By John Hawkins
10/23/2012
There are fourteen days left until the election and the few people who haven't made up their minds yet are independent voters. So, rather than preaching to the choir, it seems like a good time to explain to those remaining undecided voters why Mitt Romney should be their choice.
1) Mitt is from a blue state and understands how to work with the other party: Mitt Romney spent four years as governor of Massachusetts, which is one of the bluest blue states. In fact, as Romney has noted many times, his legislature was 87% Democrats and yet, he still managed to pass legislation and balance the budget. On the other hand, Barack Obama has spent the last four years at loggerheads with the Republicans in Congress. You can argue about whose fault it is, but the fact of the matter is that Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress have proven to be incapable of cooperating and that seems unlikely to change if he's re-elected. Maybe the same thing will happen if Romney gets into the White House, but he at least has a track record of success in that area while Barack Obama does not.
2) Mitt Romney is a moderate Republican: Take it from someone who ran Notmittromney.com during the primaries and preferred Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman to Romney: Romney was not one of the more conservative candidates running. Although it's possible that Romney will govern very conservatively if he's elected and many of us on the Right will do all we can to try to influence him to do that, the biggest reason some of us fought so hard to stop Mitt Romney was that we feared he would be just as much of a moderate in the White House as he was as the governor of Massachusetts. As a movement conservative, I consider that to be a bug, but if you're an undecided voter, that's probably exactly the kind of feature you're looking for in a President.
3) He'd be one of the most decent men ever to sit in the Oval Office: This will sound too good to be true, but most of the people reading this column don't know a single, solitary person who is more compassionate and giving than Mitt Romney. Just to name a few of Mitt Romney's acts of charity, he raked leaves for the elderly, he bought milk for veterans at a VA hospital for two years, he helped a dying 14 year old boy write his will. At one point he devoted 10-20 hours per week serving in his church. He made Thanksgiving dinner for a family with a sick child and offered to pay for the college education of two boys who were made quadriplegics in a car wreck. Despite what you may hear in campaign commercials, Mitt Romney is exactly the sort of fundamentally decent man that we should want in a position of power.
4) Who better to get the economy going than a successful businessman? As Paul Ryan noted during his debate with Joe Biden, the economy isn't doing so well.
Look, did they come in and inherit a tough situation? Absolutely. But we're going in the wrong direction. Look at where we are. The economy is barely limping along. It's growing at 1.3 percent. That's slower than it grew last year and last year was slower than the year before. Job growth in September was slower than it was in August, and August was slower than it was in July. We're heading in the wrong direction; 23 million Americans are struggling for work today; 15 percent of Americans are living in poverty today. This is not what a real recovery looks like.
Who knows more about getting the economy on track, an incredibly successful businessman like Mitt Romney or a politician like Barack Obama? Who knows more about creating jobs? Obviously Barack Obama isn't very good at it; so isn't it time to give a man who has proven himself in the business world a shot at it?
5) What message does it send if you reward failure? When you look at Barack Obama's first term, the successes have been few and far between. The economy is terrible and getting weaker; the unemployment rate is the same as it was when Obama was elected; gas prices have soared. He has run up a trillion dollars of debt every year of his presidency; he spent an inordinate amount of time pushing through an unpopular health care bill that wasn't even read before it was passed; his foreign policy in the Middle East is in chaos. There just isn't much there that makes you say, "Wow, the country could really use a little more of that over the next four years." Meanwhile, Barack Obama hasn't even bothered to flesh out a second term agenda. If the American people reward that kind of performance with a second term, there's no reason to expect anything other than more of the same. Can the country really afford to have another four years just as bad as the last four years?
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