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.
Doesn’t Turdblossom still run American Crossroads, or some other wingnut welfare outfit?
The value of luck (often dumb luck) is always significantly underrated as a factor in achieving substantial financial success. Then there are those that are nothing more than snake oil salesmen. What’s fascinating is how quickly many large fortunes are accumulated. Compare Steve Wynn who began his career in gaming in 1963 and now has a net worth of $2.5 billion with Sheldon Anderson who got into gaming in 1988 and is worth $26.5 billion.
They are in a strange predicament. There is a large bloc of Republicans that are angry at the Establishment , because they control the party and they assured them Romney would win. And I can understand their anger, sort of how I used to feel about the DLC.
But they are also convinced that of they had a REAL Republican, like, say Michelle Bachman or Rick Santorum, people who capture the real American spirit, the Reagan spirit, they would win in a landslide.
Here’s an example. If you can’t get all the way through it, well neither could I, I just don’t have the stomach for that degree of untethered delusion.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/karl_rove_and_republican_decline.html
I think it’s funny that the website is called “the American thinker”
You might enjoy a lib’rul political satire site called Sadly No, which frequently lambastes the contributors to American Stinker (among much else wingnut).
Only got as far as this:
While everyone seems to recall that Reagan’s approval rating at the end of his term was high, in real time that wasn’t the way it was at all. His 42% approval rating in February 1987 was what I recall. His bounce to 60% in October 1988 was an artifact of the election with a dreadful Democratic candidate.
Anywhere if there was a shred of validity to the assertion that Bush was the third term of wildly popular Reagan, then Gore should have won in an even bigger landslide because Clinton’s final approval rating was 67%.
Anywhere if there was a shred of validity to the assertion that Bush was the third term of wildly popular Reagan, then Gore should have won in an even bigger landslide because Clinton’s final approval rating was 67%.
Seconded. The assumption that a President’s incumbency advantage transfers to his Vice President is bogus.
Ike’s VP lost to Kennedy. LBJ’s VP lost to Nixon. Yes, Reagan’s VP won, but then Clinton’s VP lost to Bush.
Since FDR, the American people have given the White House to the same party three elections in a row only once. When a party has been in power for eight years, their sins are right in front of the public’s face, with their opponents’ are largely forgotten.
I don’t think a sitting VP has an electoral advantage. Just the opposite, such a candidate has an uphill climb.
their advantage is limited to their prospects for winning the nomination.
Ooh, thanks for the link. I love going to wing nut sites like this and looking up their archives from around, say, Nov. 2012 when I need a good dose of schadenfreude.
Almost all of Gomez’s campaign staff are from Romeny’s loosing team. The money men have refused to pay for a replay or as you said…fool me once….
fool em once.
fool em every time!
thanks for playing!
Skewing works every day but election day. The media adores skewing and consumes it voraciously. In an important sense skewing is central to the identity of the corporate media. The Republicans don’t have a strategy for election day because no one can square the circle of openly militant corporatist with national appeal. The party has simply abdicated any pretension to governing the country as a whole. They’ve entered a vicious and apparently terminal circle of ever increasing extremism. From that perspective, “skewing” was probably the very best strategy available. They couldn’t win with that strategy but they could and did blunt their losses, and so Rove could plausibly argue that he went to war with the best army he could get.
But it is funny to read how Romney or “the establishment” was insufficiently doctrinaire. Romney was the most doctrinaire hard right candidate EVER. He was the absolute poster child for everything the militant corporatists crave. He even went full Benghazi. And the “establishment”, in so far as it hasn’t been in the vanguard of militant corporatism (and no one has better credentials for that than Rove), has demonstrated absolute and craven fealty to the most bug-eyed ravings of their base.
Fabulous analysis, but I tend to doubt that this was what KKKarl Rover actually told his plutocrats and he performed the cashectomy!
Many of the self-made plutocrats had one Big Idea which they were able to parlay into a fortune. Often it’s one step from a scam like Issa’s car alarm shit or the fleecers of fools at mega-casinos like the Adelson turd. Of course many rely on crony capitalism and a mostly rigged game, which the gub’mint somehow enables at high cost.
The main goal of most of these Great American Success Stories is to ensure that they don’t have to operate in a competitive market and can use the market power of some enormous conglomerate to crush new entrants. And of course make sure gub’mint never makes a move to regulate whatever their scam or abuse may be.
But as a result of all this meritocratic success they know they are obvious geniuses who cannot fail to conquer in all they touch. Now they have a constitutional right to divert an ocean of money (often corporate) into throwing elections nationwide. A perfect stage for their bulging repulsive male egos. But they are finding that the election game is not (yet) as rigged as the fake “free markets” they exploited to get where they are. Their “investments” aren’t paying off as quickly as they imagined, apparently, and their investment adviser, KKKarl Rover & Co, seems to be staffed by dolts.
Well, what are their options to KKKarl Rover and Crossroads? Play the game themselves? Too complicated and ego risky, and I have to wonder what the Santorum and Newt Turdrich egocrats really thought their chances were of getting to wipe their ass in the Lincoln bedroom. Those guys seemed to be more examples of a fool and his money.
If there were a free market in Repub consultants for election rigging, then we’d start to see some new entrants challenging KKKarl Rover as a failed loser moron who will just succeed in throwing their hard-fleeced money down a rathole. You know, real competition. I haven’t seen that yet.
The other option is for Rover to tell them that more time and effort is needed in rigging the election machinery across the country, and that their 5 conservative male activists masquerading as “justices” are about to do that (again) by gutting the voting rights act (that should be coming out any day now). The investments will indeed pay off if more suppression of the electorate can be achieved. That’s the most likely patter of advice now.
As for this Gomer Gomez character, that’s a pretty tough sell in any set of circumstances, don’t you think? Another phoney Romneyite moneyman, who’s never been elected to shit, thinking he should start at the top, like all these egomaniac plutocrat turds. Running against one of the most experienced legislators after Waxman in a pretty Blue State. Try being the closer on that sale, haha.
“The takeaway from that should not be despondency and defeatism. It should be
skepticismRAGE. Karl Rove lost everywhere and everything. “…and should be literally crucified by right-wingers.But they’re just too fraidy-cat wimpy (see: “Al Quaida, Cowering before, by G.W. Bush & Co”) to take it to the next level, so they’re going to get taken again and again and again.
Thank goodness for that.
the fact that ANYONE still gives Rove money proves PT Barnum right.
The fact that anyone voted for Bachmann, Gohmert, Issa, etc. has already established that Barnum had it right.
“He spent possibly as much as $160 million of rich Republican donors’ money, and he had nothing to show for it.”
Of COURSE he had something to show for it: the fact that he separated $160 million from the fools that had it. Isn’t that was capitalism is all about?
Rich Republican donors just can’t face the fact they lost at their own game.
And he spent that $160 million on SOMETHING. I wonder if it’s possible to estimate the stimulative effect of Karl Rove.
“So many Republicans thought we would win the presidency last year that they are now unable to believe that we can win anything.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!
Man, I need a cigarette.
It’s been six full months since election night. The schadenfreude shouldn’t still feel this good.