Two 'conservative/libertarians' who refused to vote for Romney now whine ObamaCare is bothering them

Some of you will not like me today but some of you don't like me any day, so what do I care?

I'm not going to give away any names here, but I want to relate an exchange I had on Facebook yesterday with two people who identify themselves as "conservative/liberatarians," although I would tell you there is no such thing and they are simply libertarians. The first demanded that supporters of ObamaCare apologize to him because his insurance got taken away. Now I remember very clearly on Election Night 2012 this same guy announced with great pride that he had refused to vote for Mitt Romney because Romney was not sufficiently in favor of small government/liberty/whatever. So I pointed out that someone who didn't like ObamaCare but had refused on ideological purity grounds to vote for Romney might acknowledge he had some culpability himself, since Romney, whatever you believe his imperfections to be, would have signed a repeal of ObamaCare.

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At this point his friend jumped in and told me that didn't matter because a) Romney would have signed an assault weapon ban - how he claims to know this I have no idea - and also; b) an ObamaCare repeal wouldn't pass the Senate. The first one then comes back and insists that Obama's margin of victory was greater than the number of "conservative/libertarians" who refused to vote for Romney, so it's not their fault. Let's think about this. First we can deal with the repeal issue. It is certainly true that an outright repeal of ObamaCare couldn't pass with the 55-45 Democrat majority in the Senate today, but given the election dynamics of 2014 it's entirely possible that one could pass in January 2015, especially since a slim Republican majority could pass the repeal using the same reconciliation rules Harry Reid used to pass ObamaCare in the first place. Would you like to be looking at the chance of being rid of ObamaCare this time a year from now? If Mitt Romney was now the president, this would be a real possibility. Also, if Romney had been elected in 2012, just think how the implementation of ObamaCare could have been different. For one thing, Romney vowed during his campaign to immediately grant waivers to all 50 states. We would certainly not have had the litany of outside-the-law executive orders giving us delays and new requirements. President Romney would have worked with Congress to correct as much as he could have, and if Senate Democrats stood in the way the pressure could have been brought down squarely on them. We would certainly not have had a company run by Michelle Obama's friend building a $600 million web site that didn't work. And when citizens came forward with problems that sprung up as a result, we would have had a White House responsive to the problems. We would also not have had a president appearing on idiotic talk shows in a desperate attempt to sell the overpriced, shoddy product to young healthy people who don't need it. In a broader sense, as Romney reminds us today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, there is a lot to be said for a president who simply understands executive leadership:

Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied? A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries." When protests in Ukraine grew and violence ensued, it was surely evident to people in the intelligence community—and to the White House—that President Putin might try to take advantage of the situation to capture Crimea, or more. That was the time to talk with our global allies about punishments and sanctions, to secure their solidarity, and to communicate these to the Russian president. These steps, plus assurances that we would not exclude Russia from its base in Sevastopol or threaten its influence in Kiev, might have dissuaded him from invasion.

You may not think Mitt Romney is a perfect conservative and you might be mad at the Republican Party establishment for tilting the scales in favor of his nomination. But he is an experienced executive and he would have gotten many basic leadership principles right that Barack Obama does not even begin to understand. So is it true that "conservative/libertarians" who withheld their votes from Romney for the sake of ideological purity are not responsible for his defeat? Not at all. The simple fact is this: In November 2012, there was one way and one way only to get rid of Barack Obama, and that was for as many people as possible to vote for Mitt Romney. You may have wished there had been other options, but there were not. Because of that, everyone in America who did not vote for Mitt Romney - for whatever reason - shares responsibility for the re-election of Barack Obama. Guys like this think it's better to re-elect a liberal and see the country fall apart than to elect an imperfect Republican who will do some good things but won't be as much of a small-government guy as they want. They are insane. How much better off would this country be if only one Obama policy - that being ObamaCare - was done away with? It would be immeasurably better. And that would have happened if Mitt Romney had been elected. Anything else he would have improved would have been a bonus. I made a point during this Facebook discussion that the left is a lot smarter than we are when it comes to getting results. Whoever is best positioned to give them what they want, they will elect. They don't care about purity or anything else. They care about achieving the goal. Our side, given the chance to get rid of ObamaCare, will wring its hands about ideological purity and bumble its way into giving Obama four more years in office. So to all of you who patted yourselves on the back in 2012 when you "stood by your principles" and refused to give Romney your vote, I say screw you very much for helping to stick the rest of us with ObamaCare. It's your fault.