Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Walt Amses, a writer and educator from North Calais.
A week after an electoral college blowout, Mitt Romney provided Americans a huge reason to be thankful as he once again spoke candidly to his largest donors, suggesting President Obama was victorious largely because of “gifts” bestowed upon young women and black and Hispanic voters. People who want free “stuff,” as Bill O’Reilly put it.
But before Mr. Romney self-deports, we would do well reminding ourselves what occurred barely two weeks ago …
With visions of Bush vs. Gore dancing in his head on election night, the once indomitable Karl Rove blinked. While insisting that Fox News had called Ohio for Obama too soon, it was actually Rove who was premature, pulling the ripcord on the GOP plan of last resort: to throw what they believed was a close election into chaos.
Apparently, Rove was quite prepared to call Ohio’s results into question, essentially disrupting the electoral process, and he obviously expected Fox complicity in the scheme. Ohio would be close and they counted on Florida to be its usual, strangely dumbfounded self, baffled at the idea of counting all those votes. Planes and lawyers were at the ready, bags packed and tickets to Columbus and Miami in hand.
But it was not to be. As Fox anchor Megyn Kelly made a theatrical walk to the network’s decision desk – suggesting at one point that it had been different “in rehearsal” — the spontaneity of the moment became as questionable as Rove’s dissembling. Kelly was borderline sacrilegious by Fox standards, asking Rove if his math was just “something Republicans did to make themselves feel better.”
The difference this time around was that while Rove was fulminating and Fox was hesitating, Mitt Romney was pulling the plug. Realizing that the president had run the table of swing states, rendering both Ohio and Florida – not to mention Rove – irrelevant, the GOP standard bearer chose to end his political career with a whimper and some semblance of dignity.
Like most of the crestfallen GOP, Romney needed to explain that he was not the reason he’d lost nor were his policies, but rather gullible voters who had been bribed into choosing a second term for the president.
That was an illusion he might have pulled off had he kept his mouth shut. But Romney, ever willing to clarify the velvet ropes that separate the makers from the takers, couldn’t help himself. Like most of the crestfallen GOP, he needed to explain that he was not the reason he’d lost nor were his policies, but rather gullible voters who had been bribed into choosing a second term for the president.
This was only the latest of rationalizations coming from Republicans, who had previously attributed the election results to, among other things: voter fraud; Black Panther intimidation (one dude in a leather jacket); and not being conservative enough, which seems oblivious to the fact that the single time – albeit briefly – Romney was in the game at all, was after having moving decidedly and surprisingly toward the center.
Although Obama’s standing dipped somewhat after his no-show at the first presidential debate in Denver, it was temporary and he never actually trailed in the majority of polls. Beginning with Joe Biden’s evisceration of Paul Ryan and culminating with Chris Christie becoming FEMA’s biggest fan in Hurricane Sandy’s wake, throwing Romney under the bus for the second time, things returned approximately to where they had been since August: the president maintaining a small but consistent lead.
Republicans seemed not only bitterly disappointed, but genuinely baffled by Romney’s loss, despite every logical indication that it would happen. It appeared that pundits on the right had spent so much time divorced from reality that an 11th hour reconciliation was next to impossible. They had lived by denial and would meet their demise the same way. Math, they discovered, was math, not so vulnerable to spin.
In the post-election analysis, with most of the country soberly evaluating the results and what they meant, the Fox crew and the usual GOP suspects returned to the comfortable confines of elementary school, pouting and calling people names – including voters who had the audacity to re-elect the president.
Who better to help the right get back into the swing of wrestling sanity to the ground than Donald Trump, who tweeted for a “March on Washington,” erroneously believing that Romney had won the popular vote. Trump thought the results warranted a “revolution,” forgetting momentarily that modern American uprisings occur at the ballot box and are seldom motivated by the opportunity to cut billionaires some additional slack.
The Donald quickly transcended the election, engaging in a bitter war of words with Cher, who had insulted his hair. He – in turn – mocked her cosmetic surgery while assuring the masses that he did not wear a “rug.”
Some Twinkies will never go out of business.
