HERE’S TO THE LOSERS

[defrog]

One of the more underrated but no less fun aspects of democracy is the post-mortem. Which is to say, the bit where media people who spent the whole election dithering over who would win spend the week/month/year after the election trying to figure out why the winner won – or, more often than not, why the guy they thought was going to win didn’t.

This is especially fun in 2012 when the media people in question work for Fox News, for what I would assume are obvious reasons. There’s something amusing – and yet symptomatic – about watching even Megyn Kelly take pot shots at Karl Rove for refusing to believe Obama took Ohio. The subtext went something like: “Look, Karl, it’s bad enough we spent weeks believing you that Ohio was a done deal, but dude, now yr just embarrassing us.”

Then again, it’s hard to feel sorry for anyone at Fox. They not only drank the Kool-Aid, they made it themselves and handed it out by the gallon. They’re as complicit as anyone in the reality schism between how the election was going and how they wanted to think it was going.

Granted, this was a very close race up to the wire, so there was always the chance that Romney would pull off a victory. And sure, on paper, incumbent presidents overseeing sluggish economic recoveries traditionally don’t win a second term.

Still, when the actual numbers are coming in and yr trying to put a favorable spin on it, and yr completely flummoxed (as well as crushed) when they don’t go where you wanted, yr being a little too obvious about which way yr loyalties lie. Fox News’ 2012 election-night coverage should be included in mass-comms textbooks as an example of how NOT to report election results.

Anyway, it’s been fun watching Republicans trying to explain what happened – especially Karl Rove. He’s got a whole long list of reasons why Romney didn’t win. Basically, if it wasn’t for Hurricane Sandy, the Liberal Media, whoever made the 47% video, Obama suppressing the vote and the Democrats resorting to dirty tricks and making Romney look like a rich guy, Romney would be president now.

Ha ha.

As for reasons based in some kind of reality, the most sensible explanation I’ve heard can be found in the exit polls.

Essentially, it really was all about the economy in the end, and while most people agreed with Mitt Romney’s main argument that the economy wasn’t in the best of shape and hadn’t recovered as quickly as it should, only 38% of people actually blamed Obama for it. The rest blamed Bush.

True, some of those people voted for Romney anyway. But not enough of them. So in the end, the GOP’s message of “Obama hasn’t been able to magically fix the mess we left him, so why not vote us back in?” was evidently not a winner with the swing voters.

Of course, no one’s really talking about that. The main topic of the 2012 post-mortem has been the fact that Mitt and the GOP did so badly with every demographic that wasn’t Straight White Male, and came across as the heavy on just about every social issue there is.

Even Rush Limbaugh is gobsmacked by this – as if it never occurred to him that by whipping up the White Male base into a Fear Frenzy over gays and Mexicans and Muslims and other brown people who want the govt to buy them everything, and Republicans saying things like rape babies are a blessing to women from God, this might turn off some people who actually belong to those categories.

So the "surprise" is a bit disingenuous.

Still, there’s enough talk about it from the conservative side that they may have learned that at the very least they need to polish their comms skills and – possibly – start weeding out the batshit wing that’s usually responsible for generating headlines.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can actually do that. I’m guessing not – at least not as long as they keep relying on the likes of Limbaugh and Fox News to rally the base for them.

On the other hand, even Karen Hughes has threatened to cut the tongue out of the next Republican bozo who says anything about rape besides “rape bad, the end”.

Incentive!

Change yr life,

This is dF