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After most presidential campaigns, advisors and strategists for the losing team routinely start reflecting on what transpired, and start acknowledging doubts they couldn't share before Election Day. They put on a brave face and sounded confident notes beforehand, and couldn't share suspicions they'd come up short, but they weren't oblivious to the likely outcome.
Team Romney, however, claims to have been oblivious to the likely outcome.
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."
This really is remarkable. When I heard the bravado from the candidate and his aides going into Tuesday, I assumed it was just the usual p.r. palaver. But it appears they weren't spinning, hoping to sell talking points they didn't themselves believe; they were actually, genuinely clueless. Romney himself, one advisor told CBS, "was shellshocked."
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.
Campaign-management textbooks will likely use the Romney/Ryan campaign as a model for what not to do in the future.
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This level of incompetence and we were supposed to hand the government over to them? This level of incompetence puts ever other republican lawmaker on notice - deal with reality and facts or get the heck out of the way.
Well, add a bit of Murdockland, and you have incompetence enveloped in an echo chamber of wishful thinking!
I am very glad we averted such catastrophe on November 6th, 2012! Now, our next quest should be to directly challenge the madness over there at FOX! -Kevo
George H.W. Bush was reportedly similarly gob-smacked by his 1992 defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton. And we know the GOP legislators at the time also had a hard time wrapping their heads around any idea of Clinton's "legitimacy."
It's odd, isn't it? With all their money, they can afford the best analysis, the best internal polling.
Or is it more just a case of being at odds with the idea of "expertise," as an extension of the party's rampant anti-intellectualism?
But it's in their own best interests to get the information right. That's a kind of "invisible hand" at work here.
Well, I stopped believing in the "magical thinking" Adam Smith attributed to an invisible hand a long long time ago. THAT in itself doesn't stand up to empirical testing. Even Alan Greenspan admitted as much, to Congress.
But in this case, as details emerge of how fully they had all started "putting up drapes," it is mind-boggling. From the web site, to the legislators with their "on-message" integration with the failed candidacy, to the cancelled fireworks display in Boston, as if the election hadn't just been lost. I think we'll find more, elaborate planning for an election that some of the richest people in the country were absolutely certain was in the bag.
I'd even wonder if gambling houses that supported betting on the election had some very high influxes of cash at the end, as some super-rich even tried to profit from the outcome that they thought was certain. Would be interesting to find out.
You know, no one is talking about the other possibility behind their certainty, esp. with someone who has the dirty tricks history of Karl Rove:
What if, in smoke-filled rooms filled with "influencers," they were told the "fix" was in? That it was safe to ignore the poll numbers, because the disenfranchisement, voting machine hacks, gerrymandering, etc. will have effectively countered any kind of effort by the Obama campaign??
Take a look at the backstory about the interaction between Fox News producers, Carl Rove's communications with the Romney campaign panicked about the Ohio call announcement, the battle of ego, brains, legs and credibility with Journalist-Host Megyn "are you just making up republican numbers" Kelly, and the empiricists at the Fox News "Decision Desk"
(Elspeth Reeve's Atlantic Weekly story)
I dvr'd fox news that night and it is pretty interesting to watch cognitive dissonance play out in real time. (mediate clips here)
The interesting thing is that in Ailles' neck of the woods in Murdochland they actually do have empiricists. They had a room full of standard technocratic guys who know how to look at precincts and make predictions about where the state is going. It's just about numbers.
Apparently the Romney campaign has guys who may have the skill set, but the leadership is such that they have an "emperor with no clothes" culture where information is used to confirm the preconceptions of the leader, rather than confront the leader with data about emerging threats to his goals.
It is this moment that gives you insight into how little leadership Romney actually is able to exercise over his internal organization. If he was unable / unwilling to commission unbiased polling to understand what the Obama campaign was doing, then it calls into question how much he really engaged reality as a businessman. It is plausible that Romney never really had to be much interested in an empirical understanding of the nuts and bolts of a business beyond the high level refinancing details that board members and bankers would find convincing. And he was just the pitchman who man the deals look good, and got lots of guys rich. What he did was flip companies and all he needed to understand was enough to construct a plan where he and the decision makers in the deal would make lots of money regardless how the deals went. So long that everyone was happy in the plutocratic bubble, Romney was a genius.
So election night, the Romney campaign's hotline to Fox is as we suspected: Karl Rove. What? How did they have the number that would get to him in the Fox studio? I thought there was a provision that there would be no coordination with super pacs.
Not only was there co-ordination with the superpacs, but there was coordination with the Fox media apparatus.
But then the producers had a problem of friction with reality. Now, I don't know this Megyn Kelly, but she clearly appeared to be enjoying confronting Rove with the facts Tuesday evening.
Precisely. Good for her.
Not just GWHB. It appears to be a common trait among Republicans. In poli sci, the Goldwater campaign is used as the archetypal example of selection bias and the inherent atypicality of activists. He and his team legendarily discounted the polling clearly showing the epic asswhipping LBJ was about to put on him because they were keeping track of who was getting the most favorable "letters to the editor" in papers across the nation, and they were whipping Johnson by that measure. The assumption was that this activism represented the "true" voice of America and the elitist pollsters just weren't reaching Real America. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)
It's part and parcel of anti-intellectualism they've traded on for decades. They just flat out don't believe in science. And this is what happens.
Romney is reportedly a numbers-guy and Ryan claims to be a math-guy, but neither of them can read a poll.
Interesting points, Steve-458256. I didn't know that about Goldwater.
So, just thinking about that for a second, is it sort of like the gap between Newtonian (or Aristotilian) physics and Einstein?
In other words, empiricism by anecdote and direct observation is weighted more heavily than what can be counter-intuitive scientific findings that exceed our observational abilities (theory of relativity is all about exposing the limitations of a singular POV).
Then, I sort of call, "Victorian." There's something that's not even typically conservative in this kind of thinking as much as it is almost Steampunk. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The intrepid late 1800s observer, cataloguing his (always his) world and ordering a hierarchical great chain of being. Borderline determinist in a mechanistic sense, in that Observation A and Observation B must necessarily lead to Conclusion C. Taxonomies. Seeing the world as a great clockworks of causes and effects. Certainties. Authorities.
The kind of stuff that led postmodernists to poop on the Enlightenment (I hate it when anyone poops on the Enlightenment. I'm just sort of fond of it that way).
Any kind of (Kuhnian) thinking, taken to its furthest conclusion, becomes overly rigid foundationalism, even anti-foundationalism (pomo). What I'm saying is that it's not the Enlightenment's fault, or Sherlock Holmes's (although when he became an action hero, I got thoroughly confused).
Wouldn't it be funny, tho, if what we are seeing is our socio-political cultures LIVING an tableau enactment of the struggles between eyeball-centered and non-eyeball centered scientific paradigms?
And Jay Rosen thinks the "View from Everywhere" non-POV-driven model of journalism is dead! Well, there's a contradiction!
Poltics is an aggregation of both, right? You have one side that has to be empirically driven, and you construct Karl Popper type hypotheses that make testable predictions about reality. You need to test them like crazy to know that you have a real Nate Siliver like handle on where the electorate really is.
Mental models that "save the appearances" (medieval philosophical term) of the observed data can also be manipulated as described in the Movie the Matrix. This is the second "God Game" - bubble world aspect of politics, where it is recognized that the world can look a lot different not because the eyes of the conservatives were altered, but because their minds were.
So being able to keep those separate- to be able to engage the reality with the projected fiction of a candidate's vision is where the literature of politics either succeeds or fails.
I think that it was severe case of blind arrogance.
The very saddest part of all is that this is the most credible claim to come out of "Team Romney" since the start of this election cycle (if not longer).
Got Enraged and Engaged:
Mooched the Vote 2012!
;-)
John, buddy, you wrote:
"how little leadership Romney actually is able to exercise over his internal organization. If he was unable / unwilling to commission unbiased polling to understand what the Obama campaign was doing, then it calls into question how much he really engaged reality as a businessman"
This is exactly what Romney is, a CEO Businessman. And the CEO finds themselves surrounded by people who tells them what they want to hear, and the CEO is always differed to.
And in business everything on paper, usually, because hiding things can kill a deal and result in law suits.
This was Romney being Romney, demonstrating how he is completely out of his depth when it comes to dealing with people, especially dealing from a position where he doesn't have absolute power.
I was worried Romney would win and then this would come back to bite us, the U.S.
Seems it lead to his failure.
.
.
Ooh, John, you always find a new way to blow my mind!
The "God Game" in the Matrix and the "God Game" contemporary politics! That's the deep shift in mental models. Almost as big as the "Great Divide" theory of literacy, like is it rewriting the wetware.
(Great Divide theory of literacy is on the outs, however, and deservedly so. Literacy may well rewrite our wetware, but not in the precise way the original proponents thought-- an old legacy of that Victorian "colonialist" thinking).
Generally, one takes the Machiavelli model for the projected fiction of a candidate's vision is where the literature of politics either succeeds or fails. That's the idea that there's one version that you say in public (the projected fiction) and a more crass and manipulated version that is shared or acknowledged in private, wink wink, nudge nudge.
Generally Dems/liberals assume the latter is SOP for the GOP, because it is such a norm in politics. Master puppeteers and all that.
We don't really have a model for a Master puppeteer who drinks his own Kool-Aid to that degree (what on earth would we say if Jonestown had never happened?).
But a "God Game" could be one explanation. Like all the dispensational premillennialism/Late Great Planet Earth/Left Behind stuff. Glenn Beck and his bunker crowd.
Imagine a liberal/progressive "God Game" where we have a mental model for living in The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake/Year of the Flood! Margaret Atwood as our alternative progressive dystopian post-millennialism! Or Philip K. Dick. Yeow!
I've been telling my mom for months now that the Fox News-framing bubble was on the verge of bursting any day now. Warned of disrupted people experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance (Mom talks with lots of retired people on Facebook-- she's online nearly as much as I am).
But it never occurred to me that, in the face of a massive reality check, their un-reality bubble would fail to burst, leak, deflate, what have you.
What does this mean? Are there scholarly findings about the demagoguery of a mass media outlet that have never before been measurable like this? Is the disjunct really that extreme, or is that just what's being spouted?
Are they walking around in a daze, or still in complete and total denial?
And an even worse thought just occurred to me (outside of schadenfreude): Should we feel pity for them?
PS anytime I use the word "schadenfreude" it makes me miss the old days when we had the wonderful voice of Al Franken on Air America. He used to do some of the most hilarious riffs on schadenfreude.
How dare he become a Senator and then deprive us all of that voice and POV! :-P
Rob- I have some experience with business, and was described in DOJ documents available online as an executive decision maker at a major US software corporation. The description was exaggerated and I am long since out of that world but I think I am qualified to comment that your analysis is correct, but only for businesses that sooner or later are destroyed.
My assessment of Romney's performance as a manager is that he seems to not understand even elementary concepts. Putting aside his policies, and just looking at the man as a person capable of executing a plan to achieve his goals, I think he would have proven himself to be as disastrous a leader as he was a campaigner. A leader cannot allow group think to grow up around him. It is really really easy to be complacent about that, but it is in my view by far the most common source of failures of companies to adapt to reality.
Chris, I think you get that I mean the literature of politics not in a pejorative propaganda way where you use newspeak to program your followers. It certainly can be used that way, and that is the dominant mode for cynical practitioners, but it can be used positively to inspire and motivate, and can be used in a totally transparent way. Reagan sincerely believes the same bubble world vision that Goldwater and many in the T party believe in. This is a transgenerational matrix of tropes that structure their world view.
Similarly, Obama exercised many progressive and calls to unity tropes in his speech. If he can infect people's minds with the same vision, then he will succeed in transforming the landscape as Reagan did. I once believed he understood the centrality of this activity, but I believe I was projecting my peculiar take on the metaphysics of politics onto him. So it wasn't fair. I am looking forward to his book where he reveals his thinking accompanying the events we have already witnessed with him. I wish him well, and I really hope he will see that he will not achieve his rightful place in history unless he wins the US over to his vision as Reagan did.
---Notes---
Re: Saving the Phenomena/ Appearances. I made obscure reference to this idea that was bandied about in medieval times between the competing sun centered vs. earth centered models. This debate went back to Plato's academy, where up and coming Greek politicians were often sent to learn the arts needed for leadership. It is not simply a science concept. Plato gave the exercise to construct the simplest possible explanation that "saved the appearances" of the irregular motion of astronomical bodies. "Saving" seems like an odd way to describe the idea that the best model is the one that accommodates all observed phenomena in the simplest way. It does have to do with perception, because we do not perceive details in the phenomenal world in the way that an skilled tracker will instantly spot spoor of various animals, and to the accompanying hikers- all they see is dirt. The spoor simply does not exist to them. And the tracker is in a different phenomenal space where he feels not just the past presence of the animals, but what they were doing in that clearing. It is a reality separate from that of the city dweller. So these models "save" appearances from inexistence. To wax more poetic- it is the anima- the spirit- the Word that brings these alternate realities into existence in our minds saving the formless data of the senses with forms.
ANyway... The point is that politicians must develop the same skill of saving the appearances. Plato provided the foundation of the the modern perspective that politicians may project alternate systems of platonic forms onto events to "save their appearances".
In the 6th century, Simplicius repordedly described this concept of saving the phenomena with a mental model. He attributed to Eudoxus in his commentary on Aristotle's "On the Heavens". Aristotle seemed to use the idea in the sense of rescuing a hypothesis from contradictory information. Simplicius took it a different direction entirely.
It's reminiscent of reading about life in Hitler's bunker during World War II. They were constantly being surprised to discover they weren't the geniuses they thought they were.
If you're going to have a war - either real or metaphorical/political, it's always good if your opponents are right wingers, since they have to be morons to be wingers in the first place. They may cause a lot of trouble along the way, but ultimately they go down like the losers they are (which is why they became wingers to begin with).
If no one saw it coming then why all the pre-election kvetching about "if Romney loses Sandy cost it" or "Christie endorsed Obama and the election is in the balance" talk from anonymous campaign sources?
As another poster at another site said on Wednesday (still perfect for now):
"I feel nothing but glee at their suffering. I would travel the nation this morning stopping to take a dump in each of their coffee mugs if I could. They have spent four years sowing the seeds of mindless hate and reality-denying stupidity. Last night the bill came due. Eat it."
Suggestion for new Friday column: Chronicling Republican Mendacity.
Here's two to start you with (as you've already reported): Rove states "Obama suppressed the vote." Boehner willing to work with the president.
Seconded.
And, the Republican mendacity started WAY before Mittens. See Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power.
We can only be glad that Mittens did not have a Hoover at FBI to lend veracity to the lies he told for the last 18 months. Republicans have been making stuff up for a long time now.
Talk about job security for Steve...
Thank God he was defeated. Nothing more dangerous than politicians who believe their own b.s.
yes,,we are lucky he was defeated,,do you remember when bush before he was president,,wanted to go to war with irak,,he just needed an excuse,this is why it is possible 9/11 ,maybe they let it happen ,they had memo in advance about it,,,than we had the irak war,,now romney hinted he wanted the war with iran,,i got worried,,because his 12 millions jobs,and extra spending for the army,and the army did not want it,,,he possibly would have the draft back,,and all our young men would have jobs,,going to war to get kill, and the millions given to romney,,those rich peoples expect billions back,,they do not give for nothing,,they give to charity only because they get something back nothing else,,i am pretty sure with a war ,,a lot of arms and weapons making factories would open,,they would have a lot of share of those,,,amd make billions in return from them,,not for the citizens,,us we would loose our young soldiers ,,this is the only way i can see he could create 12 millions jobs,,and those millionaires get their money back,,,karl rove is a fool when his party lost,,,i think they try to rig few states,,but can not rig more than 10%,,after that, it shows,,i saw a programmer that did it,,he is in court,,and it is the way he explained it,,one of jeb bush assistant had paid him to rig the voting machines,,he is now in court about it,,under 10% on votes they can cheat on voting machines in big precinct only,,in small it would be discovered very fast,,mr obama won 2008 with more than 10 % votes,,he possibly did it this time also in big swing state
Plain and simple they believed their own BullShMitt. Mitt Romney was a sorry candidate, Paul Ryan an unacceptable ideologue, and while they were manufacturing conspiracies and taking Obama quotes out of context , Democrats were registering voters and motivating people .
Most Dems watch two or three news sources. ALL Repubs watch a propaganda source - FOX. So, that begs the question - what will FOX do now? What will the far Right do about this BS they were throwing. Probably nothing but it sure will be fun to watch them spin this garbage. Maybe now the Righties will watch more than just their "paid for, loyal to the point of stupid," network!!
Nope ...more of the same ..It's how they make MONEY.
Snake oil salesman duping gullible peons.
Better by some gold and survival kits doncha know.
Obama coming for your guns
The big question is, now that the Unskewed Polls guy has been conclusively shown to be a blithering idiot, will he become a quickly forgotten laughingstock or get a job at Fox News? Unfortunately, I think inquiring minds already know the answer to that one.
Oh and here in Central Florida, I saw the first salvo in the debt ceiling war.I nearly fell off the cross trainer at the gym last night. There it was ...the racist Chinese- from- the future -are taking -over- our -economy- because -of -the -debt commercial. On CNN /Direct so I don't know if it was national.
Really? we don't get 5 minutes?
I hope Obama calls their bluff this time like Krugman suggests
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/opinion/krugman-lets-not-make-a-deal.html?ref=opinion
Curious if anyone else has seen it.
Wasn't an isolated incident. '
It was playing in PA a few days before the election..ad nauseum.
I'm up by Wilkes-Barre..Republican rural territiry, they eat this crap up and think it's all true. Dumbasses elected Lou Barletta back to Congress. he didn't do squat for two years.
Yes, we were surprised to see this pseudo futuristic anti- Chinese commercial AFTER the election! Enough already with silly propaganda from the Right. We live on the gulf coast of Florida and wondered if this was a nationally aired commercial.
And the weirdest part is they had all the earmarks of a campaign that is losing and knows it, like the Politico article discussing the circular firing squad Romney's top campaign advisors had formed, and the leaking of the stuff about what Ryan's handlers were suggesting he do in the event of losing the election. Hell, every Republican surrogate for the campaign was running around saying things like, "Here's what we're going to do in 2016," which was a clear sign they didn't think Romney was going to win. Everyone surrounding the campaign seems to have been able to smell the whiff of death it emanated except for the people immediately around Romney and Ryan themselves.
That's... actually pretty scary. Imagine how it would have been to have these guys as POTUS and VPOTUS with the staff keeping them wrapped in cotton wool to shield them from the ugly truth of what's really going on in the world. We really dodged a bullet here, folks. Again. (Still shivering at the idea of Sarah Palin being anywhere near the office of POTUS.)
Anyone who said no to him was fired or demoted , they were YES MEN / WOMEN till they cash their last check , it would have been wall st america had he won , with all the trappings of a ebenezer scrooge society for anyone outside of that small circle , with ryan issuing nasty directives down to the 47% people ever day
Why the surprise? These were many of the same folks who said Iraq would be a "cakewalk", over in two weeks, flowers thrown at the troops.
Eisenhower wrote TWO speeches to be delivered after D Day. Romney? Just the ONE. . .
He also wrote a farewell address that always seems to come up when dealing with the modern Republican party...
I love Rachel's comment, "I'm a Liberal- you know, an Eisenhower Republican!"
This is astonishing. I find it hard to believe, yet Romney was so certain of a
win, he didn't even write a concession speech. I know that the people who live
in the Fox Fantasy Funhouse had been duped, but the candidate himself? Mojo
had a discussion this morning about why the Republican leadership will remain
intact even after their spectacular losses. It also appears the Repubs will continue
their 'no tax increases for the wealthy' mantra going into the debt debate. Did
they really not get what the election results meant? It's pretty scary; we seem
to have an entire political party in total denial.
Better no speech than the bitter, narrow-minded, churlish (yes I'm that old) speech the loser in Missouri gave. Forgot the name, which is something we should all do.
Congressional Republicans will continue to obstruct everything President Obama tries to accomplish--their base is expecting this out of them. I overhead two Republican women talking at a PTA meeting. One asked, "What are we going to do?" The other answered, "Don't worry. We still have the House and in two years there will be the Senate race." They don't want cooperation. They keep their Romney/Ryan signs in their yards out of protest. This is not going to be an easy four years. There is too much hatred out there.
Notice how all their expectations were in places where voter suppression was a factor? Quite telling
Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades is a Drudge report flunky , so romney is basically our very 1st fox entertainment news / rush limbaurgfh pres candidate , and it showed , the dems should be able to exploit this next time around also
Romney should be awarded an autographed copy of My Pet Goat.
Shellshocked? I bet and to consider Sandy a factor in losing and not anything else? How about the GOP's war on women? Or the 47% comment not ever really being addressed?
On the funny side, think of all the lines we'll remember about this election:
Binders full of women
Horses and baronets
Don't feed those fish
...what else
Killing Big Bird... and eating him?
o.O
Got Enraged and Engaged:
Mooched the Vote 2012!
;-)
They actually believed they would not only win, but win big. Romney didn't even have a concession speech prepared. And this group thought they could lead the free world?!? Very scary.
...experienced, well-paid, professional operatives have access to quantifiable evidence...
That could easily describe Rove...And having access to the evidence is not the same as believing it.
...huge and enthusiastic crowds," which they took as evidence of national enthusiasm.
Uh-huh. And it's a little chilly here in the northeast today, so global warming isn't real.
The Left needs to use this as a cudgel to beat into the heads of recalcitrate republicans the fact that not only couldn't Team Romney count votes, they also can't add up (budget) numbers, or accurately recognize other data that put the GOP so far outside the mainstream on so many issues.
No change here.
Remember the good old days of the Bush gang? W used to say that he knew his policies were popular because the crowds at his events cheered.
Did he even know that the audiences were screened, and that people who threatened to disagree with him were blocked from entering his events? Has he been told that even today?
not wanting to be caught in an uncomfortable position, which would make bush look dumber than he already is, IT WAS PROBABLY HIS own IDEA.
WTF I remember people saying they were getting crowds of several thousand (when they weren't photoshopping them or not letting them leave)
Obama was getting TENS OF THOUSANDS
but I'm sure they thought those people were there for free cell phones or food. The view is always so nice from the ivory tower.
Remember, too, all the early indications that the whole Republican machine was shaky - primaries where paperwork wasn't filed on time so the candidate wasn't on the ballot, the whole "we don't care who the candidate is, all the electors are Ron Paul supporters" and so on.
They never had a planned response for even known issues, and just tried to get ticked that anyone would dare even ask questions.
It looked like they were blindsided by the arrival of things like sunrise, and Tuesdays, why is the election result blindness a surprise?
I wonder how much of this is the result of the simple worldview that once you pay for something, it's supposed to happen, because there are people for that. You know, minions. They bought the election. It was supposed to be delivered. It doesn't look like it ever occurred to them that they were the people who were supposed to make it happen.
And ORCA, their vote-tracker software, was a beneficiary of what I have to call "faith-based quality assurance"*:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/11/romneys-fail-whale-orca-the-votetracker-149098.html
*TM
I loved Stephanie Miller's line about that - "They called it ORCA because 'FLIPPER' would have been too obvious!"
Got Enraged and Engaged:
Mooched the Vote 2012!
;-)
Remember Romney won among middle aged angry white males. I suspect that demographic is almost universal in the Romney campaign.
I have three brothers all of whom were Romney supporters. Two of them serious donors. None of them saw it coming because none of them encountered Obama supporters on a regular basis. All of their friends are white, most of them are male, all of them only watch Fox News.
I suspect the angry white males dominating the Romney campaign staff rarely, rarely encounter the other. Like many of their kind they think their views are the predominate views nationally.
As was commented above Mitt Romney's campaign staff spent their entire lives in the Fox News bubble. How could they be expected to know or understand reality.
I'm a white woman and was really seriously thinking this morning that I'm glad I live in a mixed/more minority neighborhood. My kids are getting a little older and are making friends with those that are not the same color we are. They get to see that it's normal that people of all color go to school, their parents work, their teachers look like their friends, etc. Instead of growing up, living beside and working with only people who look like us. When FauxNews and other bloviators just screed on about how it was lazy poor people looking for a handout (read: those bad brown people) that voted for the President, it enforces too many views that too many white people still hold. It's what they were taught, and/or it's what they grew up around. Neighborhoods are still by and large segregated as are schools. It's quite obvious in our city. The "good" schools are in white areas with mostly white kids who come from solid middle and upper income families. The "bad" schools are in the lower income areas with lower income kids who are mostly brown.
Ron you summed it up perfectly. I live in a county that went 58- 42 for Romney and that is the formula for that level of delusion . Plenty of "Nobama" and "He's got to go" signs abound .
As that demaographic shrinks it is only going to get worse
double post
incompetence personified. mitt is dubya with a better do.
It is typical CEO behavior. Nothing new there. In any corporation you'll find dozens of 'yes men' to tell the Boss exactly what he wants to hear, and any dissension is quickly smothered.
Hell, it was obvious during the campaign how quickly 'negative poll news' was squashed, or not to be believed, or ANYTHING other than it telling the truth, which would be 'bad news'.
CEOs fully believe in the 'shoot the messenger for bad news', and their people know it.
Heck, if I was making as much money as his political 'advisors' were, I would tell whoever is signing my paycheck near anything they wanted to hear, truth be damned.
Live by the echo chamber, die by the echo chamber...
You know we need to think about the impact of overt voter suppression on this election. The Republicans targetted minorities all over the country. Word got out. What did the older minority voters lead? The civil rights movement. What did many of them fight for and some of their friends die trying to achieve? The right to vote. What demographic voted in larger numbers than in 2008? African Americans. Three guess as to why. Voter suppression. What should Romney and Republicans learn from voter suppression? You can't count on voter suppression to do anything other than stir up a hornets nest.
it worked in florida in 2000, and in ohio in 2004, they thought it would work again.
maybe it took an african american president to REALLY fight voter fraud/suppression.
i went out last night,,and i was in republicans land,,alone and ready to discuss as a democrat,,the weird thing,they believed romney would create 12 millions jobs,one lady told me,she prefer a good job ,with money enough to pay for her own abortion,,what is strange remember, with the ryan murdouch etc comment,than an other one told me poors do not create jobs,,maybe not,,but the republicans like romney send more jobs to china than create jobs in the us,,,what good is that for us,,,and poors deserve the same respect and a chance to find a job,,if the rich are honest and create jobs for us,,,fine,but no they send jobs overseas,,,i think romney wanted more money for army,to start a war with iran,,and without saying it,,would get the draft back,so 12 millions of young soldiers would have a job,,getting kill,,why else would he want more money for army who did not ask for it,,and our soldiers are all coming back in the next 2 years,,all the millionaires giving money expected billions in return from weapons making factories they own,,,,i do not trust the evil republicans,,not ever in the future,,they will cover their real meaning to get votes,,they will not change
Whether or not it is true that Team Willard didn't see it coming -- how can you ever know when it comes to that lying sack of shhit campaign, -- one thing you can believe is that Willard was certainly used to getting his way through lying. How else do you do what he did with Bain? Remember that when you deal with folks from the world of business.
Wonder if Mitt will contemplate that the worst lying done was by him, to himself. Through this entire year it's been apparent that Mitt was his own worst "yes" man.
Romney,the "competent" Guy who will turn things around,showed a degree of incompetence that is truly frightening.What if this guy had won the election?
I dread to think of the level of corruption and auto-piloting that would have been in the White House.
I think that's what happens when you "get high on your own supply" with the aide of our stupid and useless political punditry.
When i take a look at Romney's two big achievements namely the Winter Olympics and the RomneyCare and think about the respective context under which these two occured
-American tax payers spent almost 4 times as much as the previous 4 editions combined.
-Universal health care was already in the agenda of the Democrats in MA
I say to myself that Romney is not as competent as we've been made to believe.
Because with that kind of money and connection you can hire competent people to run the Olympics for you,even if you are a neophyte in that domain.As for the Health Care The legistation, the MIT healthcare experts and Federal funds were entirely onboard.
What is that old saying -- there are none so blind as they who will not see?
I wish Romney's face could have been on video for that moment. Kind of like at the second debate, when he smugly raised his eyebrows at the President SO SURE that he had caught him in a lie, only to discover he was the one lying to himself.
It's petty of me to enjoy this, but I only enjoy the misfortune of people who bring it on themselves is a deserving fashion.