For years now, I've been listening to Republicans tell me that this election was a "gimmie," quite possibly the easiest thing in the world. "Barack Obama is the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter," I was repeatedly told. "We can't help but win!"
Folks are now coming around to the view that I put out there years ago: That presidential elections are always serious business, especially where defeating an incumbent is involved. And while Obama might be Carter, Mitt Romney sure as shit isn't the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.
People generally, and Republicans and the media specifically, make much too much of the 1980 election. There is no clear analogy between '80 and this year for a couple of reasons.
First, Obama didn't have a brass-knuckle "future-of-the-party" primary fight, like Carter had with Ted Kennedy. Kennedy didn't win very many primaries at all, but he did expose Carter as being weaker than anyone expected. Further, the Kennedy challenge forced Carter to spend time, money and other resources beating it back that otherwise would have been used defining the GOP and developing a general election narrative.
Second, the President doesn't have a third party candidate drawing from his vote, as Carter did with John Anderson. As an anti-Reagan Republican, Anderson was directly competing with Carter for support, which meant that Carter was actually running against two campaigns. Reagan was not.
Regardless of what Democrats tell you, 1992 worked essentially the same way. Given Ross Perot's issue set, fiscal responsibility, it's almost impossible to believe that he drew support evenly from Clinton and Bush, nor have their been any particularly convincing studies to back that assertion up.
Let's look at the raw numbers of 1980, shall we? Reagan won 50.7% against Carter's even 41%. But Anderson got 6.6% of the vote, all of it out of Jimmy Carter's hide. Take Anderson out of the equation and you have a much closer popular vote and, very probably, Electoral College result. Anderson did nearly three times better than Ralph Nader did in 2000, and most people think that Nader cost Al Gore the presidency.
Yes, Ronald Reagan still would have won, but the result would have been more in keeping with an average election spread.
2012 not only isn't 1980, it was never going to be.
Of course, Republicans are now trying to explain their early overconfidence, which was actually much closer to ignorance.
For a few weeks, it's been "skewed polls," which I explained yesterday is delusional for any number of reasons and even Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday said was unmitigated horseshit. Paul Ryan even went with the exhausted (and easily disproved) old trope of "media bias," even though he couldn't provide a single example of it.
Slowly, but surely, we're starting to get to the truth.
During the summer, the Romney campaign said it could not match the Obama campaign’s ad spending because Romney’s coffers had been depleted in a tough primary fight and campaign finance laws forbade Romney from spending money raised for the general election before accepting the Republican nomination at the party convention in Tampa.
As fall began, the Romney campaign explained that Romney appeared at relatively few public events — perhaps one rally or town hall a day — because he had to devote a large amount of time to fundraising. That was necessary, aides explained, because President Obama blew up the system of publicly finance campaigns, forcing Romney to devote precious time and resources to fundraising.Ouch!
All through the spring and summer, all I heard about was FEC reports showing how much Romney was raising and Republicans bragging about it. It was so bad that Obama was forced to start begging supporters to not let him be the first president to be outspent in an election.
I noticed this a couple of weeks ago.
Like so much of Mitt Romney's existence, this was a trick of creative accounting. It turns out that a lot of the money he raised was for the Republican National Committee and independent PACs, which is money that he doesn't control. Just to get through August, when Romney-Ryan wasn't doing much in the way of ad buys, the campaign had to borrow $20 million.
By essentially going dark through the summer, Obama was given the freedom to define Romney unchallenged. This of course happened when idiot bloggers (specifically at Red State) were endlessly going on about Mitt's stellar fundraising and an Obama "burn rate" that would leave him broke after the convention.
And this is where things get hilarious. Just like when he was Bain, Romney used the borrowed money to give his top campaign staff bonuses.
Just as he started pulling the fire alarm about media bias on Sunday, Ryan is now panicking about money in public.
Now, it’s October, and that moment is apparently not here yet. In an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio program Monday, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan pointed to a lack of money as the reason the Romney-Ryan campaign is trailing the president in some key issue areas. “Why do you think that on the tax issues, and on the handling the economy issue, that Romney-Ryan trail Obama-Biden?” Ingraham asked. “What is it in the messaging, or is it the coverage, that isn’t connecting?”
“When you’re outspent massively on TV with absolutely false and misleading ads by your political adversaries who are suggesting that this somehow raises people’s taxes, it clutters and confuses,” Ryan answered. “We are entering the debate phase of this campaign. We are entering the choice phase of this campaign. And we are making it crystal clear to people that all these falsehoods that are coming out of the Obama campaign about our tax policy, about our Medicare reform and everything else, are just that.”
“But are you guys going to release big ads?” Ingraham asked. “I mean, where are the ads? I thought you guys had this huge war chest. We’re now being massively outspent in ads?”
“They have more money for TV,” Ryan said. “That’s very clear. Everybody knows that. They’re even outspending us three-to-one in Ohio recently, and we’re still in the hunt, in a very close race.”I've repeatedly said this now. Romney is not only running a shitty campaign, he learned exactly the wrong lessons from the primaries.
There was never any real possibility that Mitt Romney was going to lose to any of the misfits running against him in the primaries. So Romney decided to bury them in money.
What never occured to him is just how much time and money it took to slaughter those assholes once and for all. And most of them were busy destroying themselves at any given time.
But Romney just kept soldiering on into the general with a money strategy that didn't work as well as it should have during the primaries. And it's hard to argue that Newt Gingrich isn't half the politician Barack Obama is. It was fatally flawed and irredeemably stupid from the very beginning.
On the other hand, I'm a uniter, not a divider. So I'd like t announce for the very first time that I agree with Newt Gingrich on a matter of some importance.
“I don’t understand it,” says former House Speaker, and former Romney rival, Newt Gingrich. “Everything I thought up until about August 1 was that the Republicans were going to outspend the Democrats. I don’t understand what is going on.”
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