Last Call

Team Romney lost for two big reasons.  One, they bought into the bubble.

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks - not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan - bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time - poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats - and that would translate into votes for Romney.

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed - they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks. 

They actually thought they were going to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, maybe even Michigan.  They thought Florida, Colorado and Ohio were in the bag as a result.  They bought into the bubble and it cost them everything.

Secondly, their ground game was horrible, as BooMan points out.

After reading a variety of articles with sources from inside the Romney campaign team, I am considering revising my whole way of looking at this election. I knew, because I witnessed it first hand, that Romney had a terrible ground game that basically threw money at problems rather than organizing in any rational way. But I still can't believe that they just wasted 30,000 volunteers on election day by asking them to sit inside precincts and strike voters off the list as they voted using a web application that didn't work. Failure on that level is reminiscent of the post-invasion plan for Iraq. It's not a matter of the Obama campaign staff being better. The Romney campaign sabotaged their most passionate warriors and rendered them useless. 

If there's one word that sums up the Romney disaster, it is "entitled".  They thought they were entitled to win, they were entitled to the Presidency, they were entitled to the vote, they were entitled to fawning media coverage, they were entitled to coattails that would make then GOP heroes, entitled to victory, because they were who they thought they were.

Mitt Romney never had to work for anything in his life.  It was given to him.  That sense of entitlement sabotaged his campaign from the very beginning.  The notion that anyone would every question his victory simply never occurred to the man, because he was never questioned before.  He just came out on top because that's the way the world worked for people like Mitt Romney.  They won because they were the winners.  Only losers ever considered losing, and those rules of gravity just didn't apply to Mitt.  He was the destined one. Dubya, for all his faults, at least had been tempered by his humility and his battle with alcoholism.  Not Mitt.

And that attitude swept down the campaign.  Only losers prepare to lose.  Only losers make "corrections" and "adjustments".  Mitt had already won the election, it was all just a giant set of bureaucratic trivialities that had to be weathered before the White House was theirs.  This was Mitt's test.  Ann Romney, especially, displayed this attitude of "why don't you people treat him as the President he is?"  They had been running victory laps since May.  The first debate convinced them they had won completely and utterly.  You could see it.  They had "visualized victory."

Only, something funny happened on the way to the Oval Office.  Reality stepped in and slapped the bejeezus out of these entitled pricks as the country revolted against these assholes.  Barely.  But it happened.

And it's a damn good thing.  Could you imagine these clueless, entitled bastards running the country?  They would have made Dubya look like a Boy Scout.

That's terrifying.

Pop Goes The Bubble Cause The Bubble Goes Pop

Rachel Maddow sums up the madness of the right this week and rips into the know-nothings of the GOP.



It's a necessary dose of tough love.

But Obama really won, Maddow said. “And he really was born in Hawaii, and he really is legitimately President of the United States, again, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month, and the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy, and the polls were not screwed to oversample Democrats, and Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad, Nate Silver was doing math, and climate change is real, and rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes, and evolution is a thing, and Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us, and nobody is taking away anyone’s guns, and taxes have not gone up, and the deficit is dropping, actually, and saddam hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps, and you UN election observers are not taking over Texas, and moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”

Maddow pleaded with Republicans to accept the “actual, lived truth of the world” instead of believing whatever made them feel good. The liberal MSNBC host said it was important for the country to have a two-party system where both parties had good, albeit different, ideas on how to manage the government.

“You guys, we’re counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently.”

There's zero reason to believe Republicans will snap out of it, and every reason to believe they will obstruct the country's recovery in order to spite the President and damage the Democrats, continue to believe in insanity,  continue to insult the American people and continue to try to drive that wedge between the members of the President's coalition.  Obama Derangement Syndrome will only get worse, not better.

But I do thank Rachel for trying.

Galt's Ghosts

And so, it begins, as American class warfare finds the "job creators" deciding they are going to take their petty revenge on those awful, greedy, moocher minorities.

“I’ve done my share of educating my employees. I never tell them which way to vote. I believe in the free system we have, I believe in the right to choose who they want to be president, but I did explain as a business owner that I have always put my employees first. I always made sure that when I went without a paycheck that [I] made sure they were paid. And I explained that I always put them first and unfortunately I’m at a point where I’m being forced to have to worry about me and my family now and a business that I built from just me to 114 employees.

“I explained to them a month ago that if Obama gets in office that the regulations for Obamacare are gonna hurt our business, and I’m gonna have to make provisions to make sure I have enough money to cover the payroll taxes, the additional health care I’m gonna have to do, and I explained that to them and I said you do what you feel like in your heart you need to do, but I’m just letting you know as a warning this is things I have to think of as a business owner.

“Well unfortunately, and most of my employees are Hispanic — I’m not gonna go into what kind of company I have, but I have mostly Hispanic employees — well unfortunately we know what happened and I can’t wait around anymore, I have to be proactive. I had to lay off 22 people today to make sure that my business is gonna thrive and I’m gonna be around for years to come. I have to build up that nest egg now for the taxes and regulations that are coming my way. Elections do have consequences, but so do choices. A choice you make every day has consequences and you know what, I’ve always put my employees first, but unfortunately today I have to put me and my family first, and you watch what’s gonna happen. I’m just one guy with 114 employees — well was 114 employees — watch what happens in the next six months. The Dow alone lost 314 points today. There’s a tsunami coming and if you didn’t think this election had consequences, just wait.”

"Just wait" as the mighty decide they will punish us, to teach you people a lesson, to teach you people to know your goddamn place in the world.  Class warfare has reached the open "warfare" point now.  If they fire enough of us, I guess we'll all just die or something.

But don't you dare think of businessmen as the bad guys around here.

StupidiNews!

• Jared Lee Loughner, the man who killed six and wounded 12 others in his attempt to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011, received seven consecutive life sentences plus 140 years on Thursday.
• Parts of New York City and neighboring New Jersey are rationing gasoline as shortages from Hurricane Sandy and this week's nor'easter continue to wreak havoc.
• As China's once-a-decade government reshuffling begins this week, President Hu Jintao is warning that government corruption is the largest threat to China's government system.
• President Obama's victory is prompting the wealthiest Americans to make a number of tax-saving financial moves before the January 1 "fiscal cliff".
• After years of planning, Australia has now formally dropped its plans to filter the country's access to the internet, calling it unworkable.