It's The Policy, Stupid

Or more accurately, it's the stupid policy.

Repubs and the Conservative Entertainment Complex are very busy analyzing the Romney Fail, and everybody's talking about everything except the simple fact that the GOP Platform and the GOP Voter Strategy were repulsive to a majority of the voters.

But first, guess what - Obama is the first POTUS to get a majority of the vote in 2 elections since St Ronnie the Reagan did it in 1984.  28 years.

(Just wanted to throw that in because it's kinda important once we get it through our think skulls that there's really only about 10 or 20% of the voting public who actually come under the heading "The Base" in any party)

So anyway, one of my favorite rationalizations for Romneybot's Malfunction is that Obama played Identity Politics to pump up his base and get them to turn out for him.  I think "turning out The Base" is a tired old saw in politics that people just need to let go of.  "The Base" is always there - they show up come hell or high water.  It's everybody else ya gotta worry about.  Which is why the "Identity Politics" crack is so hollow.  First off, it's just another example of (what's become) a trademark Republican tactic of taking your worst shortcoming and projecting it onto your opponent.  But it seems emblematic in that practically every GOP campaign in the last 30 years has been all about Voter Identity, and has worked hard to narrow the party's appeal to the point where they might as well hang a sign on the door - "No Dogs, Jews or Coloreds allowed".

It suddenly occurs to me that Romney felt totally blindsided because he truly felt he'd run the campaign according to the formula you apply when you're selling Goods and Services; he did everything you're supposed to do, but I think the results prove it's a big mistake to base your pitch on Snob-Appeal and Exclusivity, and believe it works in politics the same as it works in Retail Selling.  Cuz it don't.

So, Repubs - if you guys wanna go on losing, all you have to do is keep lying to yourselves (and to each other) about how Party Purity is the best way to expand Party Appeal.

And BTW: Adults stand up and accept responsibility while children point fingers and assign blame.

Yikes

David Frum was kind of ousted and shunned by the "conservatives" a while back - because it seems he re-activated his gag reflex, and still just can't go along with all the junk being peddled by the "Conservative Entertainment Complex".

Give a listen (via Crooks & Liars):

It's Aristocracy vs Democracy

Any Questions?

Yay, Montana

From Crooks & Liars:

Initiative number 166 stated that “corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not human beings,” and thus is a blow to the Citizen’s United ruling that helped make this presidential election the most expensive one ever.

Today's Pix

Look Closely

From mistermix at Balloon Juice:

I’ve always thought that there was something fishy about the GOP’s GOTV and advertising operations. We’d hear every cycle that a massive, highly effective GOTV operation was cranking up to make the big difference in the election, but I never saw clear evidence of what, exactly, that operation was.

This is a great look at the basic swindle that's going on in the GOP.  It turns out to be practically nothing more than a microcosm of what that "party" has been trying to do to the whole world.  The approach is the same old trickle down crap - "if you pay the Operatives lots of money, they'll turn around and pay their staffers well, and then the staffers will have enough to go out and make the magic happen".  Everybody down the chain thinks he's a mover and a shaker, so he takes a nice big cut, and delegates the task down the line to the next guy.  So, by the time it gets to where something's supposed to get done, there's not much money left to make it happen.

Case in point (Breitbart, via Balloon Juice):

Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.

--snip--

Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn't work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren't allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.
I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

To me, this looks like the Operatives are all doing everything they could possibly do to put as much of that money as possible into their own pockets, while spinning the yarn back up to the Campaign Managers that everything was peachy dandy.

mistermix:

One of my core prejudices is that big consulting firms can’t write software. They’re a bunch of fast-talking MBAs who bullshit management into buying their services, and after they get the contract, all they care about is how cheap they can offshore a project, and how many hours they can bill. Well, Mitt Romney, the biggest consultant of them all, had to eat his own dogfood on Tuesday, and it was a goddam unappetizing meal.

I seem to recall stories of how totally fucked up everything was in the USSR all through the 80s - beyond the Kremlin, anywhere anybody looked, all they saw was empty factories and empty stores and empty streets.  But in Moscow, there was always a parade or a bunch of shiny things to look at, and lots of happy talk about the glories of the Soviet.

More recently, there's the story of how Sadam Hussein "totally fooled" the CIA into thinking he had WMD, or was "on the verge" of acquiring them.  But the real story was that after the Gulf War, Sadam's whole program collapsed, and it turned out that the people he was paying to develop the nukes for him thru the 90s were taking the money and submitting bogus reports of their "progress".  And the same thing happened with his Chem and Bio Weapons.  They just scammed the shit out of him.  And when we invaded, he had nothing.  Prob'ly came as quite a shock.

The power players in the GOP are mostly just like Romney.  They've spent their whole lives figuring out how to get somebody else to do the work while they count the money. And when suddenly they find that everybody under them has seen their example and learned to do exactly the same thing, they're surprised and they feel betrayed, but somehow they can't quite figure out what could possibly have gone so wrong.

Here's a thought:  The GOP always talks a good game about individuals and personal effort, but then they run political campaigns that are always top-down and tightly controlled.  Meanwhile they criticized the Dems for being all about Big Government and central planning when the truth is that Obama had a few people on the ground in thousands of locations who were given basic instructions and plenty of support, but who were also free to make it happen the way it needed to happen in their precincts.

And finally - which party just got its ass kicked for the second time in a row by a punk-ass community organizer and a bunch of wussie libruls?

Eat it, bitches.

The Popular Vote

Yesterday, I was thinking maybe the election wasn't the mandate politicians are always trying to claim they have.

Well, if this keeps up, I may hafta change my tune a little...

...cuz a difference of 3,000,000 votes does not indicate "a closely divided nation".

You can run all the opinion polls you want.  The only one that really matters is the one where people get up off their asses and cast votes to express their will.

I know I'm a hard-ass about this, but as far as I'm concerned, if you don't have the gumption to go out and vote when you have the chance, you can just shut up and step aside - the rest of us would like to get a little work done without listenin' to you flappin' your gums all day about how shitty you think everything is.

We Done Good

Bragging a little.

(Charlottesville & Albemarle County, VA)

I spent most of the day at my polling place.  And I overheard the Repub Captain on his cell phone saying he was scared because "the Obama people are here in force" (we had 3 or 4 at our table while the Repubs never had fewer than 5), and "they brought lawyers", and "can't you get somebody up here to help us?"  There was really just no way Obama was going to sneak up anybody, but the local Repubs seemed to think they'd walked into an ambush.

So I guess in light of what we've been learning about how Winger Media was misleading the GOP faithful, it must've come as quite a shock to these guys to see firsthand what the Obama ground game was accomplishing.  It was kinda weird.

Still Waiting

What the fuck, Florida!?!  Do you think you could get your head outa your ass just long enough to run a clean and efficient election once in a while?

As of today:

The GOP's always telling us that everything's so much better when they're in charge because they know all about making things work blah blah blah.

Let's see:
2000 - Repub Governor, fucked up election.
2004 - Repub Governor, semi-fucked up election.
2008 - Independent Governor - OK election.
2012 - Repub Governor - fucked up election.

And - just wondering - in a democracy (or a democratic republic or however you want to describe what we're trying to do here) can you think of anything that matters more than a fair election?  Anything at all?  Take your time.  Think about it for a minute or nine.  Then tell me what you think your Sec'y of State has to do that's more important than making sure the voting process isn't this recurring clusterfuck?  Get your shit together.