No doubt you could argue that I should qualify that with "if" he loses. However, I'm not going to. I don't see why we can't just call a spade a spade. If you continue to doubt it check today's polls out Gallup which show the President with a 6 point lead or Nate Silver's 538 that shows Obama with a 81.8 percent chance of victory. Today Nate admitted this race could end up looking a lot more like 2008 than the pundits ever dreamed.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/sept-26-could-2012-be-like-2008/
http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-closeness-of-2012-may-have-been.html
Anyway, when Romney loses how is the GOP going to explain this, what will they take from it?
One thing you already see is unleashing a kind of Holy War against the pollsters. First it was the fact-checkers, now it's the pollsters.
Rush has been bashing the pollsters as has Fox News:
"It’s clear that Fox & Friends has a tricky relationship with data. But on the show Thursday morning, the hosts took that relationship to a whole new level."
"After a raft of new polls showed Obama opening up leads in swing states, the Friends flew in to full-blown conspiracy mode about what’s really behind the data."
"Parroting the latest Republican meme that national polls oversample Democrats, host Steve Doocy threw in to the mix the possibility that pollsters are using voter turnout from 2008 to guide who they should be asking. And why would the “left-based mainstream media” do this? Doocy had an answer."
“Well, two reasons,” he said. “One, perhaps, to keep Mitt Romney’s donors from coughing up more cash. And two, to keep people from doing early voting.”
"Co-host Gretchen Carlson had another theory: “I do think there’s a subliminal message in these daily polling things, which isn’t always great for the voter.”
"One problem with the theories: FOX’s own polling also shows Obama surging in swing states. A survey released by the network just last week showed the president leading Romney by no fewer than five points in Ohio, Virginia and Florida."
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/fox-friends-polls-rigged-conspiracy.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Fox won't let that little detail get in the way. The other thing you're starting to see is that Mitt isn't a real conservative. So this is why he's losing. Bill Kristol on Sunday gave us an extreme version of this by saying that yeah, the President's team has done a decent job of cleaning up the financial crisis but that what Romney should do is make this an ideological contest on the size of government.
No doubt part of Romney's problem is that he has given us no specifics. Yes the Ryan plan is specific all right. However, Americans don't like those specifics-Medicare privatization.
It does seem, however, that this will be the ideology the GOP may settle on. The conservatives will try to make that case anyway. As to the idea of Chuck Schumer among others that this will lead to a rejuvenation of GOP moderates, the trouble with this is I'm not sure there are many moderates left in the GOP.
Who are the GOP moderates of today?
"Today, the media and their pollsters are to blame for Mitt Romney's political troubles, according to Romney's fans. But if Romney does lose this year, blame will quickly shift to the Republican presidential nominee himself, his shortcomings, and his ability to articulate a conservative vision for the country. And the fallout from a Romney loss has the potential to reverberate through the Republican Party for a decade."
"One can imagine the thought process: Romney, the moderate Massachusetts
flip-flopper, was insufficiently clear in articulating the views of the conservative movement and allowed his own shortcomings to distract from the cause, both of beating Obama and of advancing the agenda."
"The blame game has already begun in some quarters. "There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican," conservative blogger Erick Erickson wrote on Tuesday. "They conspired to shut out others, tear down others, and prop up Romney with the electability argument. He is now not winning against the second coming of Jimmy Carter. They know there will be many conservatives, should Mitt Romney lose, who will not be satisfied until every bridge is burned with these jerks, hopefully with the elitist jerks tied to the bridge as it burns."
"The schism within the Republican Party began during George W. Bush's administration ("They think the conservative movement will give them a pass just as the movement did with No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Harriet Miers, TARP, etc.," Erickson added, ticking off Bush's greatest hits). The tea party movement, with its antispending message, stood in contrast with Bush's big-government conservatism, a virtual rebuke of party leadership, which the activist class believed had lost its way. If Romney loses, that rage at the establishment — Erickson's "elites" — will only grow."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/on-the-trail/how-a-romney-loss-would-impact-the-gop-20120927
This is always the takeaway for the Right. They still delude themselves that Bush was a big government conservative.
History does show a resourcefulness of the Right. After 1964 it looked like conservatism was repudiated after Goldwater's landslide loss. However, they rallied and 16 years they got the Reagan revolution.
So we'll see. The truth is, however, is that Romney has flipflopped is he knows he can't run as the Right wants him to.
Unlike 1980, conservatism has now been in power for 30 years, so it's not as if people don't feel they know what they get with it. The results have not been pretty.
What is a fact is that since Goldwater which begun the ascendancy of the Right within the GOP nothing has slowed the momentum of conservatism within the party. No matter what, the GOP moves further and further to the Right.
If they don't after this it would be the first time in 50 years that Centrists get the upper hand. That's hard to imagine.
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