Would Benghazi Ad Have Given Romney The Presidency?

      There has been quite a stir among Republicants and Conservatives in recent days with the release of a Republicant National Committee ad dealing with the feckless response by the Obama administration to the Benghazi terrorist attack that took four American lives. Many feel that, had the ad run, it would have changed the outcome of last fall's election. Not running the ad was a calculated risk on the part of the Romney campaign to stay focused on the horrible economy.
     One must remember that before Barack Obama was re-elected, no president had won re-election with economic data worse than when he took office. Mr. Romney was placing his faith in the American people to want better for the country than the Obama administration had delivered in its first term. He thought that bringing an unsettled scandal into the campaign would confuse things and take the focus off the economy. I know it is popular among conservatives to want a magic bullet to which they can point as the reason Governor Romney lost the election. But the truth is that one ad on Benghazi would not have changed the outcome. Besides which, presidential elections are almost always about domestic issues and rarely are decided on foreign affairs.
     All the polling about President Obama's handling of Benghazi, before, during and after the attack, show that his negative numbers never got much over the low fifty percentile. And people still re-elected him. Even to this day, polling shows that there is still not the kind of outrage over the Benghazi attack, and the Obama administration's incompetence before and during and their blatant lies afterward, that there should be from the majority of the American people. For the Romney campaign to have run an ad, no matter how effectively produced conservatives thought it might have been, during the campaign, would not have changed any votes. The people who felt the Obama administration's handling of Benghazi was a national disgrace, were going to vote for Romney with or without an ad about it.
     Conservatives need to move away from analysis of the Republicant failed election bid and begin to wake up to the battle they should be fighting against Leftism. Until there is an acknowledgement in the Republicant party that recent elections have been lost because effectively articulated conservatism has not been the focus of the Republicant message, they will continue to lose elections. And no one ad is going to be a substitute for principled adherence to the conservative values which founded and made this country great.