Republicans blame selves in 2012 poll 'post-mortem' (via AFP)
Adelson spent $150 million on US elections: report (via AFP)
Even if he wished to do so, Romney is in an even weaker position to influence the GOP than most other losing nominees. He has been out of elected office for almost six years, and he presumably won’t ever hold elected office again. By itself, that wouldn’t have to keep him from contributing to the intra-party debate, but Romney wouldn’t have anything to add to that debate even if he joined it. As a famously unprincipled politician who ran a campaign that was mostly about nothing, there have been no issues that seem to animate Romney and no cause other than his own self-promotion that drives him to participate in politics. If Romney’s failure can teach the GOP anything, it is that utterly shameless opportunism and unscrupulous pandering can only get a candidate so far. (bold mine, RB)I think this is accurate. Romney was little but an unprincipled plutocrat and saw the Presidency not as an opportunity to serve but a trophy he was entitled because of who he was. A sociopath completely lacking empathy can't win even though it should have been a Republican year.
Karl Rove is feeling the heat. The face of the historic $1 billion plan to unseat President Barack Obama and turn the Senate Republican, Rove now finds himself the leading scapegoat for its failure. And he’s scrambling to protect his status as a top GOP money man by convincing disappointed donors to his Crossroads groups that he did the best he could with their $300 million.Not only did Obama beat Romney 332 to 206 EVs most of the Senate candidates he supported lost. It looks like the "genius" has lost his Midas touch.
Richard Viguerie, a pioneering direct-mail consultant, called for Republicans to purge from their ranks Rove and Ed Gillespie — who helped found Crossroads and later moved over to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — as well as Romney advisers Stuart Stevens and Neil Newhouse. “In any logical universe,” he argued, “no one would give a dime to their ineffective super PACs, such as American Crossroads.”Of course Rove is afflicted with the same disease that infected the Romney campaign - he believed his own bull shit.
Rick Tyler, a former strategist for the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC and a top adviser to Todd Akin’s Missouri Senate campaign, called Crossroads’ efforts “a colossal failure,” and asserted, “Rove has too much control over the purse strings.”
Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.That's the Romney campaign's description. Ace of Spades says:
Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP's effort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.And what about that "data driven" part? The campaign may have been data driven but they selected bad data from the conservative echo chamber.
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.Not unlike the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq war the Romney campaign was only considering "data" that told them what they wanted to hear. The data the labeled as "liberal bias" turned out to be correct.
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."
Conservative leaders on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney, saying his attempts to paint himself as a centrist and hide his principles cost him the presidency.Of course it's the Tea Party that probably cost the Republicans the Senate for the second election in a row.
They vowed to wage a war to put the Tea Party in charge of the Republican Party by the time it nominates its next presidential candidate.
“The battle to take over the Republican Party begins today and the failed Republican leadership should resign,” said Richard Viguerie, a top activist and chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
He said the lesson on Romney’s loss to President Obama on Tuesday is that the GOP must “never again” nominate a “a big government established conservative for president.”
Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots said Romney failed to make the kind of strong case for conservatism that would have won the election.
It was inevitable that conservative activists and advocates would find someone other than Mitt Romney and the Republican Party to blame for the fact that Mitt Romney lost the election and succeeded in winning only two of the states that Barack Obama had won in 2008. After all, we can’t admit that the Republican Party is slowly but surely losing touch with a large segment of the American public, including its fastest growing minority group. We can’t say that four years of opposing the President at every turn while failing to offer a coherent alternative contributed to the GOP’s problem. Nobody’s going to admit that the fact that GOP still hasn’t come to terms with the legacy of the Bush years, or that it spent the better part of the winter and spring of 2012 alienating women, contributed to its electoral troubles. And, surely, it can’t be because the polls were right all along and the American people actually wanted to re-elect the President. No, a scapegoat must be found and, at least in this initial 24 hours after Election Night, that scapegoat appears to be the Governor of New Jersey.If the Republican Party is going to survive it must come to recognize that their problem is their ideology. It's simply not very popular. I was watching FOX News today and Shepard Smith left the ranch again. He was talking to some Republican hack who was talking about not increasing tax rates but eliminating deductions. Smith went ballistic and said that everyone is in favor of eliminating deductions as long as they are not their deductions. Once again poor Shep is telling truth to power - something Roger Ailes is not real happy about I would guess. Republican economics is always based on unicorns and fairy dust.
Obama wins re-election, makes history again (via AFP)
What to watch for on US election night (via AFP)
Ten states will decide White House race (via AFP)
Memes of the past: Great gaffes and missteps in history before the internet (via GlobalPost)
Great expectations for US economy: Are Obama, Romney too optimistic? (via The Christian Science Monitor)
Obama trumps 'The Donald' with Kenya gag (via AFP)
Obama in eight state campaign blitz (via AFP)
So what does Romney do tonight? Do an etch a sketch and alienate his neocon supporters or stay to the right and scare off 72% of the Independents, 65% of the Democrats and 53% of the Republicans?Well he did do a complete Etch A Sketch but what I should have anticipated was his neocon masters would assume he was lying.
On Israel-PalestineRomney said Monday,Will it work? Only time will tell!
But in a secretly videotaped fundraiser in Boca Raton last May, Romney had said about the Israel-Palestine conflict:
“So what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem….and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”So in public Romney is criticizing Obama for lack of progress in the peace process, without mentioning that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has in the past actually boasted about derailing the Oslo peace accords. But in private he admitted that likely under these circumstances, no progress is likely, and that the ball would have to be kicked down the field.
Verdict: Flip-flop.
On Afghanistan
Romney on Monday said
“Well, we’re going to be finished by 2014. And when I’m president, we’ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014. The commanders and the generals there are on track to do so. We’ve seen progress over the past several years. The surge has been successful, and the training program is proceeding apace.”Although Romney had earlier generally given an impression of concurring with the 2014 withdrawal date, he had earlier hedged it by saying:
“I will evaluate conditions on the ground and solicit the best advice of our military commanders . . .”
So before, he implied that Obama was riding roughshod over the Joint Chiefs of Staff in high-handedly making Afghanistan policy, whereas he, Romney would defer to them. Now he has withdrawn that objection, acknowledging that the Pentagon is on board with this withdrawal timetable.
Verdict: Flip-Flop.
But this wasn't a debate: It was a moment for Obama to show himself to be all commander-in-chiefy, and for Romney to show himself to be sane, responsible and uninterested in foreign entanglements (Iran, of course, being the bipartisan exception). My assumption is that the so-called neoconservatives close to Romney didn't lose an argument about how to approach these issues, my assumption is that these people read polls, too, and know that Americans profess to be tired of the Middle East, and that therefore, it is best, two weeks before the election, not to recommend to their candidate that he push for greater involvement in the Syrian crisis, for example. Neocons, like everyone else in politics, are interested in winning.
Does this mean that Romney, if he wins the White House, will shed his moderate cloak and embrace the agenda of the interventionists? Maybe, maybe not. I tend to think of him as more of a pragmatist than an interventionist. I'm not suggesting that he was hiding anything last night. I'm suggesting only that he accentuated his non-interventionist impulses, and I'm also suggesting that his neoconservative advisers happily went along with this less muscular approach.
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While the candidates do not differ from one another on policy questions as much as their campaigns want the public to believe, there does appear to be a significant difference between the incumbent, whose response to political upheaval in North Africa and the Near East is frequently faulted for its “passivity,” and the challenger, who seems to think that the U.S. needs to be even more assertive and involved in these developments than it already is. If most viewers perceive Obama and Romney that way, it is difficult to see how Romney’s message will be very appealing to most of them. The survey results clearly show that the public doesn’t favor a candidate pushing for a more activist and hard-line approach, and it’s not even a close contest. After the last decade, the only thing that is surprising about this survey result is that there is still any support for more involvement.Romney has said that we should not have left Iraq and that we should stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014. In addition he has been very hawkish on Iran. All of these positions are contrary to public positions. As I said here Romney Foreign Policy sounds a lot like Bush 2.0. While Romney studies Neoconservative talking points I would hope that Obama is prepared with Romney's past Foreign Policy pronouncements.
The greatest danger for Romney is that he sabotages himself by repeating attack lines that only hawkish ideologues find credible. That would show that he is either just mouthing their phrases or so intent on proving that he is a hawk that he doesn’t care how politically harmful their hard-line policies are. For example, if he returns to dated, nonsensical complaints about the Green movement protests or missile defense, he wouldn’t land any hits on Obama’s record and he would demonstrate how much he relies on the movement conservative echo chamber for his arguments. The less that he sounds like the candidate who delivered the VFW and VMI speeches, the better it will be for him politically. A reliable standard for judging how well or badly Romney has performed is to see how the most ideological neoconservatives respond to what he says in the debate. If they are extremely pleased by his performance because he echoed their views, Romney will have lost the debate very badly indeed.Update II
But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal, and his oversight of the most successful Winter Games on record, that make him the Beehive State’s favorite adopted son. After all, Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people.They not only don't know who is they don't know what he is going to do - the Etch A Sketch problem.
In short, this is the Mitt Romney we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us.
Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?"
More troubling, Romney has repeatedly refused to share specifics of his radical plan to simultaneously reduce the debt, get rid of Obamacare (or, as he now says, only part of it), make a voucher program of Medicare, slash taxes and spending, and thereby create millions of new jobs. To claim, as Romney does, that he would offset his tax and spending cuts (except for billions more for the military) by doing away with tax deductions and exemptions, is utterly meaningless without identifying which and how many would get the ax. Absent those specifics, his promise of a balanced budget simply does not pencil out.So they have seen through Mitt - a man who will say anything to get elected and refuses to give any details of what he would do. We can make some guesses when it comes to Foreign Policy - just like George W Bush.
For four years, President Barack Obama has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to pull the nation out of its worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, a deepening crisis he inherited the day he took office.Via The Agonist
In the first months of his presidency, Obama acted decisively to stimulate the economy. His leadership was essential to passage of the badly needed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Though Republicans criticize the stimulus for failing to create jobs, it clearly helped stop the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs. The Utah Legislature used hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to plug holes in the state’s budget.
This just goes to show how wedded Romney is to the failed foreign policy of George W. Bush. It is also obvious that Romney is in favor of maintaining the welfare to the military industrial complex.If you're a presidential candidate looking to establish your national security cred with a war-weary American public, who might be the worst frontman you could choose for your cause? How about the guy who oversaw the campaign that lost Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, then bungled planning for war in Iraq? In a news release Wednesday night, Mitt Romney announced the 300-plus members of his "Military Advisory Council," and that man led the list of endorsements:
"I'm proud to be supporting Mitt Romney in this critical election about our nation’s future," said General Tommy Franks, USA (Ret.), Past Commander, U.S. Central Command. "Governor Romney is committed to restoring America's leadership role in the world. Instead of playing politics with our military, he will strengthen our defense posture by reversing the President's devastating defense cuts. The fact of the matter is that we cannot afford another four years of feckless foreign policy. We need level-headed leadership which will protect our interests and defend our values with clarity and without apology."Few living Americans can speak with as much authority about "years of feckless foreign policy" as can Tommy "Rumsfeld's water boy" Franks, who comes in at No. 4 on a Foreign Policy list of worst US generals ever. As readers of our lie-by-lie Iraq timeline will recall, Franks oversaw CENTCOM from 2000 to 2003 and scripted the initial conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
