Bush and Rove: Tweedledumb and Tweedledick

Continuing in the longheld GOP tradition of making shit up, Karl Rove has come out swinging to defend George W. Bush’s legacy as President. In a wide ranging interview, he made the following claims on an ABC interview:

1. “He kept us safe after 9/11,”

2. “He moved to modernize our tools, provide the tools to fight terror, he called terror for what it was”

3. “He tackled the big issues of trying to reform Social Security, Medicare, immigration, education,”

4. “The Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone,”

5. “The greats, you can’t touch: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR, the greats. But yeah, I’d put him up there,”

Tearing this nonsense apart isn’t particularly difficult, because, well, everyone reading this experienced the Bush years for themselves. The man only left office five years ago, and much of the world is still recovering from the monumental fuck ups he and his gang of lunatics wrought while in office.

Let’s take Rove’s claims one by one and match the fiction with the reality.

1. “He kept us safe after 9/11″

First of all, he didn’t exactly do a great job of keeping the nation safe before 9/11, when it actually mattered. It is well documented that Bush ignored many credible warnings that Al-Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil and did next to nothing to investigate them. He then attacked the wrong country afterwards and let the country fall apart under his disastrous management. As a result, authoritative studies have shown that the threat of terrorism increased by 700%. Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank
Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, note that:

“As The administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on “Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States,” circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that “the Iraq War has become the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists…and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

2. “He moved to modernize our tools, provide the tools to fight terror, he called terror for what it was”

If by modernized our tools, Rove means the unprecedented expansion of the security state and the use of torture, then he’s kind of right. As for calling terror what it was, Bush essentially ushered in a war against a military tactic – about as useful as declaring a ‘War on Reconnaissance Missions’.

3. “He tackled the big issues of trying to reform Social Security, Medicare, immigration, education,”

Despite Bush’s best efforts to privatize Social Security (ie. dismantle it), he had no luck, and the popular government program remains intact. On medicare, Bush introduced a baffling, ludicrously expensive bill (Medicare Part D) that was essentially a giant giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and added trillions of dollars to the deficit. As for immigration, Bush was reasonably pro immigrant, but then that’s because he saw immigrants as a giant source of cheap labor for beloved corporations. On education, Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy was about as successful as the post war occupation of Iraq. As Diane Ravich at The Daily Beast wrote:

NCLB [No Child Left Behind] is the worst federal education law ever passed. About half of all public schools in the nation have been stigmatized as “failing” because they couldn’t meet its utopian mandates, and the proportion is certain to grow every year. In Massachusetts, the nation’s highest performing state, 81 percent of the state’s schools are officially “failing” by the standards of NCLB. No national legislature in history has ever designed a law that resulted in the shaming of most of its public schools.

4. “The Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone”

Consider this when thinking about the war in Iraq:

More than a million deaths and millions more wounded with varying lifelong disabilities, including thousands of tortured prisoners, with an estimated 16,000 of them still unaccounted for. Twenty-eight percent of Iraqi children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 2.8 million people are still internally displaced or living as refugees outside the country.

Add to that the complete upheaval of the Iraqi economy, as well as its transportation, education and medical institutions….the countless people suffering from trauma and depression, sectarian strife, terrifying birth defects from toxic pollution, and a brain drain that has left the country illiterate.

Forget the fact that the war was illegal, unnecessary, stupendously expensive, and incomprehensibly badly executed, it also left a power vacuum for Iran to fill, making it the biggest power in the Arab world and direct threat to US/Israeli hegemony in the region. Iraq is now an open breeding ground for terrorists and is decades away from serious stability.

5. “The greats, you can’t touch: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR, the greats. But yeah, I’d put him up there”

If think that allowing the biggest domestic terror attack ever to happen under your watch, invading two countries with no post war plan, trashing America’s image around the world, increasing the threat of terrorism, gutting the government to the point of no return, massively expanding the debt, creating unprecedented levels of wealth inequality and poverty and wrecking the global economy makes you a great President, then yes, Rove is right on the money.

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Dick Morris: Never right

If anyone could legitimately tell me what purpose Dick Morris serves, I’d gladly turn The Daily Banter into a propaganda wing of the Republican Party and join Dick in the fight against evil socialism in America. Apparently, Morris is a political pollster, consultant, and media pundit, but given he has been spectacularly wrong about, well, everything related to politics, it’s hard to see why anyone would hire him. But no matter how badly Dick screws up, he’s always there reeling off predictions and giving his analysis on the latest political issue of the day. In Dick’s world, Republicans will always win and Democrats will always lose, and Barack Obama is always moments away from resigning from his Presidency.

It seems there are limits to how wrong you can be, and Morris, having pushed them to the very end has finally felt the consequences of not getting anything right. Fox News got tired of his limitless wrongness and took him off the air along with his partner in crime, fellow propagandist Karl Rove.

The last straw was probably Morris’s prediction that Mitt Romney would ‘Win by a landslide’ in the general election, a prediction that was not only incorrect, but completely the opposite of what happened. Morris explained in a blog post that he was a ‘pollster, not a meteorologist!’, and he was wrong because Hurricane Sandy saved the President from the previously inevitable Dick Morris backed proposition that ‘there is no chance Obama will get re-elected’. Wrote Morris:

There was no good national polling after Sandy struck. Gallup, for example, suspended its polling. At the last minute, it put together a national sample — with lots of disclaimers about the dangers of inaccuracies due to the difficulty of sampling storm-hit areas — and it showed a slight Romney lead.

Romney was, in fact, leading before Sandy and that his chances blew away in the storm with its famous bipartisan photo of Governor Chris Christie with Obama. And there was no way to measure the impact of Sandy since there could not logistically be any polling. Why was I wrong? I’m a pollster, not a meteorologist!

Never mind the fact that the Obama team had long sewn up the electoral college by running one of the most sophisticated campaigns in history, and unleashed an incredibly powerful ‘get out the vote’ ground game on election day that made Romney’s campaign look like a Communist run shopping mall.

But none of that bothers Dick, and he is still hammering away on his blog, no doubt analyzing the political landscape and envisioning dream match ups he could write books about (Morris brilliantly predicted Hillary Clinton would face off against Condoleeza Rice in 2008, and even wrote a book about it).

It is with a heavy heart though, that I write this, as covering Dick’s failed predictions in the mainstream media has been great fun, and I won’t be checking in on his blog all that much (running this one takes up most of my time anyway), so I thought I’d compile a list of Dick’s best work.

Here are the 5 dumbest predictions Dick Morris has made in recent times, most of them pertaining to the Republican’s chances of knocking Obama off his perch – a fact Dick was absolutely certain about.

1. Donald Trump will run for President and could beat Obama. Said Morris on The Mike Gallagher Show:

“Oh I am. I am. I take him very seriously. I think he’s going to run, I think he’s got a good shot at the nomination, and I think if he were nominated, he could beat Obama”.

Reality: Trump didn’t run for President.

2. Michele Bachmann will wing Iowa. Said Morris on Fox News:

 ”Bachmann Is Probably Going To Win”

Reality: Michele Bachmann came 6th in Iowa.

3. Obama won’t run for re-election. Wrote Morris on The Hill:

The kind of enthusiasm Obama kindled in 2008 cannot be ignited easily by negative appeals. Particularly if the Republicans nominate a more moderate candidate such as Mitt Romney, Obama will not be able to rely on partisan animosity to succeed where job approval has failed. And, given all that, he might not even run.

Reality: President Obama did run for re-election.

4. Obama has no chance of getting re-elected. Said Morris to Sean Hannity:

“There Is No Chance That Obama Will Get Re-elected…..Zilch, none, zip, nada”

Reality: President Obama was re-elected.

5. Romney will beat Obama by a landslide. Said Morris on Fox News Sunday:

“Romney will win by a very large margin – a landslide if you will.”

Reality: President Obama beat Romney by a very large margin, particularly in the electoral college. A landslide if you will.

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Karl Rove: Out

It seems even Fox News is becoming concerned with reality – at least for now, that is:

Karl Rove’s familiar 2012 presence on Fox News appears to be coming to a halt.

New York Magazine reports that President Roger Ailes is limiting Rove and fellow contributor Dick Morris’ presences for the time being. A Fox News representative affirmed the situation to NYMag, adding that programming chief Bill Shine conveyed “the election’s over.”

Rove turned heads with an Election-night meltdown on Fox News, where he questioned the network’s “premature” decision to call Ohio and, subsequently, the race for President Barack Obama. Fox News Executive Vice President of News Editorial Michael Clemente told the Associated Press the morning after that Rove’s argument proved his value.

The following day, Rove appeared on Fox News, charging that Obama’s victory was a product of the president’s ability to suppress the vote.

Dick Morris, a supposed sage in the industry, predicted a lop sided victory for Romney, making about the millionth bogus political forecast in his charmed career and finally drawing ire from his employer.

The pair of them did their best to convince viewers during the election of a make believe world where Republicans were way ahead of the game and Obama a lame duck President waiting to cede office to its rightful, rich white heir. And now reality has set in, there doesn’t seem to be much point in them. This doesn’t mean much – Fox News is still a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, but it does indicate that the Right is becoming increasingly concerned with being wrong all the time. The memory of Karl Rove having a serious meltdown on election night when it became clear Obama was going to take Ohio is a powerful one. Rove had not only spent millions of dollars of his rich friend’s money on the election, but had spent weeks telling everyone it was a sure bet. His refusal to accept reality was amazing to watch, and it looks like Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch have finally decided that he is no longer an asset to Republican interests.

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Voter suppression: Republicans have few options left

By Ben Cohen: We discuss the topic of Republican voter suppression in this weeks mailbag, but I thought it was worth expanding on a little given how serious the issue is. A reader asked whether we thought that the Republican’s admission that they tried to stop minorities from voting would change anything for elections going forward, and I answered that it most likely wouldn’t.

The answer why is fairly straight forward – Republicans lost the general election in part because of the ‘demographic time bomb’ and unless they change their policies, they don’t really have any other way of sustaining electoral viability. As Steve Benen noted:

Mitt Romney took an enormous gamble about a year ago: he would run very far to the right on immigration policy, alienating the fastest growing segment of the American electorate on purpose, in order to secure the Republican Party’s nomination. Then, he hoped to be able to avoid a drubbing from Latino voters in the general election. It was, as Ron Brownstein put it, Romney’s “original sin.”

The gamble, we now know, failed miserably. President Obama won close races in Colorado, Nevada, and (probably) Florida, and it was Latino voters who made this success possible.

We covered the issue of voter fraud a couple of months back, talking with Craig Unger about his book ‘Boss Rove’ where the Vanity Fair contributing editor detailed Karl Rove’s extraordinary efforts to suppress the vote in Ohio in 2004. The picture Unger painted of Republican efforts to stop minorities from voting was terrifying to say the least. Here’s an excerpt from the interview we did where Unger outlines GOP attempts to stop minority voting in the 2012 election:

“You’re going to see this on a large scale in the upcoming election,” he explained to me. “That is Karl Rove who is the father of voter IDs and voter suppression. He started a campaign, he started it before 2004 in Ohio saying that there’s widespread voter fraud, people who a registering are Mickey Mouse and so forth, or they are dead people being registered to vote en-masse and as a result we need voter IDs. But the fact of the matter is that this type of thing happens very very rarely.”……..

Rove, a careful and insightful strategist has long understood that the Republicans face a demographic ticking time bomb. There are around 50 million Hispanics in America today, and there will be about 70 million in about 2020. In Texas alone there are roughly 10 million Hispanics, and they vote about 2:1 for Democrats. Rove is extremely worried that if they were to start voting in large numbers states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico will turn blue, and he’s working diligently on strategies to keep voter turn out low.

“It’s also been called ‘Juan Crow’ because of the challenges the Republican face demographically,” said Unger.  “The answer has been to keep these people from voting. And they do that again and again. They do it in the black districts in Ohio, in Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County — I itemize this in my book, but the lack of voting machines, and I refer to the technique of cross over voting where blacks were shunted to the wrong voting booths deliberately and when that happens you’re using punch cards, you may not know it but if you vote for the Democrat, the vote actually goes to the wrong candidate.”

Unger’s predictions played out exactly on election day and in states like Florida, thousands of minorities were prevented from voting by the hiring of ‘election consultants’ that pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours, knowing African American and immigrant communities tended to vote early. In 2008 Democrats, minorities turned out in unprecedented numbers for the President. For example, in Palm Beach County, 61.2 percent of all early voting ballots were cast by Democrats that year, compared with only 18.7 percent by Republicans. In a stunning admission from the Former Republican Party Chairman in Florida Jim Greer, he revealed he had attended meetings where consultants made clear that early voting had to stopped at all costs. From The Palm Beach Post:

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

The demographic change presents a true nightmare scenario for the GOP, and its attempts to circumvent this have been truly horrifying. Republicans are catching on to the fact that labeling half the American population as ‘social parasites’ and ‘takers’  isn’t good when it comes to getting votes. This theme has been perpetuated in public – mostly on Fox News and Right Wing radio – but the audience is limited and the knock on effects counterproductive. Most Americans in the center are not comfortable with that type of rhetoric, and the Democrats are hoovering up wavering voters with a more inclusive approach to politics.

So what options do Republicans have going forward?

We’re starting to see cracks in the low tax militancy front with several prominent Republicans saying they would budge when it comes to negotiating with Obama on the fast approaching ‘fiscal cliff’, some have made noise about toning down the anti immigrant rhetoric (with even Sean Hannity doing an about turn), and pro choice, pro gay marriage Republicans have begun to make themselves more visible. But the change isn’t exactly dramatic and it won’t be enough to undo the years of abusive rhetoric and archaic policy proposals that have come to define the Republican Party.

The only choice they have left is to continue efforts to stop minorities and poor people from voting – the conclusion Karl Rove has obviously come to and is dedicating all his resources to pursuing. The Republican’s admission that they were involved in voter suppression shines some much needed light on the skeletons in their closet, but in reality it’s only scratching the surface.

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Rush Limbaugh Cartoon by Ian D. Marsden of marsdencartoons.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: Listening to the Right wing fallout after President Obama was re-elected has been absolutely fascinating to say the least. From Karl Rove’s extraordinary meltdown live on election night to Sean Hannity’s one-eighty on immigration, it’s fair to say that the GOP is a party with an extreme identity problem. Most people in the party are aware that they have a huge, huge problem going forward – the population is changing in both color and culture, and they are fast becoming demographically irrelevant. If the Republicans want to have electoral success going forward, they are going to have to find a way to attract women, Latinos and African Americans – groups they lost in overwhelming fashion last week.

The problem is that the party is split into so many extreme factions that it will be close to impossible to unify the party under a new, more inclusive platform. The party is comprised of moderates, Libertarians and Tea Party activists, traditional conservatives, neo cons and evangelical Christians. And while there is considerable overlap, each group have their own objectives that are often at odds with each other. Hardcore conservatives don’t want more immigrants while libertarians and moderates understand the need for reform. Evangelicals will never accept gay marriage while moderates and libertarians would, neo cons want more wars, while traditional conservatives do not, and Libertarians vehemently oppose any tax hikes, while moderates understand it to be an occasional necessity.

Most worrying for the Republicans is the prominence of loudmouth media characters like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh – virulent conservatives who influence millions of voters with their fear mongering rhetoric. Without their stamp of approval, Republican candidates lose a vital marketing tool that can seriously affect voter turn out. Had Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin not gone out to bat for Mitt Romney, it’s likely his loss would have been even worse.

In the wake of defeat, the Right wing noise machine is still out in full force because it is not in the business of self reflection. It is in the business of fear and hate – two tried and tested ratings winners that may destroy the Republican Party, but keep the multimillionaire mega mouths on air for eternity.

Rush Limbaugh went on an epic rant after last Tuesday, sarcastically suggesting that Republicans should advocate pot legalization and start their own ‘abortion industry’. He said on his show:

The youth vote! I tell you what we should do, let’s announce, starting around Christmastime, so that we can get close to being Santa Claus ourselves, let’s announce that we are for the legalization of marijuana, and that as a party we’re in favor of forgiving all student loans . . . Is that how we do it?

All these examples . . . Latinos! We’re not going to get the Latino vote by opening the borders and saying, you know what? Let anybody in who wants to come in.

Women. Let’s start our own abortion industry. Let’s go out and get the women’s vote. I just want you to think, would that work?

Not exactly encouraging. And if you thought that was bad, Mark Levin, one of the most nauseating fear merchants had the following to say about the lessons the Right should take from electoral loss:

We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We’re not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We’re not good losers, you better believe we’re sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we’re called ‘purists.’ Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We’re purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

This ‘purism’ is a recipe for complete disaster, and the sooner the GOP exiles braggarts like Limbaugh and Levin, the sooner it can reform itself into an electorally viable political party. The problem is, letting go of the extremists means taking considerable short term losses. Republicans draw huge support from fearful white Americans who believe they are in imminent danger from marauding Mexicans, gay couples and black Muslims. They are a reliable voting bloc, and losing their enthusiasm would be very detrimental. Their economic platform has to change too – it can no longer be the party of tax cuts and deregulation at all costs – they are no longer trusted to run the economy and their inability to evolve on the issue is becoming a serious electoral burden. Again, the problem is that changing their economic principles would mean massive short term losses. The party is essentially a mouthpiece for big business, and big businesses want tax cuts. Without big business, there is no money to win elections, making it a hit the party cannot afford.

Is there a way out of this conundrum?

Frankly, it’s hard to envision one. The reforms needed will be incredibly painful and will entail some very serious action from prominent Republicans who will have to confront the militants in the party. Tokenism won’t do going forward – the changes will have to be wide reaching and meaningful – and much of the party will hate them. The Republicans will have to redefine conservatism and market it to the new America. We’ve yet to see any evidence that there is serious intention from party members to do so, making their prospects for 2016 all the dimmer.

In short, they’re screwed, and there’s not much they can do about it.

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By Chez Pazienza: I never thought I’d say this but I’m kind of liking Megyn Kelly right about now.

I realize that in the past I’ve been pretty mean to her, saying that she “comes off like an extravagantly groomed chihuahua who’s very angry about being left in somebody’s Louis Vuitton handbag for too long” and insulting her mini-spread in GQ magazine, among other often admittedly petty nastiness. I say these things because she really does know how to peg the insufferability meter among Fox News’s cadre of interchangeable blondes — and also because I enjoy being a prick sometimes. But I have to give credit where credit is due: She’s willing to turn that look that combines condescension, incredulity and revulsion — the one that’s become her trademark — on just about anybody, even, apparently, Karl Rove.

Kelly had the best line of the night on Tuesday as the election results were coming in when she somewhat surprisingly broke the rules and acknowledged, live on the air, the existence of the Matrix. By now just about everyone has seen it: Kelly looking an increasingly desperate and bewildered Karl Rove right in the eye and asking him if the shit numbers he was trying frantically to spin into gold for Mitt Romney amounted to nothing more than “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.” At that moment, she may not have blown the air lock and contaminated the hermetically sealed room so many Republicans now live in, but she at the very least pointed out that it’s a real thing. A real problem.

This little scene was followed by her willingness to recognize the awkwardness of the entire situation and the pained look on her face as she was forced to Bataan Death March in heels down to see the nerds at Fox News’s “decision desk” at the behest of a very mad Rove. They were saying one thing because they, you know, actually had numbers and facts, but it was contradicting the suspension of disbelief of the bulbous turd who’d just blown $300 million on a guy who appeared to be losing, so somebody had to answer for it. Lord knows, if there’s one thing we learned on Tuesday night, it’s not really that Republicans don’t like it when the lie they’ve been living comes crashing down around them — that should’ve been obvious — it’s that they hate it when they find out that a shitload of money can’t buy everything. Or in this case, anything.

So Megyn Kelly managed to somehow be the only person on the Fox News desk on election night to hold onto a shred of dignity — and to her credit that could be because at some point her instinct for self-preservation kicked in and she realized it would be a smart long-term career move to distance herself from the raving madman sitting next to her who was determined to cling to the fantasy that Mitt Romney was going to be president. (I have no doubt that when he wasn’t on cam Rove was using an app to write “Karl Romney” “Karl Rove Romney” “Mrs. Mitt Romney” in dainty cursive all over his iPad and Kelly was probably privy to this.)

But then, yesterday, Kelly smacked down Rove again.

In case you haven’t heard, an almost astonishingly bitter Rove was back on Fox News yesterday, this time to offer his sage take on how his guy got the pants beaten off of him so badly by Barack Obama. Rove’s excuse for the loss: voter suppression. Yes, voter suppression — on the part of the Obama camp. Never mind that every instance of the attempted or successful disenfranchisement of an electoral bloc this past campaign season — and there were many, from legal maneuvers to outright intimidation — came from the right and was directed at the left; Rove was able to rattle off a bunch of statistics that really proved nothing and once again made it look like he spends his afternoons standing in the middle of Tompkins Square Park talking to a water fountain.

Kelly again didn’t let him get away with it. Her response was almost admirably patronizing: “You keep saying that, but he won, Karl.” It wasn’t simply a shutting down of everything Rove was saying — it was an outright disrespectful dismissal.

I get that by this time tomorrow Megyn Kelly will probably have done ten new things to make me dislike her, at least as far as her on-air persona is concerned. But for now — she and I — we’re okay.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Daily Banter Mailbag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss the Republican Party’s future, social media’s electoral influence and Karl Rove’s doomed political career.

The questions:

1) I know you’ve talked about this before but given the beating the Republicans took on Tuesday do you think ANYTHING will change in the GOP? Will they muzzle the crazies? Will they compromise? Will they stop locking themselves in an informational echo chamber? Or do you think everything will stay the same as in Obama’s first term?
– Marie

Ben: Hard to say given how fractured the party is. The problem for the Republicans is that a significant number of their core voters are batshit crazy racist homophobes who need to be thrown some red meat every once in a while. It’s almost impossible for the GOP to win races without getting these people out to vote, making appealing to the center harder and harder to do. Also, the Republican Party has been almost 100% bought out by financial interests so it really doesn’t operate as a political party any more. Change would require it to temper some of its core economic principles, and their corporate backers just won’t stand for it. In short, they’re pretty screwed so I think we’ll see some serious infighting over the next few years until they sort it out. Or maybe they can’t. Either way, it’s good for the Democrats as they get to concentrate on running the country while the Republicans tear themselves to pieces.

Chez: The GOP got spanked a lot harder than I expected and it was surprising to hear many of them acknowledge right off the bat how they’re basically facing a date with demographic destiny — whether it was said as a form of conciliatory soul-searching or just to be a sullen prick, like O’Reilly. I think that at least for a bit they’re probably going to be forced to compromise with Obama, but that period may not last long once the lunatic conspiracist rank and file stop whining and try to exert force again, to “take back their country” (despite it now being obvious that it’s not their country to take back anymore). I think Obama’s second term victory will infuriate the far-right even more than his first and I doubt they’ll stay quiet about it. The question is whether the Republican establishment — the people who actually want to win national elections at some point ever again — will again cede the party to the dangerous idiots. I’m hoping not, but I’m not counting on it. The difference this time might be Obama himself not being willing to put up with that shit.

Bob: I don’t think they’ll change at all. They might dabble in some racial tokenism, but they’re the party that fears change above all else and as such they’ll never stray far from their marketing strategy. They’ll simply augment their deception campaign in hopes of tricking more white people into voting against their economic best interests. Plus, they have a slight advantage insofar as there’s only one Barack Obama and too many Democrats tend to be self-defeating and disorganized.

2) Do you think social media have (or will) fundamentally changed the way campaigns are run? Facebook offers a venue for quick, cheap bumper stick sloganeering (you know what I’m talking about), but it also gives an opportunity to address the issue immediately and directly. If a friend posted some garbage talking point about gas prices, the economy, or welfare drug tests, I could immediately fact check them with sources. Granted, it would rarely change that person’s mind, but how many of that person’s friends see the rebuttal? Do you think that this election will be the last time a campaign is run as cynically as Romney’s because of social media changing the way we interact politically?
– Mike

Bob: Social media is a significant tool for accountability and grassroots organizing. But it will only ever be a secondary means of winning elections.

Ben: Interesting question. I think Romney ran his campaign operating on the premise that it didn’t really matter what he said, or whether he was fact checked or not. As long as people hear what they want to hear, they generally ignore the rest, and Romney hedged that the initial lie would be enough to do the damage. He was right to an extent as he did a heck of a lot better than he should have done. Social media is great because it allows fact checking, but advertising is still an incredibly powerful medium where the initial effect can negate any factual follow up. Look at what has happened to Julian Assange for example. He was accused of rape, and regardless of the facts, his reputation has been irreparably damaged. I don’t know how truthful the accusations were against Assange, but it doesn’t really matter any more. The image has stuck, and Assange isn’t really taken seriously any more. Politicians will continue to chuck dirt at eachother regardless of how easy it is to get the truth out, and for one good reason: It works.

Chez: I think social media has made the world much more transparent, and that’s something I’ve been saying for years now. It’s a lot harder to get away with bullshit. That said, the flip side is that it’s much easier to disseminate bullshit and have people believe it because there’s a media outlet willing to cater to every single person’s particular bias. I do, however, think that Romney went so far off the reservation with his lies that social media’s easy access to information screwed him. I don’t know, though — I’d like to think that cynical politicians will learn their lesson but every time Jon Stewart plays a soundbite of a guy saying one thing, then quickly produces tape from two months ago of the same guy saying exactly the opposite, I really do think they still think we’re all idiots and they can get away with bending reality to their will. And Jesus, that’s tape. Old media.

3) How fucked is Karl Rove?
– Carlos

Chez: I wrote a piece for Banter not long ago that talked about how I really wasn’t into schadenfreude — that it’s a trait of the bullying right to want to be able to not just defeat their political enemies but laugh in their faces. But I have to admit, after that truly mind-boggling display on Fox News on election night — with Rove desperately, angrily trying to fight reality and demanding answers from the Fox numbers nerds who’d just burst his bubble — I’m having a lot of fun at his expense. Rove’s behavior was staggeringly undignified — and it was fucking hilarious. He’s not just a sore loser — he’s a guy who, like so many on that night, was honestly stunned to his core that all the bullshit he’d been dishing out and swallowing was wrong. Of course Rove spent around $300 million of other people’s money during campaign in support of Republican candidates, particularly Romney, and got zilch for it. I like to believe that Rove’s panic was because he knew Shelly Adelson’s goons would be waiting outside to break both his legs. As for his future, I think his image is likely tainted pretty badly within the GOP. But then again, if Fox doesn’t back away from him and his ranting — and so far it hasn’t, despite a still shellshocked Rove now complaining that Obama “suppressed votes” — who knows?

Bob: Karl Rove orchestrated two presidential victories and lost one. To be fair, that’s not a bad record. That said, the one loss cost a lot of wealthy people $300-400 million. If I were Rove I would make sure I had a solid security contingent otherwise I might wake up with a horse’s head in my bed. Then again, Mitt Romney raised $880 million and lost. Upshot: Rove will be back, and so will his Crossroads GPS super PAC unless the president can pass an amendment that repeals Citizens United.

Ben: Karl Rove is pretty much finished as a credible political operative. He went through 300 million dollars of his friends money with his Super Pac and ended up with a landslide loss in the electoral college. Rove is a smart guy with a ton of connections, but this screw up was pretty epic. I can’t imagine rich Republicans will be lining up to give him money after this, particularly as he was the one who rammed Romney down everyone’s throat in the first place. Rove did his bit behind the scenes knocking off all the other GOP candidates in the primaries ensuring he would be the one to face off against Obama. He directed an extraordinary amount of money Romney’s way, and the billionaires behind him expected to see a payoff from their investment. They believed in Rove’s strategy and his predictions, and as a result, they lost it all. Not exactly a good sign for his future in the GOP.

——

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Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong

By Ben Cohen: If you listened to any prominent right wing media outlet during the week leading up to the election, you would have thought it was in the bag for Mitt Romney. Right wing pundits like Karl Rove, William Kristol  and Charles Krauthammer predicted a close but definitive victory for Romney, Dick Morris boldly predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes, and incredibly, George Will thought Romney would take a whopping 326 (Romney won 206 electoral votes). In fact, the Right wing media was positively giddy with excitement believing they had finally unseated the Muslim Communist presiding in the White House.

Meanwhile, the supposedly ‘liberal’ media was projecting a fairly decisive win for the President, in large part due to the predictions of the New York Time’s polling expert Nate Silver.

Why the difference?

In short, the Right used ideology as the intellectual underpinning of their projections, while everyone else used facts. Nate Silver isn’t a mystic or the modern incarnation of Nostradamus – he’s an extraordinarily thorough polling analyst who bases predictions on a formula that accounts for real world margins of error and reporting discrepancies. It isn’t perfect, but the methodology is pretty airtight when it comes to projecting accurate odds. That’s why every half decent political analyst took Silver’s projections seriously and discounted the Right wing noise machine when it came to picking a winner.

This theme of fantasy vs reality goes far deeper than picking the winner in Presidential elections. It goes to the heart of what now constitutes conservatism in America, and why it is in perpetual decline.

As Conor Friedersdorf writes in the Atlantic, conservative ideology in the US is now so far removed from reality that it now only exists as a money making machine for loudmouths like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity:

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood’s convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama’s America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense — not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there’s no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it’s often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

How long can this go on? The libertarian economic orthodoxy that has polluted American politics for over 30 years has wrought havoc on the economy, creating gigantic wealth inequality, a dangerously powerful and unregulated financial system, and most impressively, the biggest economic disaster in 80 years. Yet Republicans insist it works and we need more of it to get out of the mess it created. Mitt Romney believed he could present a tax plan to the American public that didn’t add up, because his philosophy of cutting taxes and allowing big business to do as it pleases was self evident. The Right believes that because it believes something, it must be true. And they keep finding out that is doesn’t.

It seems that no matter how hard reality hits, mainstream conservatism finds a way to avoid it and curl back into its ideological ball. The Right has been wrong on climate change, economics, and now their own chances at electoral success, yet they continue to ignore hard facts and proceed selling the same nonsense to an increasingly skeptical public.

I would have paid money to be in the Fox News studio with Karl Rove last night to watch the fallout after it dawned on them that Romney was going to lose, and lose badly. Just watch this incredible clip of Rove, unable to confront reality, as Fox called Ohio for Obama:

Writes Andrew Sullivan:

Last night, Roger Ailes’ walls came tumbling down. Because their foundations were not based in reality, just ratings. Fox deserves a great deal of credit for re-electing president Obama. Because they refused to see who he actually was, they could not effectively counter him. They countered a figment of their imagination – and it was a particularly nasty, bilious, mean figment. Their universe became a black hole last night, sucking almost all of them in.

Perhaps the Republicans will reinvent themselves taking reality into account – it’s a long shot given their recent history, but the only way they’ll maintain any sort of electoral viability in the future.

But it’s about as safe a bet as Romney’s chances were of winning the White House.

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A survey by the Pew Research Center shows Obama leading Romney 48% to 45% among likely voters. Pew estimates that Obama will take 50% of the popular vote to 47% for Romney. The 3% lead for Obama marks turning point from a week ago when both candidates were level with 47% of the vote. It appears that Hurricane Sandy helped Obama with 69% saying they approved of Obama’s handling of the storm.

There is a saying in America that when it comes to Presidential elections, ‘As Ohio goes, so goes the nation’, referring to the fact that the Midwestern swing state is a pretty good (but not entirely accurate) measure of who will win the election. Here’s a snap shot of the latest polling data from a cross section of polls on Ohio showing the President leading Romney by a clear margin. From Real Clear Politics:

As Paul Krugman points out about the aggregate:

That’s a lot of polls, with one tie and every other poll showing Obama ahead. Since Ohio is generally considered crucial, you can see right there why all of the poll aggregators — not just Nate Silver, but also Sam Wang, electoral-vote.com, Drew Linzer, Pollster, Talking Points are showing an Obama advantage. It’s not the political leanings of the analysts; it’s the polls. Again, the polls could be wrong, but they have to be systematically wrong by at least 2 percent to reverse this.

And while Obama is the favorite to take the popular vote, the electoral college looks an even surer bet.

The Romney campaign has fired up its rhetoric significantly, and if you look at the Mitt Romney’s manic travel schedule compared to the President’s over the last month, you can see that Romney’s campaign knows it’s in trouble. Check out these charts from the Guardian mapping each candidates travel itinerary:

Polls aren’t always accurate, and looking at Romney’s travel schedule isn’t a fail safe way of predicting an election, but with most major polls pointing to an Obama victory and some striking admissions by key Romney advisers (Karl Rove admitted that Hurricane Sandy has given Obama a significant boost), it would be extremely surprising for Romney to pull it out at the last minute. There is also the ground game – a factor that the polls don’t take into consideration, and a facet of the election that Obama has a massive advantage in. Obama’s ground team is one of the most powerful organizations in US voting history, and the difference on the day could be significant.

It’s slightly pointless to make predictions and get excited one way or the other – the result will be what the result will be, and no matter how bullish either side is, what matters is how many people actually come out to vote. That is a massive unknown that can be affected by many different factors, making accurate predictions even harder. The bottom line is, Obama looks to have some wind behind his sails and seems to have an advantage in the closing days. That doesn’t necessarily mean he is going to win. For that we, will have to wait until November 7th to find out.

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