What Happened

Too weary to think, so cuttin' n' pasting from post election analysis.  I've been reading quite a lot of it -- after all, when math isn't going well for you, why not wallow in schadenfreude, eh?  (I'll stop mañana, because The Boot That Is Headed for My Teeth is never far away, and dag, I was in Ohio in 2004.  I know how it feels.)  Anyway, the story that's emerging (and damn if my NYT didn't go missing this morning) is that the election results as they rolled in were a complete and utter shock to the Romney campaign, much less the prospective celebrants in Boston.  There are few things worse than losing, but thinking you're winning only to be losing is one of them.  The evidence was there and had been there in abundance.  The Romney campaign chose to ignore it.  I'll allow voters or partisans that delusion, but a battle-hardened campaign staff, a person who's run for high office before and top-drawer political Svengali's?  That's pretty astonishing.  I can't wait for the book, and rest assured it won't be written by Mark Halperin.

Anyway, much fascinating commentary to glean. Got this comment from Eunomia:

CitizenE says: November 10, 2012 at 11:03 am

Romney presented himself as the ultimate politician. A weather vane in other words, a hologram, an etch a sketch. Even among his supporters, those to the far right presupposed he would kowtow, as he did through the greater part of the campaign, even in his selection of running mate and his endorsement of Senate candidate Mourdock, to their interests if elected. Those more moderate would tell themselves in an act of self-mesmerization, he only did all those things because that is what all politicians have to do, and his truer perspective, a moderate one, would win the day once elected to govern. He presented nothing actual or concrete in terms of policy proposals, so no one could pin him down about anything, and to the degree he did discuss policy, on one day of the week he would say one thing, the very next day, the exact opposite. And he managed to insult a majority of the voting electorate with a political tourettes, nowhere better exemplified than out of the country, when he assured the city of London, a city that famously rebuilt itself after being bombed to smithereens, that they were of course likely to screw up the Olympics somehow (of course, this was, and here’s the kicker, based on his own experience–the ironies abound). Romney was a horrible candidate, that won one round out of the fifteen, the first debate when he caught the President napping by basically aggressively arguing for things he had heretofore opposed.
If our economy were not foundering, and if Barack Obama were white, Mitt Romney would have lost the election by double digits. He overperformed at the polls, not underperformed.