Even More Mitten-freude

The Boston Globe gives their version of how the Romney campaign blew it:

To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.

They console each other with claims that the election was much closer than realized, saying that Romney would be president if roughly 370,000 people in swing states had voted differently. Romney himself blamed demographic shifts and Obama’s “gifts”: ­federal largesse targeted to Democratic constituencies.

But a reconstruction by the Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.

One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people.

These failures are now the subject of scrutiny by national GOP ­officials who say they plan to “reverse engineer” the ­Romney effort to understand what went wrong. A number of Romney’s top aides stressed in interviews that, while they ­remain proud of their work, they feel an obligation to ­acknowledge their numerous mistakes so lessons are learned.

And yet we all know that if Team Romney had gotten those 370,000 votes and put the country into recount hell, or 500,000 votes and won the electoral college, we'd all be reading from our Village betters about how the Obama campaign was the largest failure in human history, and that despite these deeper problems in the Romney campaign, the Obama campaign must have been worse because after all, they still lost to the guy.  And the Romney campaign would have been "right all along".

So no, knowing how close the country came to abject disaster, knowing that Mitt Romney could have won the presidency and lost the popular vote by 3% and 4 million votes, I choose not to dance the dance of Loser Mitt, but to remember that despite every dirty trick in the book and a few new ones, it was only the Romney camp's massive incompetence that saved our country, and that 61 million Americans, less than 20% of the country, could have doomed us all.

They were close.  They needed but four states:  Florida, Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire.  They almost got them.  We'd be wise to remember how close they were.

Merry Christmas.  We've still got a lot of work ahead.  Take the 2012 election as the warning it was.  Savor the victory, but stay vigilant.