Josh Barro: [Democrats' treatment of Mitt Romney was justified][]: "Anti-Trump conservatives have had the clarity to see that Donald Trump would make a very bad president, and to break with their team, often at some personal cost. I admire this... (Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Trump Hell)
...But they have also spent an inordinate amount of time finding ways to assign blame for Trump's rise to Democrats, rather than to the nominally conservative Republicans who voted for, endorsed, gave money to, and campaigned for him. One of the main arguments goes that Democrats... attack[ed]... McCain... Romney in such vitriolic terms that voters do not believe them when they say Trump is different. Charles Cooke....
Donald Trump is a bad, bad man. But when a fine man such as Mitt Romney is given the Hitler treatment too, it becomes difficult for that message to resonate. As has been observed by men smarter than I, crying wolf has its drawbacks....
This is a distortion of how Democrats talked about Romney in 2012. No, Democrats weren't painting Romney as the reasonable, sober, moderate statesman they paint him as now. They were campaigning against him for president. But who gave Romney "the Hitler treatment"?... Obama made very sharp attacks on eventual vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's budget blueprint.... You can debate whether "radical vision" is a fair description... but this description certainly does not constitute "the Hitler treatment." Cooke also complains that Democrats accused Marco Rubio of "racism" just as they have accused Donald Trump of racism. Who, exactly, called Marco Rubio a racist?...
There were no ads in 2012 warning that Romney might start a nuclear war, or suggesting that he was an inappropriate role model for children. Not only is this time different, but Democrats are also saying quite different things about their opponent than they said last time. How does this represent crying wolf?...
In 2012, Romney went to Trump's hotel in Las Vegas to accept Trump's endorsement--saying it was a "delight" to do so — and had Trump make robocalls on his behalf in Michigan. This was when Trump had turned himself into a conservative celebrity by running around the country alleging that Obama had been secretly born in Africa. Romney isn't a racist, and I don't recall any prominent Democrats calling him one. But he was certainly way more comfortable using Trump to market himself to racists than he should have been. If Democrats previously talked about Republicans' agenda as being driven by an underlying hostility to women and minorities, well, doesn't the nomination of Trump, and near-universal support for Trump among Republican voters, provide some evidence in favor of that thesis?...
As Cooke himself notes, overheated rhetoric is a problem on the Republican side.... One of Rubio's main talking points... was that Obama was intentionally setting about to harm the country. Rubio, you will recall, was supposed to be the normal, reasonable one. Republicans were never going to listen to Obama, the man their party set about delegitimizing for eight years, on the subject of whether Trump is too dangerous to be president. They needed to hear that message from Republicans and conservatives.... Most Republican officeholders, party leaders, and mass conservative media figures have not. Even Rubio, who says Trump is an erratic individual who cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, says Trump should be made president.
Along with the voters, these nominally conservative leaders are the ones who deserve the lion's share of the blame for enabling Trump ...
