After what seemed like a decade of 24/7 coverage of the Republican 2012 primary process, news has come out that there are still untold stories.  Apparently, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum negotiated to team up against Mitt Romney.  Ok, this doesn’t sound like a one meeting kind of thing.  It sounds like something that happened over a much longer period of time and something the political press, who are supposed to be “experts” would have picked up on. (And I am not talking about locals who may not cover politics all the time but the national reporters who do.)

Well, the nation was spared such a spectacularly awesome scary ticket because neither man would accept the veep slot. Phew, and the GOP thought the worst thing they had to fear last year was candidates who like to prattle on about “legitimate rape” and whatnot. (As a satire writer, I would have LOVED a GOP ticket with Newt & Santorum, LOVED IT.)

Of course, the other news that probably won’t actually come out (sorry, I cannot think of a better way to put that right now) is that Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) was NOT asked to take the veep slot for Romney because his son is gay.  Portman was a Romney surrogate and the two men spent a lot of time together. The irony is he had a better shot of picking up a state with Portman than Paul Ryan. I have a hard time seeing Romney ever getting Wisconsin.  Yes, I know people don’t base their pick on the VP candidate.  I guess someone if picked Ted Bundy after he was convicted of being a serial killer it would have turned more than a few people off…  Can you imagine the tagline for that campaign?  Smith/Bundy — because no one knows  more about preventing crime than a convicted serial killer!  (Ps.  I am sure some people were also turned off from John McCain because of Sarah Palin but not enough to swing a state or the election.  Note to any GOP readers:  I am NOT implying any Republican would pick Bundy for anything, ever.)

But I digress.

The GOP has been in overdrive trying to “rebrand” themselves.  I was especially impressed with their chairman, Reince Priebus, this morning.  He was asked if they planned to cut Portman’s national funding off now that he has endorsed same sex marriage.  “Of course not!” Priebus said with a fair amount of moral indignation because of course his decision to not defund Portman is the right thing to do based on current polling numbers that show increasing support for marriage equality.

At the Conservative Union conference last weekend, better known as CPAC, there was a session entitled “How do we look less racist?”  My response to the question was “How about you just BE less racist?”  My advice to the GOP is that superficial changes to messaging materials isn’t enough to convince people you care about their issues.  Priebus deserves some credit for starting to reach out to groups that have not either always or recently been the GOP base.

Getting people to believe you care about the things that matters to them requires you understand what those things are.  Reaching out to talk to them may not get you all the way there but it is a start.  Let’s hope the change Priebus is pushing is part of a long term approach and not a policy du jour.

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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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Mitt Romney: Not a model for future Republican candidates.

I’m not sure how I missed this incredible gem, but if you want to understand why the Republicans lost the election this year, look no further than Stuart Steven’s astonishing article in The Washington Post last week. In probably the best example of the fantasy thinking that has plagued the Republican Party Stevens argues that contrary to popular opinion, voters actually really liked Romney, and by some creative number analysis, he really beat Obama when it came to the votes of true Americans. Here he is on Romney’s shining personality:

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s Green Room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought he would win the nomination… Nobody liked Romney except voters.

This is despite Romney having the lowest personal approval ratings for a presumptive presidential nominee dating back to 1948. Steven’s also argued that although Romney lost, he actually beat Obama because he got more votes from the middle classes:

Let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day.

That is of course because poor Americans don’t actually count as voters – a point made clear by Romney in his 47% speech to a room full of rich people.

Interestingly, Stevens also thinks that the campaign Romney ran should serve as a template for the future as Obama only won because he had the charisma and money to get minorities to vote:

There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?

In reality, Obama won because campaign strategist David Axelrod insisted on fighting an extremely smart campaign that focused on key battle grounds to take the electoral college. Yes, Obama’s appeal to minorities was an important factor, but most importantly, his re-election team understood that the Republicans were woefully unprepared on the ground in key states and ran sophisticated operations to drive the vote out and smash Romney with negative ads.

Republicans lost because as one Romney aide discovered after listening to David Axelrod’s postmortem of the debate at a Harvard conference last week, “We weren’t even running in the same race.”

But if Republicans want to take Stevens’ analysis of what happened, they should go right ahead. They just won’t win any more elections going forward.

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David Axelrod: The brains behind Obama's re-election (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily Beast has done a fascinating write up of a talk given by David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief re-election strategist, on the serious missteps made by the Romney team:

Offering a lengthy dissection of the campaign, David Axelrod told a Chicago audience that he was “a bit surprised that super PACS which spent an unbelievable amount of money” didn’t hit television and radio with anti-Obama ads until May.

“Our air defenses weren’t ready,” he said, alluding to his side’s early lack of resources. “They gave us a pass, for whatever reason.”

At the same time, he was surprised that a plausible, distinctly positive image of Romney as successful businessman was not central to Romney’s media strategy until late fall. In part he ascribed that to Romney’s “Faustian bargain” to get the Republican nomination and tacking far to the right while also unleashing a barrage of mostly negative ads against GOP primary rivals.

The Obama camp assumed that after Romney sewed up the nomination, he would offer that more upbeat aura in his ads. “They never did that,” Axelrod said at the evening gathering at the University of Chicago.

As for Ryan, Axelrod personally figured former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty would be the choice, possibly Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. His doubts about Ryan were a function of tough-minded views on privatizing Social Security and making significant changes in Medicare.

Axelrod’s assessment is obviously more informed than mine, but I don’t think the strategic errors played the biggest part in Romney’s downfall. Romney’s campaign, right up until the first Presidential debate, was nothing short of disastrous mostly because they had a disastrous candidate; Mitt Romney. At literally every high profile event, Romney would put his foot in it and say something to disconnect himself from the general public. Time and time again he revealed himself to be an out of touch multi millionaire with no concept of how most people in America lived, culminating in the release of the ’47%’ video that should have ended his campaign once and for all.

Then an inexplicable meltdown from the President and a reasonably human performance from Romney on debate night propelled him back into the running, giving him a realistic shot at the Presidency that he did not deserve. Of course Romney’s team made strategic errors, but it probably would not have made a difference. A bad candidate is a bad candidate, and Romney will go down as one of the worst in Republican history.

No amount of negative campaigning could have countered that.

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The scale of Right wing delusion in the face of overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama was going to win the election reached right up to the highest levels of the GOP. Apparently, Romney genuinely believed he was going to win right up until the last minute. From the Guardian:

New details emerged revealing that his Republican opponent Mitt Romney had been confident of victory right up until the first voting figures came through on election night. A source inside his camp said that at planning meeting after planning meeting he had been assured of victory.

Not only had Romney planned an $25,000 fireworks display in Boston Harbour to mark his win but he had written only a victory speech, the reason his concession speech had been so brief. In a sign of how confident he had been, he had established a 200-strong transition team paving the way for the shift to the White House that even on election day was hiring more staff.

Embarrassingly, Romney’s team allowed his pre-planned ‘President elect’ website to go live for a few moments:

The Republicans are going to have to take a very long, hard look at themselves if they want to avoid this type of electoral humiliation again. Getting it so badly wrong was not, as many of them are now claiming, a result of Hurricane Sandy or voter suppression (a new Karl Rove fantasy theory). It was the result of running a hapless candidate who lied relentlessly about himself, his policies and his record, then believing in their own numbers and rhetoric from blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Romney’s belief that he was going to win was not based in reality, much like his belief that he could grow the economy without spending money. Romney felt that he was entitled to win because of who he was – a rich white man from a powerful political family, just as he believed he could cut taxes and create revenue at the same time. Romney dealt in fantasy, while Obama dealt in reality. And the latter finally won out.

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Bill Maher explains why Romney lost the election:

Mitt Romney lost because of the Republican brand and Republican policies. There are other reasons, of course, like Mitt being unlovable to anyone not named Ann Romney, but nothing trumps the idea that 2/3rds of America thinks the other 1/3 is a frightening conglomerate of Bible-thumpers, xenophobes, and vaginophobes. (Not a word, but should be.)

Take Mitt’s pivot from being “severely conservative” to being “the white Barack Obama.” Sure, everyone tacks to the middle after the primaries, but Mitt’s performance was different: it was a full-scale repudiation of just about every idea that conservatives hold dear. The positions were changed. The rhetoric was completely different. He was basically Barack Obama, Caucasian Edition.

Now I know what you’re saying: this is what Mitt Romney always does. Being a shape-shifting phony isn’t an act; that’s who he is! And this is true.

But it isn’t who Michele Bachmann is. When it comes to nutty right-wing beliefs that are completely false, she’s a true believer. And yet what was Michele Bachmann saying during the waning days of her too-close-for-comfort campaign? She was putting out an ad distancing herself from her own Party — even her conservative district:

“Michele Bachmann is an independent voice working for us, saying no to big spending by both political parties but bringing them together…”

Then Michele pops on the screen and says, “That’s why I’ve been an independent voice working for you…”

Wow. …I’m just saying. When even Michele Bachmann can’t run as a proud Republican, your brand identification has reached “pink slime” territory.

Maher hits the nail on the head here – the Republicans are going to continue to have a hard time electorally because their party has now divvied off into so many extreme factions, there’s no coherence whatsoever. Romney was always going to have a hard time getting elected given the ideological gymnastics he had to play just to get through the primaries. He had to shore up the crazy Right and disown 99% of his record to become the Republican nominee, then pretend that it never happened in the general election in order to pick up votes from the center. The Democrats simply sat back and ran Romney’s own words against him making their job relatively straightforward (bar Obama’s atrocious first debate performance).

Obama has successfully re-branded the Democratic Party to encompass right wing foreign policy with a center left economic platform, giving it electoral coherence that doesn’t require too much shape shifting when running for office. Agree or disagree with what the Democratic Party now stands for (and in regards to foreign policy, I certainly don’t), it’s definitely working.

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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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Matt Taibbi: Romney has America's best interest at heart?

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi – his mixture of acerbic wit and penetrating insight is a rarity in journalism these days, and I pretty much agree with his stance on most issues. That’s why I was little alarmed to read this from his blog on Rolling Stone today:

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins. If some foreign agent attacks us, I seriously doubt a president Mitt Romney would wave the white flag and invite the enemy in. Right? He’ll try his best as Commander-in-chief, just like Obama has, and just like Bush did, and Clinton did, and Reagan did and so on.

That should be the way we think. We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.

Perhaps the storm has affected Taibbi’s memory a little, but here’s what he wrote about the prospects of a Mitt Romney economy a few weeks back:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

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Asked after voting for himself, Romney declared he felt very positive about his chances in Ohio. From Buzzfeed:

Asked by a reporter as he left the room who he voted for, Romney said, “I think you know.” He also said that he felt “very, very good” about his prospects…… The Romney’s emerged a minute later and the crowd gathered on the nearby streets greeted them with cheers. The Romneys then exchanged a kiss.

Asked him he felt good about Ohio, he responded, “Yeah, I feel great about Ohio.”

Romney might feel great about the rust belt state, but the polls indicate he really shouldn’t. Here’s the Huff Post’s aggregate of 115 polls in Ohio:

Of course, the election may not come down to the 18 electoral votes in Ohio, but the reality is that if Romney loses the state, he can only afford to lose at best one or two more swing states, and given Obama’s lead virtually across the board across swing states, the math does not look good.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney dueled for the White House on Tuesday in a tight-to-the-finish election shadowed by a weak economy and high unemployment that crimped middle class dreams for millions.

Voters also chose a new Congress to serve alongside the man who will be inaugurated president in January, Democrats defending their majority in the Senate, and Republicans in the House. Eleven states picked governors, and ballot measures ranging from gay marriage to gambling dotted ballots.

The economy was rated the top issue by about 60 percent of voters surveyed as they left their polling places. About 4 in 10 said it is on the mend.

More than that said conditions are as bad or getting worse, but a significant fraction said former President George W. Bush bears more of the responsibility than Obama. The survey was conducted for The Associated Press and a group of television networks.

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