— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) October 22, 2016
"He exceeded expectations. I mean, look at some of the other candidates. Look at the money they spent. They got 3,000 votes. He didn't spend any money and got 12."—Troy Bishop, one of the 12 people who voted for Republican presidential candidate and real person Jim Gilmore in the Iowa caucuses.
Fair point!
[H/T to Eastsidekate.]
I don't even begin to know what to do with this information:
Over the Christmas break of 2010, Mitt Romney and his family took an internal poll on whether he should run for president once more. Twelve family members cast ballots. Ten said no. One of the 10 was Mitt Romney himself.OH WELL THE FAMILY HAS VOTED AND THAT IS LEGALLY BINDING! YOU ARE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT LIKE IT OR NOT, MITT ROMNEY!
In an interview with [the Washington Post's Dan Balz, author of a forthcoming book on the 2012 election] that's placed at the very end of "Collision 2012," Romney explained that he ultimately decided to run when he saw the other (leaving-something-to-be-desired) candidates in the GOP field.Huh. Welp, you should have saved yourself a lot of time and energy, because you didn't have a good chance of defeating President Obama, either. And, while I am admittedly a silly, bleeding-heart, ninny-brained lady who doesn't know the first thing about big man business like politics, I have long been under the impression that believing people are entitled to food is a requisite perspective for running a nation.
"I didn't think that any one of them had a good chance of defeating the president," he told Balz, "and in some cases I thought that they lacked the experience and perspective necessary to do what was essential to get the country on track."
That is not Breaking News, I realize. But sometimes his bozosity is just truly breathtaking:
Despite Donald Trump's best efforts, Republican National Convention–goers missed out on what could have been a very interesting video. The real-estate mogul tells me he filmed a five-minute commercial for Romney that featured the mogul saying "You're fired!" to an actor with an uncanny resemblance to the president. The spot would have run at the convention, but the event's schedulers ultimately decided to cut it. Trump says he thinks part of the reason for that was the hurricane, which changed the convention's schedule. But he says Republicans also thought the spot might not have gone over well.Ha ha yep! That was definitely the problem. If there's one thing everyone always says about the Republican Party, it's that they're TOO POLITICALLY CORRECT. And if there's a second thing everyone always says about the Republican Party, it's that they're SO SCARED to insult the President.
"Everybody thought it was great, but they were afraid to use it," Trump says. "They thought it was too tough."
"They didn't want to rock the boat," he adds, "and the problem with this country is nobody's willing to rock the boat and everybody wants to be so politically correct."
Trump also says he thinks the Romney campaign thought he was too controversial to be an asset in the general election. The star of The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice stumped for Romney in a handful of primary states and also made robocalls for him. But Romney's campaign didn't call Trump back once Romney won the nomination (a victory for which Trump takes partial credit). Not getting asked to make a repeat performance "was fine with me, because I do have lots of other things to do," he adds, but he thinks he might have pushed Florida over to Romney in the general.WHAT IS HE EVEN TALKING ABOUT. "I'm a very busy gentleman, as evidenced by the gold-plated toilet in my guest bathroom which I paid for with all the money I make being an asshole on television and increasingly infrequently in actual business settings, so I don't even care that I didn't have to ask my secretary to rearrange my schedule to help Mitt Romney win Florida, but if he HAD asked, I would have done it and then he would have won. FACTS."
"I'm not unhappy about it," he tells me, "but I think I would have made a very big difference for him, as I did in the primaries."
And now, as the New York Post has reported, Trump is eyeing his own run at the presidency. While he's far from making up his mind, he told me that "what's happening with the country" will inform his decision-making process.If he notices the entire country, or at least half of it, loses its memory and forgets entirely who Donald Trump is, but is inexplicably inclined to vote for him, he will definitely run. Even though he's busy. Because he is a hero and a patriot. And you're fired.
Joshua Green in Bloomberg Businessweek—The Secret Gingrich-Santorum 'Unity Ticket' That Nearly Toppled Romney:
It's one of the great untold stories of the 2012 presidential campaign, a tale of ego and intrigue that nearly upended the Republican primary contest and might even have produced a different nominee: As Mitt Romney struggled in the weeks leading up to the Michigan primary, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum nearly agreed to form a joint "Unity Ticket" to consolidate conservative support and topple Romney.Cannot. Stop. Laughing.
"We were close," former Representative Bob Walker, a Gingrich ally, says. "Everybody thought there was an opportunity."
"It would have sent shock waves through the establishment and the Romney campaign," says John Brabender, Santorum's chief strategist.
But the negotiations collapsed in acrimony because Gingrich and Santorum could not agree on who would get to be president.
On November 9, 2012, I wrote a letter of appreciation to the anonymous videographer of the infamous Mitt Romney 47% video. It said, in part:
I don't know who you are... [Y]our name isn't important to me. Your courage, however, is.Tonight, that person, who has been confirmed as the bartender at the event, will reveal himself during an interview with Ed Schultz on MSNBC's The Ed Show.
It was a brave—and straight-up punk rock—thing to do to shoot that film of Mitt Romney yukking it up with his rich funders about how awesome it would be if he were Latino and how gross it is that people think they're entitled to food. During the last presidential election, there was all sorts of laughably ironic talk of "mavericks," but it was this presidential election in which an actual maverick showed up, video camera (or phone) in hand.
It wasn't just your job you risked taking that video and making it public. You risked your personal safety, should your identity have (or ever) become widely known. You risked being sued, losing your privacy, having your name and reputation inextricably tied to that video for the rest of your life.
These are not small things.
I want to acknowledge the risks you took, and I want to say that I believe you had a huge impact on this election. ...Your video was, for many voters, the first glimpse they saw of the real Mitt Romney, and his real base.
And I want to say thank you.
"How big a decision was it for you to release the tape and to go through all of this?" Ed asked the videographer, whose identity will be revealed on-air Wednesday.I am not a praying person, but I hope that he remains safe, and that he is rightly remembered for a historically important piece of citizen journalism.
"It was tough," he said. "And I debated for a little while, but in the end I really felt it had to be put out. I felt I owed it to the people who couldn't afford to be there themselves to hear what he really thought."
He went on to say:
"I simply wanted [Romney's] words to go out. And everybody could make a judgment based on his words and his words alone. The guy was running for the presidency and these were his core beliefs. And I think everybody can judge whether that's appropriate or not or whether they believe the same way he does. I felt an obligation to expose the things he was saying.""Has there been any time where you feared for your life?" Ed asked.
"I was up against the most powerful, the richest people in the country and the stakes were pretty high and you never know what could happen," said the man who shot the 47% video. "There [are dangerous people] out there. You just don't know. I've certainly had threats."
[Content Note: Privilege.]
Newt Gingrich is still talking:
Salon: The pre-election polls were pretty clear in showing Obama had a decent advantage. Why do you think you and so many Republicans were so confident? What did you get wrong about the campaign?There's a lot to unpack there, but I want to focus on this bit: "And of course they proved that in many ways identity politics beat economic politics, which I think is a considerable achievement."
Newt Gingrich: First, there was a belief in economic determinism, that you couldn't have that level of unemployment and have a president get re-elected. So people just sort of had a bias that as long as the economy stayed bad, he would lose. And of course they proved that in many ways identity politics beat economic politics, which I think is a considerable achievement.
Second, I think we underestimated the degree to which they were winning the argument. There's an old Margaret Thatcher phrase I use over and over: "First you win the argument, then you win the vote." If you look at the attitudes of the country, they ended up blaming George W. Bush, not Obama. They ended up thinking that ObamaCare actually was a net plus by the election. None of that seemed at all obvious to us.
And third, I think conservatives in general got in the habit of talking to themselves. I think that they in a sense got isolated into their own little world. So our pollsters, many of whom were wrong about turnout. No Republican pollster thought you could get 87 percent turnout in Milwaukee. You just sort of have to say that to some extent the degree to which we believed that the other side was kidding themselves, it turned out in fact in the real world – this is a part of what makes politics so fascinating – it turned out in the real world we were kidding ourselves.
Republicans Not Handling Election Results Well.
PPP's first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard...and also declining in numbers.Whooooooops!
49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found [pdf] that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.
Mitt Romney on Wednesday attributed his defeat in part to what he called big policy "gifts" that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.None of this, of course, is remotely surprising from the guy who thinks people aren't entitled to food, and whose running mate was blaming "urban voters" for their loss two days ago. These are highly entitled, titanically privileged, and voraciously greedy bigots who wouldn't accept personal accountability if it were dipped in gold and hand-delivered by Jesus.
In a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the "old playbook" of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — "especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people."
"In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups," Mr. Romney said...
"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift," Mr. Romney said. "Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people."
..."You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you're now going to get free health care, particularly if you don't have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."
I don't think we lost it on those budget issues, especially on Medicare; we clearly didn't lose it on those issues. I think the surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race.Better luck next voter suppression!
It was an unusual election day for Ryan, his first loss. He said losing was "a foreign experience. It's tough to describe it."Hear that, birthers? Losing is a foreign experience for Paul Ryan. Looks like Barack Obama is the REAL AMERICAN after all!
Politico—The GOP's Media Cocoon: "A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week's shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self-defeating."
Washington Post—GOP's Red America Forced to Rethink What It Knows About the Country: "Here in the heart of Red America, Cox and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama's reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign."
There has been a lot of postmortem analysis of What Went Wrong, and much of it has been amusing to read, because it is all avoiding the most obvious problem: The Republican platform is garbage.
The GOP doesn't need better rhetoric behind which to hide its grotesque policies, nor more diverse candidates to be the public face of them. It just needs better policies.
And until the party and its supporters are ready to deal with that fundamental truth, this is merely the beginning of a long slide into irrelevance.
Which, y'know, is fine by me.
"What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?"—Garry Wills, in an absolutely brutal (but accurate) post-election piece on Mitt Romney for The New York Review of Books.
OUCH.
1%: The return on investment Karl Rove got on his conservative donors' investments of more than $300 million in this election. Well, in fairness, one of his political action committees got a 1% return. The other got a whopping 13%.
Republican strategist Karl Rove created the model for outside money groups that raised and spent more than US$1-billion on the Nov. 6 elections — many of which saw almost no return for their money.Who woulda thunk it? Karl Rove is a more successful redistributor of wealth than any Democrat!
Rove, through his two political outfits, American Crossroads and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, backed unsuccessful Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney with US$127-million on more than 82,000 television spots, according to Kantar Media's CMAG, an ad tracker based in New York. Down the ballot, 10 of the 12 Senate candidates and four of the nine House candidates the Rove groups supported also lost their races.
...The return on investment for American Crossroads donors was 1%, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based group that advocates for open government. The group calculated the number based on how much of the money was spent supporting winners.
For donors to sister-organization Crossroads GPS, the success rate was 13%, the group said. That's a lower return than for donations to the National Republican Congressional Committee and to the two major Democratic congressional super-PACs, according to Sunlight.
To the Person Who Filmed the Now-Infamous Mitt Romney 47% Video:
I don't know who you are. I don't know if you're a woman or a man, or young or old, or what ethnicity you are, or anything about you. Almost nobody knows your identity, and I think that's a good thing. Even if I did know, I would keep your secret.
Because your name isn't important to me. Your courage, however, is.
It was a brave—and straight-up punk rock—thing to do to shoot that film of Mitt Romney yukking it up with his rich funders about how awesome it would be if he were Latino and how gross it is that people think they're entitled to food. During the last presidential election, there was all sorts of laughably ironic talk of "mavericks," but it was this presidential election in which an actual maverick showed up, video camera (or phone) in hand.
It wasn't just your job you risked taking that video and making it public. You risked your personal safety, should your identity have (or ever) become widely known. You risked being sued, losing your privacy, having your name and reputation inextricably tied to that video for the rest of your life.
These are not small things.
I want to acknowledge the risks you took, and I want to say that I believe you had a huge impact on this election. I don't think any one thing is ever responsible for deciding the outcome of a presidential race, not even Richard Nixon's sweaty mug, but lots of things. And among the things that made this race, your video was one of them—and a critical one, at that. Your video was, for many voters, the first glimpse they saw of the real Mitt Romney, and his real base.
And I want to say thank you. Whoever you are, and whatever your reasons for shooting and sharing that video, thank you.
Gratefully,
Liss
1. Washington Update: I just got an email from the Task Force declaring victory, i.e. that Referendum 74 has passed, allowing same-sex couples the freedom to marry. Further, the National Organization for Marriage has conceded that they lost. It's still not official, but it looks increasingly likely that Washington ALSO voted for marriage equality!
2. This tweet from Shelby Knox is great:
This whole election season women were treated as a special interest group. In the actual election, we made up 53% of voters. #fem2
— ShelbyKnox (@ShelbyKnox) November 7, 2012
Iain and I were just talking about why we think Obama won the election.
We each proposed various theories, each of which were collectively analyzed and explored. Some were dismissed out of hand, after consideration. Some were assessed to have merit, although they seemed at best factors that had insubstantial influence.
There are, after all, precious few people who wouldn't have voted for their chosen candidate if zie'd been different on this issue or that issue. Truly single-issue voters are rare. Which is in no small part because so many social and economic issues are inextricably linked.
So what is the magic thing?
At last, I said to Iain: "I think President Obama won because more people thought he is the better person. I think that's why Bush won reelection in 2004, too, even though I disagreed with the consensus that time. It really seems to come down to who is perceived by the most people to be the more decent person."
"I think you're right about that," Iain agreed. "And this time, America picked the right guy."
And so I add another WIN to the list: Yesterday, US voters decided to reject a bully.
Sometimes, it's the not-nice guys who finish last.
This country has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that's not what makes us strong. ... What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. ... America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try. I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.—Current and future United States President Barack Obama, in his victory speech last night, thoroughly repudiating conservative ideology, bigotry, and the politics of division.
