As Tuesday Echoes, Conservatives Must Look Forward

[Tiassa]

Down-Ticket, Down-Beat

President Obama has won re-election, and much focus in subsequent days has focused on high-profile issues such as marriage equality and marijuana legalization. But the emerging story will be the larger landscape of the 2012 election. Steve Benen notes:

But what about state races? The Republican Governors Associations raised more money than it's ever seen for the 2012 cycle, so maybe they have something to show for it? Well, the good news for the GOP is that they flipped North Carolina from blue to red.

AP has projected that Republican Patrick McCrory beat Democratic challenger Walter Dalton in the North Carolina governor's race. Gov. Bev Perdue (D), plagued by low approval ratings, announced in January that she would not run for a second term. Polls have always suggested that Dalton faced an uphill battle here.​

The bad news is, that's it. Republicans successfully flipped one governor's mansion but made no other progress. Last night, Montana's Democratic Attorney General Steve Bullock was named the winner of his gubernatorial contest, and though the race in the state of Washington has not yet been called, Democrat Jay Inslee appears likely to prevail. Republicans also came up short in New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia, and Missouri.

Maybe GOP candidates had better luck in state legislative races? A little -- Republicans reclaimed the Wisconsin state Senate and Arkansas' legislature. But elsewhere, California and Illinois now have Democratic supermajorities in both chambers; Democrats flipped both chambers in Maine; Republicans lost their supermajorities in Arizona's legislature; and Democrats claimed new majorities in Colorado and Minnesota. [Update: Democrats also won a state House majority in New Hampshire.]​

Meanwhile, the Maddow producer and blogger took some time today to consider Karl Rove:

I've never fully understood how Karl Rove developed a reputation as a strategic genius.

In 2000, it was Rove's idea to keep George W. Bush in California in the campaign's waning days, instead of stumping in key battleground states. Bush lost California by a wide margin, and Rove's strategy practically cost his candidate the election.

In 2006, after nearly getting indicted, Rove's sole responsibility was overseeing the Republican Party's 2006 election strategy. He told NPR in late October that he'd found a secret math that gives him insights that mere mortals can't comprehend, and soon after, Democrats won back both chambers of Congress in a historic victory.

And then there's this year, when Rove's Republican attack operation spent nearly $400 million and lost just about every race it contested -- not to mention Rove's on-air tantrum that's already become the stuff of legend.

I think it's safe to say the bloom is off the rose.

"The billionaire donors I hear are livid," one Republican operative told The Huffington Post. "There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do ... I don't know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing."​

Rove's operation is holding a phone call for its big donors today "to sum up the race." That ought to be fun, right?

There's also the question of Rove's future. Conservative activist Richard Viguerie said in a statement yesterday that "in any logical universe," Rove "would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again."​

Cartoonist Jeff Danziger makes the point about Rove more bluntly:

​

And the evangelical right is presently enduring some tremors as they circle their wagons. Peter Montgomery notes:

The tendency after an election defeat to avoid blame by casting it elsewhere was in full flower the day after the election. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Religious Right favorite, described Mitt Romney as “the most liberal Republican nominee in history” who had “waffled” on abortion, had passed a health care bill as governor, and had a hard time convincing conservatives on his commitments on taxing and spending. Perkins criticized Romney for not campaigning on issues of life, marriage, and religious liberty, even though Obama used them to appeal to his base. Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway agreed, saying Republicans had not done enough to draw the contrast on social and “moral” issues. Regarding the marriage wins, Perkins blamed Obama in part, saying the president’s policies have had “a shaping influence on the culture.” He and others also blamed marriage equality proponents’ financial advantage.

In a Wednesday morning press conference at the National Press Club, Ralph Reed’s message was clear: don’t look at me. Reed had made sweeping promises that the Faith and Freedom Coalition, his conservative voter ID and turnout operation, would stun pollsters and lead to a big conservative victory. “We did our job,” he insisted, recounting the tens of millions of phone calls, mailings, and other voter contacts his group made. He said his group had run the most efficient, most technologically superior voter contact and GOVT operation the faith community has ever seen. He claimed credit for increasing both white evangelicals’ share of the electorate and the share of the vote they gave to the Republican nominee. But it wasn’t enough.

“We can’t do the Republican Party’s job for them. We can’t do the candidates’ job for them.” In part, Reed blamed “candidate performance issues,” his euphemism for the Akin-Mourdoch rape comments that led to their undoing.

Reed said his successful efforts were not in the end sufficient because people of color and young voters turned out in numbers that he had not anticipated -- and voted overwhelmingly to re-elect the president. The fact that young voters, African Americans, and Latinos turned out so strongly seems to have stunned conservative figures across the board. And it confirmed for many of them the need for the Republican Party and the conservative movement to stop alienating Latinos and figure out how to attract younger voters. “We need to do a better job of not looking like your daddy’s Religious Right,” said Reed.​

Reed certainly has a point, but it overlooks that the evangelical right commissioned the GOP to undertake a politically dangerous job. After all, Todd Akin's comments reflect a longstanding outlook of the anti-abortion movement; his great sin, his "candidate performance issue" was to actually say it publicly. Stung though they may be, evangelicals remain somewhat optimistic for the future. Pastor Jim Garlow said of the election, "America as we know it may have signed its death warrant tonight," but he remains optimistic. Explaining that, "The problem in America is sin," he also went on to say, "we have no problem that the next Great Awakening cannot solve."

And, as Montgomery reports:

Others looked forward to the next political fight. Pollster Conway predicted that 2014 would bring, like 2010’s Tea Party wave, a conservative resurgence and called for candidate recruitment to begin now. Perkins agreed that conservatives have never had a stronger “farm team” and touted potential conservative candidates for 2016, including Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, and Mike Pence.​

This period of fracture and recrimination will pass; it always does, regardless of which party is having fits after an electoral trauma. Evangelical conservatives don't really have anyplace to go, so they will likely fight for greater influence over the Republican Party. But this will be a tough year for the rightmost wing of the GOP as conservatives figure out just how they intend to approach the 2014 midterms, and 2016 presidential cycle.

Meanwhile, Karl Rove will likely hold onto his Wall Street Journal column and FOX News position, and given the Republican Party's foolhardy decision to keep working with vote fraudster Nathan Sproul, the man once known as "Bush's Brain" can probably expect a profitable future as a political strategist. After all, in the context of Perkins' "farm team" metaphor, it is one thing to have faith in the players, but who will the club pick to manage next season? Even the Red Sox knew it was time to fire Bobby Valentine, and at .426, he didn't have as bad a season as Karl Rove or John Cornyn. For now, House Speaker Boehner has the reins, but he's going to need a reliable organization around him if the GOP intends to bring their farm leaguers up to the Show.
____________________

Notes:

Benen, Steve. "The GOP's down-ballot blues". The Maddow Blog. November 8, 2012. MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com. November 8, 2012. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/11/08/15020487-the-gops-down-ballot-blues

—————. "'There is some holy hell to pay'". The Maddow Blog. November 8, 2012. MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com. November 8, 2012. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/11/08/15024075-there-is-some-holy-hell-to-pay

Montgomery, Peter. "Ralph Reed: It's Not My Fault". Right Wing Watch. November 7, 2012. RightWingWach.org. November 8, 2012. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ralph-reed-its-not-my-fault

 

[Tiassa]

Just Another Brick In the Bubble

Just Another Brick In the Bubble

When news organizations began calling the Ohio vote, and with it the presidential election, for Barack Obama, one of the strangest and most bitter elections in American history achieved a potent climax. All that remains is to write the epilogue, but that in itself is a monumental task.

Jan Crawford of CBS News brings us an interesting snapshot:

Mitt Romney's campaign got its first hint something was wrong on the afternoon of Election Day, when state campaign workers on the ground began reporting huge turnout in areas favorable to President Obama: northeastern Ohio, northern Virginia, central Florida and Miami-Dade.

Then came the early exit polls that also were favorable to the president.

But it wasn't until the polls closed that concern turned into alarm. They expected North Carolina to be called early. It wasn't. They expected Pennsylvania to be up in the air all night; it went early for the President.

After Ohio went for Mr. Obama, it was over, but senior advisers say no one could process it.

"We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory," said one senior adviser. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming" ....

.... Romney was stoic as he talked to the president, an aide said, but his wife Ann cried. Running mate Paul Ryan seemed genuinely shocked, the adviser said. Ryan's wife Janna also was shaken and cried softly.

"There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," said another adviser. "It was like a sucker punch."

Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something.

Both wives looked stricken, and Ryan himself seemed grim. They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened.

"He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney.​

What happened? It is true that standing before the cameras in the final days of an election, a trailing candidate must put on a brave face, reassure his supporters that everything is well. But it would seem that Team Romney really did believe they were ahead. A free-market axiom should suffice: The campaign operatives in any presidential election are generally the best available in the marketplace; how could they literally miss the reality?

TRMS blogger and producer Steve Benen considers the point:

Putting aside every other consideration, the question Republicans should be asking this week is how the campaign could be this incompetent. It's one thing to have a couple of blind optimists in the inner circle, confident in the face of contrary evidence; it's another to have everyone in the inner circle be so blind.

And how, exactly, did the entire campaign operation fool themselves into believing victory was inevitable? How is this dynamic even possible in an environment in which experienced, well-paid, professional operatives have access to quantifiable evidence?

According to the CBS report, Team Romney was swayed by, among other things, "huge and enthusiastic crowds," which they took as evidence of national enthusiasm.

Oh my.

And what about the polls? The campaign assumed they were "skewed" by Democratic oversamples. Oops.

State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.​

​

There has been much criticism this year of "The Bubble", as comedian Bill Maher has coined it, though he is hardly the first to invoke the name. Benen offered an explanation earlier this week, noting:

In epistemic closure, folks in a closed environment essentially get new information from one another, and for the last several months, conservative leaders, activists, and voters were all telling themselves and each other that President Obama is a horrific monster who would be crushed by a resurgent republic rebelling against his tyrannical radicalism.

What about polls showing the president favored to win? They were skewed, the right said. What about experts pointing to Obama's structural advantages? They were from liberal schools with liberal degrees and weren't to be trusted, the right added. What about the drop in the unemployment rate? That was the result of a conspiracy, the right insisted. What about analyses showing the president isn't really a radical, but is actually a mainstream, center-left technocrat pursuing ideas that have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support? That was just madness, the right scoffed.​

And before one points out the role of Benen and the Maddow Team's role in revitalizing the Democratic-sympathizing discourse, he was riffing off Conor Friersdorf, who advised, "Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, 'What went wrong?', they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: 'Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?'" It is actually a fairly simple thesis with considerable supporting detail:

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election '08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other "mainstream media" sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely borne out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver's expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.

Sure, Silver could've wound up wrong. But people who rejected the possibility of his being right? They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Conservatives should be familiar with its contours. For years, they've been arguing that liberal control of media and academia confers one advantage: Folks on the right can't help but be familiar with the thinking of liberals, whereas leftists can operate entirely within a liberal cocoon. This analysis was offered to explain why liberal ideas were growing weaker and would be defeated ....

.... It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear ....

.... Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.

How many months were wasted on them?

How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.​

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider Friersdorf's mention of Jennifer Rubin. As Eric Alterman explained in July, Rubin is the third, and latest, attempt by The Washington Post to provide a deliberately ideological right-wing blogger, apparently for the sake of fairness.

The first attempt was Ben Domenech, a Republican staffer and RedState.org blogger with a reputation for inflammatory declarations. His tenure lasted all of three days before plagiarism, not ideology, brought him down. The Post then turned to Dave Weigel, brought up from Reason.com four years after Domenech's spectacular crash-and-burn. As a journalist, he did okay, but his political ideology as a "left-wing libertarian" pretty much describes the problem with his role as the Post's conservative blogger.

Third time is a charm, right?

Like Domenech, Rubin was hired as an ideologue, not a journalist. A former Hollywood lawyer without a single article to her credit before 2007, she had worked briefly as an editor for the right-wing Pajamas Media and as a blogger for Commentary, where she developed a specialty in venomous attacks on liberal American Jews who deviated from the magazine's hard-line pro-Likud policies. At the time of Rubin's hiring by the Post, her op-ed page editor, Fred Hiatt, admitted that he "did not read her regularly." Perhaps he should have. At Commentary, Rubin's fulminations were frequently at odds not only with any conceivable journalistic justification but also with simple common sense. For instance, she published a 3,800-word article investigating the reason American Jews supposedly "hate" Sarah Palin, in which she managed to quote exactly one American Jew (Naomi Wolf). In so doing, she ignored an avalanche of polling data demonstrating that American Jews did not "hate" Palin any more or less than most Americans—especially liberals. "In a strikingly unified response from liberals as well as conservatives," an Atlantic writer noted of the article, "most commentators are trashing the piece as illogical, poorly-argued, and anti-Semitic."​

Perhaps Rubin's greatest hit (or miss, as such) was her reminder on terrorism. "There is a specific jihadist connection here," she wrote after a tragedy, calling the deaths of seventy-seven and injuries to over two hundred-forty "a sobering reminder for those who think it's too expensive to wage a war against jihadists". And then it turned out that the terrorist was a white guy who hated Muslims. As Alterman explains:

When Rubin returned to her blog, she exacerbated her problem by doubling down on her faulty logic and foolish clichés: "That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back." As before, just who was putting forth such a "proposition" went unnamed. "To the contrary," she continued, "the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things."​

The Washington Post, of course, stood by Rubin, weakly blaming her confusion on the fact that she is Jewish. No, really. The irony is that even if we grant WaPo ombudsman Patrick Pexton's argument, it still doesn't wash factually. It was a strange thing to blame Judaism for the rabid hatred of a Jewish writer who happens to loathe her fellow American Jews for having a "sick addiction" to the Democratic Party. But that's what happens to reality around conservative media.

And that is the problem. On Wednesday, Simon Maloy of Media Matters made the obvious point:

Let's take what she's written here, in the cold reality of a Romney loss, and compare it to what she wrote when the Romney campaign was still in full swing.

Rubin now: "The convention speech was a huge missed opportunity."

Rubin then: "Mitt Romney accepted the nomination of his party for president with a speech that showed he can rise to an occasion, and let us see a side of him that was compelling and heartbreaking." [Right Turn, 8/30]

Rubin now: "Romney made a lunge now and then in the direction of immigration reform and an alternative health-care plan without giving those topics the attention they deserved."

Rubin then: "The media are doing their best to disguise the unpleasant fact that Mitt Romney has been more forthcoming on immigration than the president has in more than three years in office." [Right Turn, 6/24] "This isn't that hard: Romney will repeal Obamacare. He has always favored protection for people with preexisting conditions who move from one employer-provided plan to another or from an individual-purchased to an employer-provided plan." [Right Turn, 9/10]

Rubin now: "The communications team was the worst of any presidential campaign I have ever seen -- slow and plodding, never able to capitalize on openings."

Rubin then: "The Romney team, to a greater degree than most campaigns, has been criticized and lampooned. Too timid. Too unfocused. Too slow. Too inept. But this week demonstrated that the campaign officials are more skilled than they have been depicted, and their errors and stumbles have in large part been obliterated in the lingering glow of the convention. There is some personal vindication for them as well." [Right Turn, 8/31]

Rubin now: "But if not for a stunning series of performances in the debates and unexpected eloquence on the stump in the last month, Romney almost surely would have done worse than he did. A presidential race needs more than a good month to be successful."

Rubin then: "We've made the case that not only the first presidential debate but the debates as a whole recast the race and vaulted Mitt Romney into a position to win the race. Pollster Charlie Cook is the latest election guru to agree." [Right Turn, 10/31]​

Now here's the thing about the Bubble: Sure, you can complain that it's Media Matters, and that's fine. But will conservatives actually notice the flip?

The epistemic closure Benen considers is such that no, conservatives don't notice. And the thing about the Bubble is that, for now, it persists. We'll see what the future brings, but Floyd and Mary Beth Brown are a conservative writing team whose view of reality is such that you might think they were liberals in disguise trying to discredit their conservative neighbors:

Dick Morris, Michael Barone, and Karl Rove all got it wrong. They thought Romney would win. Let us tell you why we never thought Obama would lose.

Republicans are too nice. In contrast, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, Obama set out to destroy the character of Mitt Romney. While telling stories about how Romney killed people and shipped their jobs abroad, Obama's team never once could find a trait they liked about Mitt Romney. The Republicans never reciprocated. We nearly choked when we heard speakers at the GOP convention talking about Barack Obama's good qualities as a father and man.

The leadership of the Republican Party is living in an alternate reality. Barack Obama isn't a good man. He is evil and corrupt. Romney didn't have the guts to say it ....​

Considering that Mitt Romney led off his campaign with a lie—an attack advert blatantly misrepresenting Barack Obama—and continued lying viciously throughout the campaign; considering the Republican loathing of women's rights and humanity; considering the blatant attempt to throw the election by passing new electoral laws—add it all up and it's hard to see how the Republicans were being nice.

Well, unless you live in the Bubble:

[Romney] didn't want to talk about Obama's associations with communists and socialists. He didn't want to talk about Obama's associations with Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Romney never wanted to talk about Obama's sketchy past, his fictional birth story, and his possible ineligibility to serve as president. Romney didn't want to talk about Obama's receipt of corrupt and foreign election funds.​

What the Browns want is more Birtherism and tinfoil, more ignorant misogyny—no, really—and an even thicker Bubble. Perhaps the next one should be made of brick:

Finally, what Rove and the GOP establishment did to conservative candidate Todd Akin will not be soon forgotten. The establishment elite of the GOP must stop the war against conservative and Christian candidates lower down the ticket. Christians are the heart of the GOP, and we are not amused.​

Jennifer Rubin's grotesque flip on Mitt Romney is perhaps emblematic of the problems American conservatives are facing at the ballot box. It's one thing to be fanatical like the Browns; it's another to bet, as Rubin does, that even your teammates won't notice how full of excrement you really are. In the end, Americans noticed. And say what you want about the narrow margin of victory in the popular vote; Barack Obama won twenty-six states and waxed Romney in the electoral count. Democrats enjoyed broad success in a Senate campaign they were supposed to lose. And liberals in various states enjoyed referendum triumphs across the country.

The conventional wisdom was not necessarily wrong; President Obama faced a tremendous climb to win re-election. But in the end, Mitt Romney and the Republican Party flat blew it. And they did so by simply refusing to acknowledge reality. Whether they crawl out of their Bubble, or instead pretend that there is nothing about their extraordinary confirmation bias compared to the fact that everyone suffers confirmation bias remains to be seen.

For the good of the nation, we can only hope Republicans wake up.
____________________

Notes:

Crawford, Jan. "Adviser: Romney 'shellshocked' by loss". CBS News. November 8, 2012. CBSNews.com. November 10, 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/

Benen, Steve. "No one on Team Romney 'saw this coming'". The Maddow Blog. November 9, 2012. MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com. November 10, 2012. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/11/09/15047497-no-one-on-team-romney-saw-this-coming

—————. "An opportunity to break free of epistemic closure". The Maddow Blog. November 8, 2012. MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com. November 10, 2012. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2...pportunity-to-break-free-of-epistemic-closure

Friersdorf, Conor. "How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File". The Atlantic. November 7, 2012. TheAtlantic.com. November 10, 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...to-the-msm-and-failed-the-rankandfile/264855/

Alterman, Eric. "Attack Dog Jennifer Rubin Muddies the Washington Post's Reputation". The Nation. July 16-23, 2012. TheNation.com. November 10, 2012. http://www.thenation.com/article/16...fer-rubin-muddies-washington-posts-reputation

Maloy, Simon. "WaPo's Jennifer Rubin Admits She Misled Her Readers". Media Matters for America. November 7, 2012. MediaMatters.org. November 10, 2012. http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/11/07/wapos-jennifer-rubin-admits-she-misled-her-read/191214

Brown, Floyd, and Mary Beth Brown. "Why Romney Lost". The Cagle Post. November 10, 2012. Cagle.com. November 10, 2012. http://www.cagle.com/2012/11/why-romney-lost/

 

[Tero]

Politics is a tricky game. Republicans can easily get a president by moving to the center. The presidency is a personality game. But then the would need to drop the loonies, and without the loonies, dems would take the house. The majority of the country is democrats, only gerrymandering gets Gop the seats.

 

[Tiassa]

Maybe Not ....

The majority of the country is democrats ....

I'm not certain about this. If the majority of the country is Democratic, President Obama should have won the popular vote by a greater margin; very few Democrats crossed over to Romney, and certainly not as many as Republicans who crossed over to Obama. Additionally, data from the Maryland marriage equality vote suggests crossover Republicans carried the affirmative vote.

Still, though, that outcome does reinforce your point that the GOP needs to do something about its "loonies".
____________________

Notes:

Olson, Walter. "Why Many GOPers Quietly Backed Maryland Question 6". The Huffington Post. November 9, 2012. HuffingtonPost.com. November 11, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-olson/maryland-gay-marriage_b_2094675.html

 

[Rhaedas]

It's sadly amusing that conservatives, once they realize they had truly lost, totally threw their candidate under the bus. Up until and through Election Day, they insisted he was the best they had, was the answer to everything, and yet the minute the Electoral Votes were out of reach, the hate was upon Romney...and best yet, the MSM also blames the MSM for covering up how bad a candidate he truly was. That condemnation of the media's terrible job was done by...the media itself.

The self destruction continues.

 

[Tiassa]

General Disarray

It's sadly amusing that conservatives, once they realize they had truly lost, totally threw their candidate under the bus.

I think it is indicative that they can't even agree which bus to throw him under, the #13 to the Sour Grapes District, or the #69 to Fahqueueville.

To a degree, though, this is all predictable. The question is how long the Republicans will remain in disarray.

It's true that the Democratic Party emerged from its most recent periods of blame and backstabbing somewhere to the right of where they had previously stood—that is, closer to the contemporaneous political center—but there is no guarantee that Republicans will emerge leftward.

 

[ElectricFetus]

We will see, if the conservatives learn that their precious FOX is just shoveling shit into their eyes and throat non-stop, then we should see viewership of Fox news falling off after this election, if they simple swallow and ask for more then viewership should not change, that is my experimental model on this subject.

I think the key to the future is Hispanics (not the ones like me, the ones whose backs are still wet... no offense) if republicans can flip on immigration policy and speak of Hispanics as the hard working contributing Americans that they are, and even field Hispanic candidates in high office, I think they could turn all this around. Now instead if democrats were to throw in more Hispanics perhaps (an this is impossible) a Latina for president, and win, the republicans would be doomed for decades to come: the democrats would grab 90-95% of the Hispanic vote in huge turn out like they have with the blacks, combine that with the liberal whites and majority of women of all races and they would be unstoppable!

Hispanics though could go either way, many of them are highly socially conservative and un-trusting or even livid of corrupt or socialist governments like the ones in their home country, but if you had to choose between a supposedly corrupt pro-socialist party and another party that openly hates you and wants to deport you its not hard to jump up and make that choice for the lesser evil. So if the republicans can get rid of that openly hateful deportation image they can get back on top.

 

[Rhaedas]

They could start by not referring to them as the "Hispanic problem".

 

[ElectricFetus]

It appears the republicans are learning or at least fox news is on the "Hispanic problem":
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/po...ard-line-tone-and-pledges-immigration-reform/

 

[madanthonywayne]

I'm not certain about this. If the majority of the country is Democratic, President Obama should have won the popular vote by a greater margin;

The county by county map is also interesting:

Population density is, of course, greater in Democratic areas.

Hispanics though could go either way, many of them are highly socially conservative and un-trusting or even livid of corrupt or socialist governments like the ones in their home country, but if you had to choose between a supposedly corrupt pro-socialist party and another party that openly hates you and wants to deport you its not hard to jump up and make that choice for the lesser evil. So if the republicans can get rid of that openly hateful deportation image they can get back on top.

It's something of a catch 22. Would you suggest that Republicans should support an amnesty program which would add millions of voters to a Demographic that votes against them by more than 2 to 1? Doesn't seem too logical. Perhaps Republicans might support giving illegals legal status (green cards).

A recent article I read put Obama's victory in perspective:

I was thinking about the point I made earlier – incumbent presidents’ attempts to win re-election. Starting with McKinley in 1896, every incumbent who sought re-election won except for five: Taft; Hoover; Ford; Carter; and George H.W. Bush. All but Hoover faced a strong primary challenge (TR in 1912; Ronald Reagan in 1976; Ted Kennedy in 1980; and Pat Buchanan in 1992) and three of those four faced a serious general election third party challenge (TR in 1912; John Anderson in 1980; and Ross Perot in 1992). Hoover may be an outlier, but his situation is unique because of the Great Depression. Given this history, I wonder whether people should stop all the second-guessing about what happened this time: Mitt Romney had to overcome a difficult primary battle and unite a divided Republican Party, and he faced a united Democratic Party and a media that loves President Obama. It’s not surprising that the incumbent won. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/11/barack-obama-and-the-incumbent-president-conundrum.php

Incumbency is a powerful thing. GWB won in 2004, after all. Throw in an amazingly well timed hurricane, a compliant media, and an election day computer crash at Romney HQ and, well, we're fucked.

 

[ElectricFetus]

A recent article I read put Obama's victory in perspective: Incumbency is a powerful thing. GWB won in 2004, after all. Throw in an amazingly well timed hurricane, a compliant media, and an election day computer crash at Romney HQ and, well, we're fucked.

So basically god was against you? Has nothing what so ever to do with white majority of the electorate shrinking and all non-whites voting heavily democrat?

"Nonwhites made up 28 percent of the electorate this year, compared with 20 percent in 2000. Much of that growth is coming from Hispanics. The trend has worked to the advantage of President Barack Obama two elections in a row now and is not lost on Republicans poring over the details of Tuesday's results. Obama captured a commanding 80 percent of the growing ranks of nonwhite voters in 2012, just as he did in 2008. Republican Mitt Romney won 59 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Romney couldn't win even though he dominated among white men and outperformed 2008 nominee John McCain with that group. It's an ever-shrinking slice of the electorate and of America writ large. White men made up 34 percent of the electorate this year, down from 46 percent in 1972." -- http://www.kxan.com/dpps/elections/...-elections-to-look-different-nd12-jos_4960485

 

[Rhaedas]

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/

The link has a number of election result maps. I think the most interesting ones are near the bottom (pretty large so I didn't show them on the thread). The cartograms that used red, blue, and purple for those counties that are a clear mix show exactly how our country isn't divided, so much as a true mix of opinion. Of course, this is strictly based on a vote for a President. Imagine a cartogram like those, only showing the multiple dimensions of opinion on various topics as well.

 

[Rhaedas]

A recent article I read put Obama's victory in perspective: Incumbency is a powerful thing. GWB won in 2004, after all. Throw in an amazingly well timed hurricane, a compliant media, and an election day computer crash at Romney HQ and, well, we're fucked.

Well timed hurricane. Yeah, we've never had bad storms in October.

Complaint media. This is a great example of cannibalism inside the party. I even heard Joe Scarborough saying this line...the media was at fault, for either loving Obama more than Romney, or for not calling Romney on the lies. Now, which is it? You can't have both. I'll admit the media as journalism sucks, but don't say they leaned Obama, when the internet was buzzing with factchecks on Romney daily, and no media really jumped on it enough to make it a point.

And the Romney campaign had more than a computer crash, they were in some bubble of their own making. At least they set some record, of the worse campaign running ever. Blinders anyone?

The biggest revelation is that the Republicans wanted so bad to win against Obama, they were willing to ignore a terrible candidate. They could have put better up there, someone conservative but midstream, someone that would give Obama a run for the money on issues. But they would have alienated too many of the new Republicans, the Tea Party group, so they gambled on Romney, and lost. I still can't believe how many people still got sucked into the lies and voted for him...but I guess some things are stronger than facts. And no, it's not party loyalty, as the day after the election, they showed how much they support each other.

 

[ElectricFetus]

The biggest revelation is that the Republicans wanted so bad to win against Obama, they were willing to ignore a terrible candidate. They could have put better up there, someone conservative but midstream, someone that would give Obama a run for the money on issues. But they would have alienated too many of the new Republicans, the Tea Party group, so they gambled on Romney, and lost. I still can't believe how many people still got sucked into the lies and voted for him...but I guess some things are stronger than facts. And no, it's not party loyalty, as the day after the election, they showed how much they support each other.

LOL! Romney was the most moderate candidate they had! Did you not see the primary line up? Everything else was either ultra libertarian (Ron Paul), super socially conservative (Sanatorium anyone? here I scraped it out of my own ass.) or pure fat evil (Newt
Gingrich).

 

[billvon]

Given this history, I wonder whether people should stop all the second-guessing about what happened this time:

Well, if you really want to stop all the second guessing, then the facts of what happened are that most voters wanted Obama to be president. Everything else is an excuse.

 

[spidergoat]

James K. says it best:

The party marginalized itself by becoming an alliance of corporate oligarchs with poorly-educated Southern suburban white trash religious fanatics, both using each other to browbeat the nation into transforming itself into kleptocratic theocracy.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/11/a-look-in-the-mirror.html

 

[Rhaedas]

LOL! Romney was the most moderate candidate they had! Did you not see the primary line up? Everything else was either ultra libertarian (Ron Paul), super socially conservative (Sanatorium anyone? here I scraped it out of my own ass.) or pure fat evil (Newt
Gingrich).

Yes, that line up was a sad one. Are they really the best the Republicans can do? The cream of the crop? Romney was likely picked because he was more malleable than the others, and we saw this throughout the campaign. He said whatever needed to be said to get votes.

 

[joepistole]

The county by county map is also interesting:

Population density is, of course, greater in Democratic areas.
It's something of a catch 22. Would you suggest that Republicans should support an amnesty program which would add millions of voters to a Demographic that votes against them by more than 2 to 1? Doesn't seem too logical. Perhaps Republicans might support giving illegals legal status (green cards).

A recent article I read put Obama's victory in perspective: Incumbency is a powerful thing. GWB won in 2004, after all. Throw in an amazingly well timed hurricane, a compliant media, and an election day computer crash at Romney HQ and, well, we're fucked.

What the heck do you mean by "compliant media"? The only compliant media I am aware of is the Republican entertainment media, Fox News, Republican talk radio, et al.

 

[madanthonywayne]

So basically god was against you?

Sort of seems that way. This years elections saw hurricanes at the begining and the end of Romney's run for president. Both of which, arguably, did him some harm.

Has nothing what so ever to do with white majority of the electorate shrinking and all non-whites voting heavily democrat?

So, are you suggesting that by letting too many "non-whites" into the country we are doomed? Is economic freedom something only whites value? Are "non-whites" socialist by nature?

The problem isn't too many "non-whites". It's that we're letting in too many low skill immigrants who rely on the government for food stamps, welfare, AFDC, WIC, etc. Rather than focusing on race, we would be better served to shoot for a more rational immigration policy that does not let in a flood of people economically predisposed to become dependent on the government (and therefore to become Democratic voters).

Perhaps a deal could be made that would give illegal immigrants who have jobs and are stable members of society legal status (not citizenship) in exchange for real immigration reform. Reform that would let in more people likely to be self reliant and productive (potential Republicans) and fewer people likely to become wards of the state (likely Democrats). Many other nations have adopted such a system.

The current system..privileges immigrants who benefit from genetic relationships, while discriminating against potential immigrants from every region in the world who would contribute a great deal to American society but lack relatives in the U.S. It allows a small number of countries like Mexico and the Philippines to provide a disproportionate share of U.S. immigration, at the expense of much more populous countries like China and India. The family preference system even discriminates against individuals in the over-represented countries who are not fortunate enough to have American relatives. In addition to being unfair, nepotism-based immigration harms the U.S. economy. Family-based immigration is dominated by less-skilled immigrants. They enter a labor market in which there was a glut of less-skilled labor even before the recession created the highest levels of mass unemployment since the Great Depression.

The unification of immigrants with their nuclear families should remain a major part of U.S. immigration policy. But family unification should be limited to spouses and children. The U.S. should learn from other countries and reform its immigration admissions criteria so that the majority of immigrants are admitted on the basis of their potential contribution to the U.S. economy, not on the basis of their genes.

http://growth.newamerica.net/public...n_policy_should_shift_from_nepotism_to_skills

 

[spidergoat]

There is no net immigration to the USA going on.