"Etch a Sketch Romney" can't come up with a "47% Solution"

---  Mitt Romney, in perhaps his most truthful moment of the 2012 campaign,  identified "47%" of voters who were going to vote for Barack Obama, no matter what. Then he made his fatal error and said we can't worry about them. 
---  Not only did that result in a bad bit of video, in a bad sound-bite and in all kinds of great slogans for the other side, it showed that Mitt Romney had defined and chosen a political battlefield upon which he could not win. 
---  Even the Etch a Sketch guy couldn't erase that. 

In a video clip of a May speech, which surfaced in the middle of the campaign, Mitt Romney said,  "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what....  All right -- there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing."  Unfortunately, he added the following, "[M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

In March Eric Fehrnstrom, one of Romney’s closest advisers had said that after the primary campaign, “everything changes” and he added that “It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”  That gaff was also an embarrassment to the campaign. More important, it demonstrated that Romney had a very squishy approach to the principles and beliefs of various groups and individuals that would be necessary to Romney’s campaign efforts..

These two fundamental misconceptions were part of the DNA of  the Romney Campaign for  President in 2012.

Conceding “47%” of the electorate to his opponent, the sitting president, meant that the Obama Campaign only needed to win-over three percent of the remaining “53%” to win the election. Obama’s mantra, “Forward” (some times expressed in the MSNBC-ish “Lean Forward”) was about all that was necessary. Although it was a long hard lean, that’s how the push toward 50% was accomplished by the Obama Campaign; and President Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected.

Conversely, The Etch a Sketch image of Mitt Romney always lingered in the background. The Obama Campaign could always trot out historic Romney flip-flops, and they did so repeatedly on women’s issues and Obamacare. For his part, Romney chose to eschew many of the hot-button issues from the primaries during the campaign against Obama.  So instead of addressing the immigration issue head-on, Romney simply ignored the Latino-Latina population altogether. Rather than engage when the so called “War on Women” issues, arose during the general election campaign, Romney argued that the economy is more important to women than anything else.  Romney’s campaign was also rife with false starts, like Benghazi, that were advanced with some fanfare, and then left to fall flat, not to be followed-up in any way. All of that made it look like Mitt Romney didn’t really care about very much.

Mitt Romney seemed like a decent sort of fellow. He was somewhat well informed and looked presidential. He was running against an opponent who presided over four years of  economic stagnation and prodigious overspending. Nevertheless, Romney never really broke through the 50% mark at any point of the campaign; and at the finish line he was edged-out in the 49th percentile by the President. Romney just couldn’t win by being defensive and playing defense the whole way  —  especially  when he was so squishy in letting his supporters and potential supporters know exactly what it was that he was defending and from what.