ryan.  This was a bit interesting because it brought the budget to the forefront of the discussion... wait, no, it didn't because the very first thing every news company did after the announcement was go to how Ryan was a health nut.  After that we got to start talking about the budget.... except that their plans were too complicated to explain on news shows, so we didn't get to discuss them really, just the hypotheticals, sort of, in a distant far off kind of way to avoid specifics such as how we'd end up paying for the tax cuts and the military spending they wanted.
7. Republicans didn't help him out either, with a pathetic Republican Convention and with various Republicans running for office and touting that science isn't real (women's bodies have a way of shutting down a pregnancy if it's unwanted) and rape isn't so bad (if a pregnancy is the outcome of a rape, that's God's will and it's a blessed thing... which, by less stretching of the statement than Ryan's stretching the truth on his marathon run time, means that rape is a blessed thing).

Alright, back to his statements of bribery though... "The president's campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift... He made a big effort on small things"... such as what, Romney? Don't stop there, give us something particularly juicy to sink our teeth into.

1. Free health care, he claimed, was highly motivational to black and Hispanic voters as well as voters making $25k to $35k/year.  
2. The administration's promise to offer "amnesty" to "the so-called DREAM Act kids" was a big influence on the Hispanic vote.
3. The administrations plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and being able to remain on their parents' health insurance plans were big for the young adult vote.
4. Free contraception coverage under the heath care plan had pushed young women to be in favor of Obama.

I don't know about you, but to me, these seem like stances on issues that are backed by the Democratic platform.  The DREAM Act was an important piece of legislation that the Democrats brought forward and was prevented by the Republican held House.  This legislation was then partially put into practice by the Obama Administration's stated priorities in what cases they would pursue, a perfectly legitimate movement considering that there is far too much work to be done on the U.S. immigration front than can be reasonably expected to be done, so we have to prioritize the work that can be done.  Romney essentially said "Obama ran on the Democratic Party's platform, and that's not fair."

The explanation that these priorities and stands on the issues of the day are equivalent to bribery is somewhat interesting and the idea that people voted for Obama because they got free things plays directly into the 47% statement that Romney gave at another donor discussion that was also leaked.  Each of his statements was insulting to every group that the Republicans have to work on if they are going to be at all successful in the future.

It almost seemed like this Romney committing Seppuku for the Republican Party.  By deliberately insulting every group that he had alienated during the campaign, he places the blame for the loss squarely on the shoulders of his complete lack of understanding of the electorate and his utter lack of connection with the less fortunate (aka, the bottom 99.99% of this nation).  By taking the hit, he distances the Republican Party from himself and they have the opportunity to say "wow, can you believe that nut job?" just as they did with W. Bush.  I would be willing to bet that Romney won't appear at the nominating convention in 2016, just as W. Bush didn't appear at the nominating convention in 2008 or in 2012.