I picked up on this story earlier in the day. Apparently, Republican donors are showing little interest in the Massachusetts special election to fill out John Kerry’s term. I found one explanation for this kind of interesting:
To one GOP insider, [Gabriel] Gomez’s problems with his own party stem from a larger problem: “So many Republicans thought we would win the presidency last year that they are now unable to believe that we can win anything.”
So, this is kind of a problem of Dick Morris’s making. Or Gallup. Or the skewed polls guy. Political analysis is what I do, and I can tell you honestly that I don’t know how anyone who thought Mitt Romney would win, or even could win, has enough brainpower to operate their lungs. The proper conclusion for those people should be to get better sources of information. Bigtime Republican donors must of have been successful at something. They can’t all be trustfund babies. When they made money in business, did they keep consultants and advisors on the payroll who were consistently and epically and catastrophically wrong?
People they trusted lied to them. They gave them false assurances. They took advantage of them. The takeaway from that should not be despondency and defeatism. It should be skepticism. Karl Rove lost everywhere and everything. He spent possibly as much as $160 million of rich Republican donors’ money, and he had nothing to show for it.
I think that that performance is the real problem here. It’s not that Republican donors are defeatist. It’s that the people asking them for donations no longer have any credibilty with them.
