It's a huge mistake for the GOP to blame Romney and not learn from this election cycle, so nobody tell them about this article from Salon.
The summary: Republicans have nobody to blame but themselves for following the Tea Party and going further right than even GWB.
Conservatives who point their fingers at him now should think of how they've behaved for the last four years...
Where The National Review is wrong, though, is in blaming Romney for this. Sure, he’s at least partly responsible, and as a Politico piece this morning reminds us, he’s hardly been a flawless candidate. But there’s a much bigger problem here, one with which conservatives haven’t been interested in grappling: the Republican Party itself has never really dealt with Bush’s shadow.
To explain how such a man [Obama] could win the presidency, they told themselves that Bush’s main flaw was a lack of ideological purity: If only he’d been more conservative – much, much more conservative – he wouldn’t have given the right’s worldview a bad name and left the easily swayed masses susceptible to Obama’s charms.
This, obviously, was a total misreading both of who Obama is and what he represents politically and why voters had soured on Bush and the GOP. But in the short-term, there was no political price for the GOP to pay. They settled on a strategy of unanimous obstruction, even if it meant opposing policy ideas they had once championed
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Things changed a bit when Republicans took over the House in 2011; with their majority, they were finally forced to advance legislation on their own. But this basically meant manufacturing destructive showdowns with Obama and passing politically toxic Medicare and budget plans
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This is the party that Mitt Romney is representing in the general election.
The article mentions Medicare and budget plans, but forgets the GOP House's obsession with legislatively attacking women over the past 2 years. That's also huge. The GOP believes in survival of the fittest, at any cost. Well, the GOP must now either evolve or die. Mitt Romney was the most moderate guy they had, and if he can't win over the middle of America using the current GOP platform, nobody in their party can.