I was going to respond to Tex's Finally, Voting comments and realized I was writing another blog post hence am responding here rather than there.
To your first comment (and thanks for reading and commenting, O' Loyal One): I have no data to back this up and my take on it is that the current President Bush's disfavor has more to do with the American population coming out of their collective coma than anything else, at least according to one of NextStage's researchers, Calum MacKenzie, who has written extensively on political issues.
Another aspect (and probably more accurate in the social sense) is that times and people change. It can be argued that (and you alluded to) Gore's loss was more his being punished for President Clinton's "crime". What was the crime?
That in a time of economic bounty he (viewed by the population as the architect of that bounty) had betrayed them. The heck with whether or not he betrayed his family, etc., and to heck with whether or not he lied under oath (psycholinguists can make a very strong case that he didn't), the general population's feeling at the time was that he had betrayed them (the "Learning you need toothpicks in Heaven" phenomenon, discovering that what you expected ain't what you got, fair-exchange and all that).What's the Romney-Palin 2012 Ticket?
Romney's problem was that he wasn't a "man of the people" and the world situation at the time he was running required that. As the images in These are amazing photographs demonstrate, Romney was not only not a man of the people, he clearly separated himself from his public, put himself on a pedestal, was a machine, pick your metaphor.
All that offered, why was he in the front-runner position? Money, probably, and the fact that that early in the race not a lot of people were paying attention. There's a line from Maugham The Razor's Edge that I love, "It's easy to be a holy man on a mountaintop." This was essentially Romney's problem -- he looked good at a distance (in more ways than one, obviously) and only at a distance.
A "Romney-Palin 2012 Ticket" came to mind because the governors share a large number of psychomacies (they have more in common than is initially obvious. I'd offer they have more in common than most people would recognize without lots of training). Should this come to pass, I'd love to be a fly-on-the-wall when the "who's on top" discussions take place.
To your second comment, I have no idea how many encumbent Democrats ran under the "Change" banner, only that the majority psychology (population-wise) would equate any "Democrat" with "Change" given the current world situation.
And again, thanks for reading and commenting.
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