Thursday Open Thread [11.8.12]

Filed in Open Thread by on November 8, 2012

I do kinda feel sorry for Mitt Romney, for you see I am a liberal and we liberals feel human emotions like sympathy. But this description from the Washington Post seemed sad, and I don’t know why.

Late Wednesday afternoon, as sleet fell in Boston’s North End, Romney visited his campaign headquarters for one final staff meeting. He thanked his aides and said goodbye. His Secret Service detail gone — and with it his code name, Javelin, after a car once made by his father’s company — Romney was spotted driving off in the backseat of his son Tagg’s car. His wife, Ann, was riding shotgun.

Allen West is a sore loser.

Rove’s operation is holding a phone call for its big donors today “to sum up the race.” I wonder if he will take personal responsibility for pissing away untold billions

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  1. puck says:

    After a year and a half of campaigning, I still don’t know if Obama is going to let the Bush tax cuts expire or not. There were several promises made by surrogates, but unlike 2008, this time I never heard Obama say it himself.

  2. Jason330 says:

    Hopefully West will blow millions of wingnut donor bucks in a futile challenge effort.

  3. TeleMan says:

    That was the wrong code name, it should have been Gremlin.

  4. cassandra m says:

    Trump on Twitter: “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.”

    This is a little inaccurate, but not by much.

  5. cassandra m says:

    I’m just going to leave this here:
    whitepeoplemourningromney.tumblr.com/

  6. Jason330 says:

    @Cassandra I blame Fox News for not lying to those people hard enough.

  7. Jason330 says:

    Go figure. I wonder if WDEL is going to continue to venerate Scott Rasmussen as the god of polling accuracy?

    2014 is a long enough away that Loudell will probably forget that Rasmussen is a GOP shill by then.

  8. pandora says:

    This is another area for which there is no penalty.

    Do you think WDEL uses Rasmussen because they’re the only polling company willing to talk with them?

  9. liberalgeek says:

    No, Pandora. I believe that Loudell has the most comprehensive Rolodex outside of DC. Rass polling lets WDEL do the “he said, she said” thing for polling.

  10. pandora says:

    Wow, and here I was hoping that it was just because WDEL is a tiny (by comparison) radio station in a tiny state.

    So… this is deliberate? I have great respect for Loudell, but now I’m having a sad. Color me disillusioned.

  11. Jason330 says:

    LG – We have to go down to Sussex and take our quadrennial photo in front of the (no doubt completely unhinged) Hudson Reality sign.

  12. Jason330 says:

    It is the having Rasmussen on as a guest and pretending that he is legitimate that gets me.

  13. liberalgeek says:

    Someone told me that that sign has been torn down. But I’m sure we can photoshop something down there… When is our next visit to iCarly radio?

  14. rsmitty says:

    …only if I go along for the ride, fellas…and someone brings bacon.

  15. pandora says:

    RSmitty in the house! 🙂

  16. cassandra m says:

    If you don’t mind Socialist Bacon, I’m happy to be the enabler here.

  17. rsmitty says:

    “Bacon For All” is a tremendous policy!

  18. Delaware Dem says:

    Finally, we have peace in our time. The diplomat: bacon.

  19. pandora says:

    Karl Rove says you can’t blame Karl Rove.

    Karl Rove told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Thursday that President Obama won re-election “by suppressing the vote” with negative campaign ads that “turned off” potential voters, citing a victory that carried a smaller percentage of the popular vote compared to that of the 2008 presidential race.

    Rove also praised Mitt Romney for a job well done, but criticized his campaign for failing to combat President Obama’s Bain attack ads early on.

  20. cassandra m says:

    What Karl Rove will say next:

    President Obama sent out New Black Panther dogwhistles which scared white people out of venturing into their voting places.

  21. Jason330 says:

    That Rove is pretty clever. Already trying to co-opt “voter suppression” and turn it into the work of evil liberals.

  22. socialistic ben says:

    Romney has given up (again) Florida for Obama!

  23. puck says:

    Here’s the full set of screen grabs from Romney’s transition site:

    http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/11/07/romneys_transition_site.html

  24. Jason330 says:

    That campaign really got sucked into the Fox News /skewed polling disreality bubble .

  25. pandora says:

    It seems Romney was shell-shocked when he lost. I knew the GOP was out of touch, but this is ridiculous.

    “There’s nothing worse than when you think you’re going to win, and you don’t,” said another adviser. “It was like a sucker punch.”

    Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something.

    Both wives looked stricken, and Ryan himself seemed grim. They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened.

    “He was shellshocked,” one adviser said of Romney.

    Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks – not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan – bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

    They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time – poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats – and that would translate into votes for Romney.

    As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed – they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn’t reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night

    Seriously? The businessman and the GOP’s Numbers Guy didn’t see this coming? At all? They didn’t look at or analyze the numbers? They didn’t question the obvious “yes men” surrounding them? Never asked to see all the data? Did no one play devil’s advocate? Did they ever change the channel to CNN, NBC or ABC or were they glued to FOX?

    This is gross incompetence on the Romney campaign.

  26. Jason330 says:

    When you are rich you get used to things breaking your way.

  27. cassandra m says:

    I’m pretty stunned at this. McCain’s people knew when they were done — how could this vaunted numbers guy not know? passed on a claim that the President’s pollsters were within 1/10th of 1% of the final aggregated results in the battlegrounds.

    Or maybe the Ds have finally bequeathed Mark Penn to the Rs.

  28. Liberal Elite says:

    @p “This is gross incompetence on the Romney campaign.”

    No it isn’t. Someone within the Romney campaign decided to keep Romney in the dark. It’s the only logical explanation. They perhaps wanted Romney upbeat for all his rallies. He was apparently deceived as much as Rusty was.

  29. cassandra m says:

    This story from MSNBC notes that campaign aides’ credit cards were cut off before they could get home after the concession.

  30. pandora says:

    Wait a minute… if that’s true, LE, then how did they pull it off? Did they keep every member of his family away from TVs, newspapers, the internet, phone calls from friends who had seen the polling? If he was in a bubble he built that. 👿

    At some point he, and numbers guy, Ryan, willfully ignored the truth. Which tells me that Romney probably never ran anything because this sure as hell isn’t the behavior of a successful businessman, a “data” guy. This is the action of a puppet, a figurehead.

    Rusty being deceived is one thing, and I feel badly for him. Mitt Romney has no such excuse.

  31. cassandra_m says:

    My experience is that delusion in a large organization definitely comes from the top and trickles down from there. Guess we’ll see who gets thrown under the bus shortly.

  32. Liberal Elite says:

    @p ” if that’s true, LE, then how did they pull it off?”

    Easy… They gave him the bogus polling analysis and told him it was real. I’ll bet Romney never personally visited 538.com or any other honest polling site. I’ll bet every news story he read was handed to him by aides.

    How else could he have been shocked at losing? Almost everyone knew… including the people who had been handling him!!

  33. pandora says:

    That is one hell of a bubble, and one hell of a disinterested candidate.