WHERE DID ROMNEY SCREW UP?

Doesn't alter the fact that the 'fiscal cliff' is just a construct.

The First Council of Nicaea, in 325, forbade clergy from engaging in usury(canon 17). At the time, usury was interest of any kind, and the canon merely forbade the clergy to lend money on interest above 1 percent per month (12.7% APR). Later ecumenical councils applied this regulation to the laity.

Lateran III decreed that persons who accepted interest on loans could receive neither the sacraments nor Christian burial.Pope Clement V made the belief in the right to usury a heresy in 1311, and abolished all secular legislation which allowed it.Pope Sixtus V condemned the practice of charging interest as "detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity."

By the 3rd century, acute currency problems in the Empire drove them into decline. The rich who were in a position to take advantage of the situation became the money-lenders when the ever-increasing tax demands in the last declining days of the Empire crippled and eventually destroyed the peasant class by reducing tenant-farmers to serfdom. It was evident that usury meant exploitation of the poor.

They must fail at any cost.

But as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign, its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.

That was just one of several ways that Mr. Obama’s campaign operations, some unnoticed by Mr. Romney’s aides in Boston, helped save the president’s candidacy. In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.

That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla. “It’s one thing to say you are going to do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it,” said Brian Jones, a senior adviser.

As the summer came to a close, the Romney campaign was stuck in a tense debate over how to rescue a struggling candidacy. On some nights, it did not even bother with the daily tracking poll. Why waste money on more bad news? Mr. Obama’s attack on Mr. Romney’s role at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, was in full swing, the Democratic convention had been an unequivocal boost for the president, and a videotape had surfaced that caught Mr. Romney at a private fund-raiser saying that 47 percent of the nation did not pay taxes, a line that reinforced Democrats’ efforts to portray him as an out-of-touch elitist.

“We had struggled pretty dramatically in September,” said Neil Newhouse, Mr. Romney’s pollster. “The 47 percent remark came out, and that was on top of the bounce that Obama got from his convention, so needless to say September was not our best month. It showed in our data. It was grim.”

There was, advisers decided, one last opportunity on the horizon: the presidential debate in Denver.

The White House announced the change of plans at 6:45 a.m. The president returned to the White House at 11:07 a.m. and went directly into the Situation Room, canceling his political events. The decision was costly to a campaign so dependent on organization: Mr. Obama used his rallies to collect supporters’ telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Once the storm struck, it was more of a problem for Mr. Romney. It put him in the position of struggling to explain the skepticism he had expressed during the Republican primaries about a federal role in disaster relief. Even worse, the hurricane pushed him off the stage at a crucial time.

In Boston, Mr. Romney’s aides broke out in a chorus of groans as they watched on television as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey offered effusive praise of the president’s handling of the disaster. They viewed it as a self-serving act of disloyalty from a man whom they had expected to deploy that very weekend on Mr. Romney’s behalf. The praise of Mr. Obama from a Republican governor came at the same time Mr. Romney had been portraying Mr. Obama as partisan and polarizing.

The same week, the president’s campaign released an advertisement in which another Republican, Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, endorsed Mr. Obama. The ad, Mr. Obama’s aides said, produced a spike of support from independent voters. (Mr. Obama’s aides grabbed the clip from a television interview with Mr. Powell, deciding not to chance asking him for permission).

Mr. Romney was finding Ohio, a state central to his victory, a stubborn target, as Mr. Obama benefited from the auto industry rescue he championed and that Mr. Romney had opposed. The Romney campaign sought to undermine Mr. Obama with an advertisement misleadingly implying that Jeep was moving jobs from Ohio to China. By every measure, the ad backfired, drawing attacks by leaders of auto companies that employed many of the blue-collar voters that Mr. Romney was trying to reach.

The futility of that effort was apparent outside the sprawling Jeep assembly plant in Toledo, which had just had a $500 million renovation for production of a new line of vehicles, a project requiring 1,100 new workers.

“Everyone here knows someone who works at Jeep,” Jim Wessel, a supply representative making a sales visit. He said no one would believe the ad. Speaking of Mr. Obama’s efforts to rescue the auto industry, he said,“I can just tell you I’m glad he did it.”

Romney had been changing positions and making up facts but the fact checkers weren't really getting any traction

November 14, 2012,
Romney Blames Loss on Obama ‘Gifts’
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

Now we know that Mitt Romney did not "misspeak" when he whined to a big-money crowd that 47 percent of Americans mooch off government and "believe they are victims." He meant precisely what he said.

In a post-mortem call with his biggest donors on Wednesday, Mr. Romney said his team ran a "superb" campaign with "no drama" (well, yes, it was a pretty dull campaign) and that he lost because President Obama showered voters with "gifts." By voters he meant black, Hispanic, female and young voters. And by "gifts," he meant government money that is not spent on tax breaks and other incentives for big companies and rich people.

He said Mr. Obama motivated young voters by keeping student-loan interest rates low and by extending dependent health insurance coverage to age 26. According to the Times account of the call, Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama's health care plan also mobilized African-American and Hispanic voters. "You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you're now going to get free health care, particularly if you don't have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family in perpetuity, I mean this is huge," Mr. Romney said.

He is right. It is huge. A hugely overdue and hugely necessary reform of a system that has left Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder with emergency rooms as their source of medical care. How crafty of Mr. Obama to pretend that he was governing when what he was really doing was handing out "gifts" in exchange for votes.

But that's not all. "Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women," Mr. Romney said, making it sound as though the president had distributed condoms with a t-shirt gun at a frat party (actually he mandated that non-religious institutions provide contraceptive coverage as part of their health care packages).

"The president's campaign," he said, "focused on giving targeted groups a big gift - so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars."

Mr. Romney is so irrelevant now that's it tempting to let his comments gather dust on the remainder table of history. But I thought a few points were worth making. First, none of these examples qualify as actual gifts. Some, like keeping interest rates low on student debt, are smart investments to help young people succeed and become - yes, taxpayers. Others, like health care reform, require Americans to spend money (on insurance, or pay a penalty).

I guess Mr. Romney would not consider oil subsidies a gift. Or a tax system that allows him to pay a 14 percent tax rate. Or his proposal to build warships and warplanes and other fancy hardware that the military doesn't want or need.

The sad fact is that Mr. Romney is not out of touch with the Republicans' post-election ramblings. It seems like no one in his party has figured out that it wasn't "gifts" or bad luck that caused him to lose. It was his ideas.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/romney-blames-loss-on-obama-gifts/?ref=opinion

rickklein just askin', but if Obamacare was "gift" to minority voters, what was (Bush initiative for seniors) Medicare Part D? abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics…

ROMNEY WAS A BAD CANDIDATE.