Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, 2008 US presidential candidate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the aftermath of the 2012 elections, Republicans and Conservatives alike are finding themselves lost, hollow, and angry, scurrying around trying to make sense of their loss. At first it seemed that everyone from the electorate to pundits to party bosses were looking to lay blame at someone’s feet and those feet belong to Mitt Romney. And why shouldn’t they? After all he was the candidate whom the GOP chose to nominate and eventually run against President Obama. He was billed as the efficient manager whose data driven business sense and organizational prowess would not only challenge but eventually overtake the President’s highly impressive Chicago machine. Beyond this there was also the President’s abysmal economic and fiscal record to consider. This led many to incorrectly assume that these two phenomenons combined would weigh down his re-election attempt and add a major advantage to Romney camp and increase their chances of victory. Well…they were wrong.

Now, at least according to Ben Smith of Buzzfeed, Republicans just want Mitt and the baggage of 2012 to take a hike and forget it ever happened.

Ten days after at least some Republicans were surprised to see Mitt Romney lose the presidency, the candidate is gone without a trace.

There appears to be no Romney Republicanism to propagate. No Romney strategy to emulate. No Romney technology to ape. No generation shaped by his failed effort. And no Romney infrastructure to inherit, though he may still be asked to write and bundle quite a few checks. Romney’s bewildering post-election explanations of his defeat — Obama, he said, had bought off Americans — drew almost universal condemnation from leaders of his party, but the comments were more excuse than cause; party figures from Ari Fleischer to Bobby Jindal appeared to be waiting to kick Romney to the side of the road. The candidate did them a favor when he complained that Democrats had simply bought off young people and minority voters, a churlish line that erased any lingering Republican affinity for him as, when all else failed, a good-hearted guy.

Romney is being erased with record speed from his party’s books for three reasons. First, many Republicans backed him because they thought he had a good chance of winning; that appeal, obviously, is gone. Second, Romney had shallow roots, and few friends, in the national Republican Party. And those shallow roots have allowed Republicans to give him a new role: As a sort of bad partisan bank, freighted with all the generational positions and postures that they are looking to dump.

“Romney is now a toxic asset to unload,” the historian Jack Bohrer remarked Saturday. “The only interesting thing left to his story is how they dispose of him.”"

Regardless of the criticisms you can raise against the former Governor and his campaign I think that Smith’s observations are circumspect. And people should remember Richard Nixon’s famous quote after his loss in 1962 for the California governorship to Pat Brown, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

We all know how that turned out.

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