First: Romney and the Campaign

(this one is going to be a little upset, positive update coming next)

As it became apparent Tuesday night that we had lost the election, I struggled to make sense of it.  I had gone into Tuesday with such high hopes and a good deal of confidence.  That it all evaporated in just a couple of hours, was almost as depressing as the result itself.  As I read through tweets news articles, and Facebook updates, one by my friend Matt Whitlock stood out: "This has nothing to do with Mitt Romney not being good enough. It has everything to do with us not being good enough for him. #Romney2012" and I agree with that wholeheartedly.  Mitt Romney is by far the singularly most qualified person to pursue the Presidency, ever.  If you dispute that, you and I have an extremely different view of what it takes to be a President.  [Foreign policy experience aside, which we generally have not demanded of our candidates in modern American politics].  I have supported Mitt Romney since 2007 when he first began running for President because no one else has such a real record of accomplishments in a such a wide variety of fields.  I want my candidates to be smart, articulate, and committed to results above all.  I do believe being rhetorically inspring is an integral part of a successful President, but inspiring rhetoric is not enough when not backed up with results.  Given a choice between the two, I will chose competency over rhetoric every time.

The post-mortems have begun (as there always will be, and always should be). What worries me are the "Mitt Romney wasn't conservative enough" people.  If you sincerely believe Michelle Bachmann or Herman Cain would have been a more successful Presidential candidates against President Obama, I don't know what to say.  While their (and other's like them) convictions of conservatism may be laudable, their campaigns and their potential as a President were not.

I believe Romney is a right-of-center pragmatist - not a closet moderate, not an ideologue   I believe that's what he's been his entire life and his entire political career.  And I believe that's what this country needs right now. Why he or his team was unable to communicate that, I don't know.  He has not been a flip-flopper or lacking in a political core.  At least not in any way more significant than any other political figure.  If you dispute that, I have a President-elect Obama to sell you who supports a single-payer health care system, has halved the deficit, closed Guantanamo, and doesn't suport same sex marriage.  Politics is tough, and a lot of it is messaging, but Mitt Romney is not some soulless political chameleon, le't s be real folks.

Along those lines,  Mitt Romney does not hate women, or minorities, or poor people, or gays.  He was not a ruthless corporate raider.  Besides being the most competent and qualified person to run for President in modern history, he was by all accounts the most generous.  Countless stories of private personal acts of charity and kindness dot Mitt Romney's life.  By biggest fear and worry was that, had he been elected, his ability to govern would have been hampered by the fact that half of the country thought that he was out to get them - as promulgated by millions of dollars of TV ads.  Whether America rejected Mitt Romney because we viewed him as an unacceptable potential President, or because we rejected his economic and foreign policy plans.  That is indeed the biggest tragedy of this election.  

Anybody who has watched the closing month of the campaign should have been able to see a Mitt Romney the way I've seen him.  While I feel that he could have done a better job of a being a more 3-dimensional candidate by explaining where he comes from and why he is who he is today - in the end we should be voting for a President  not a celebrity or a storybook character.

I had so hoped that Romney would have had the chance to be an amazing President, and I sincerely believe he would have been.  Rarely has a candidate been so prepared for so critical a moment.  But America has chosen a different path.  We will never know what a Romney presidency would have actually been like.