http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/110413-677888-romney-mccain-dole-are-losers-with-worthless-advice.htmGOP's Losers Can Stop Offering Their Valueless Advice
Posted 11/04/2013 06:47 PM ET
Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole enjoy offering gratuitous advice to the party they each led to presidential defeat. It's time for these three losers to button their lips.
Romney '12, McCain '08, Dole '96 — these campaigns were failures. The voters rejected the men who led them. Romney's and McCain's opponent, moreover, was a leftist community organizer whose extremism should have assured he never got within a mile of the White House. Yet the media attention these three receive would make you think they had wisdom to impart to the party they took down in flames.
The media actually have little use for the opinions of Dole, McCain or Romney — except when they disparage Republicans who are in the driver's seat today.
And so, as Mitt Romney, he of RomneyCare infamy, visited NBC's "Meet the Press" to give President Obama advice on how to make ObamaCare work so "he can rebuild credibility," he also recommended New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as the 2016 presidential nominee to "save our party."
Ironically, Christie hurt Romney's chances more than anyone by joining Obama at the hip as adoring court jester during the president's post-Hurricane Sandy visit to New Jersey on the eve of last year's election.
Romney also pointedly refused to include Sen. Ted Cruz on his "long list of very capable people" who could be the next Republican president.
Then we have Sen. McCain calling his fellow GOP senator Cruz a "wacko bird" whose filibuster against ObamaCare was "one of the more shameful chapters" of McCain's nearly 27 years in the Senate.
The liberal intelligentsia no doubt collectively spewed latte all over the reclaimed wood of their breakfast nooks in May upon beholding a New York Times editorial titled "The Wisdom of Bob Dole." With his typical brand of bile, Dole had told Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace that the party he used to lead in the U.S. Senate should get a "closed for repairs" sign until New Year's Day next year and spend all that time working on a "positive" agenda.
Has Dole forgotten it was his claims of having done everything to kill HillaryCare in the early Clinton administration that got him the GOP nomination in 1996, and that defeating that attempt at a government takeover of health insurance is what in 1994 gave Republicans their first congressional majority in four decades.
Members of what the Times calls "the responsible wing of the party" — in other words, good losers like Romney, McCain and Dole who know their place and keep on smiling — may wring their hands about the Tea Party. But it was that movement that brought Republicans back into the majority in the 2010 elections.
GOP losers warn that damage to the party brand from last month's government shutdown could lead to future electoral losses, but memories of the shutdown are already fading. The pain of ObamaCare, on the other hand, is only beginning.
In the 2014 congressional elections, voters will remember which Republicans aggressively and consistently opposed the law that took away their doctor and health plan and cash in the form of higher premiums.
In 2016 they'll seek presidential candidates who can be trusted to undo ObamaCare. Such candidates will sound more like Cruz than Romney, McCain or Dole.
