As far as the rest goes I think Romney lost mainly due to the fact that he let Obama, the media, and in some cases even other republicans define him and because he didn’t make a case that Obama has shown very little leadership, while he would. He needed to specifically call Obama out on his lack of leadership and then follow up on how he would lead. He should have differentiated himself by saying that he would take responsibility for his time in office good or bad and not blame others for the things that don’t go well and take credit for things that he had nothing to do with. In otherwords, Lead.

While I believe that Gary Johnson was by far the best candidate, this election should have been a slam dunk for just about any republican candidate. The republican party needs to find itself in smaller government and individual liberty. Right now it is just Democrat-lite on economic issues and increasingly out of touch on foreign policy and social issues. They need some true leaders to step up that can communicate well on the issues of smaller government and individual liberty. Gary Johnson is one of those, but the big government republicans that control the party just are unwilling to embrace them, to the possible demise of the party.

As far as the executive order issue on illegal immigration goes, I agree with you in principle but as a practical matter, I don’t think it’s possible to enforce every federal law on the books. If we really want to end this phenomenon of the president choosing which laws to enforce and which he is not I think the solution is theoretically quite simple: repeal the federal criminal code and start over. We only need a handful of federal criminal laws (immigration policy being one of them), the states can do the rest. I would love to see a presidential candidate run on this and say something like: “If I am elected, I will ask congress to repeal the entire federal criminal code and restore only the criminal laws the states do not have the ability nor authority to enforce and I will happily sign that bill.” That would (theoretically at least) tie the hands of the president and he would have no choice but to enforce any federal criminal law (unless the president legitimately felt that enforcing the law violated the constitution).

I agree about immigration but I don’t agree that Obama was right in signing an executive order. His ruling took it further then just saying we will not be going after you, but instead said you will now be legal. This is a change in law that needs to be made at the legislative level. This sets a bad precedent where if a President doesn’t get a law passed he just signs an executive order to do the same thing. This sounds like a dictatorship to me.

One thing that I thought you missed is that he rarely took Obama on over leadership, or lack thereof. Obama did not lead at all on most every issue. Tax reform, no leadership. Social Security reform, no leadership. Medicare reform, no leadership. Benghazi, no leadership. Spending cuts, no leadership. Romney could have led on all these issues and called out Obama for his lack of leadership. Instead Romney failed to lead on them as well. For example, in regards to Benghazi he could have focused on Obamas complete lack of leadership and competence and rather focused in on if he used the word “terrorism”. What a joke. Whenever Romney had a chance to show leadership he failed, which is sad because I believe that may have been the biggest issue that Obama could have been beaten on. Voters want a leader, but neither Romney or Obama showed it, so voters decided to stay with the person they know more and away from the one that was defined as a rich, out of touch republican who is going to get rid of all the goodies so the rich can get richer at the expense of the middle class.

Where was Romney in telling the people that the middle classes median income has gone down every year since Obama has been President. This should have been front and center in his reaching out to the middle class. Instead you never heard about it. Obama has done nothing for the middle class, yet Romney allowed Obama to look like he really cared about them and Romney only cared about the rich.

Romney failed to lead and lost.