[Vision2020] Romney Is President

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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November 10, 2012
Romney Is President By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>

WASHINGTON

IT makes sense that Mitt Romney and his advisers are still gobsmacked by
the fact that they’re not commandeering the West Wing.

(Though, as “The Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver jested, the White
House might have been one of the smaller houses Romney ever lived in.)

Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all,
resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.

Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.

Maybe the group can retreat to a man cave in a Whiter House, with mahogany
paneling, brown leather Chesterfields, a moose head over the fireplace, an
elevator for the presidential limo, and one of those men’s club signs on
the phone that reads: “Telephone Tips: ‘Just Left,’ 25 cents; ‘On His Way,’
50 cents; ‘Not here,’ $1; ‘Who?’ $5.”

In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard core,
so redolent of country clubs and Cadillacs, it made little effort not to
alienate women. The election had the largest gender gap in the history of
the Gallup poll, with Obama winning the vote of single women by 36
percentage points.

As W.’s former aide Karen Hughes put it in Politico on Friday, “If another
Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific,
violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”

Some Republicans conceded they were “a ‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’
world” (although “Mad Men” seems too louche for a candidate who doesn’t
drink or smoke and who apparently dated only one woman). They also
acknowledged that Romney’s strategists ran a 20th-century campaign against
David Plouffe’s 21st-century one.

But the truth is, Romney was an unpalatable candidate. And shocking as it
may seem, his strategists weren’t blowing smoke when they said they were
going to win; they were just clueless.

Until now, Republicans and Fox News have excelled at conjuring alternate
realities. But this time, they made the mistake of believing their fake
world actually existed. As Fox’s Megyn Kelly said to Karl Rove on election
night, when he argued against calling Ohio for Obama: “Is this just math
that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”

Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and
moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more
they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to
force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and
gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that,
knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination
the boot.

The election about the economy also sounded the death knell for the
Republican culture wars.

Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told wives
how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time to cook
dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands not to
vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party was helping
to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception.

Just like the Bushes before him, Romney tried to portray himself as more
American than his Democratic opponent. But America’s gallimaufry wasn’t
knuckling under to the gentry this time.

If 2008 was about exalting the One, 2012 was about the disenchanted
Democratic base deciding: “We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change;
this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change. He has
not led the Obama army to leverage power, so now the army is leading Obama.

When the first African-American president was elected, his supporters
expected dramatic changes. But Obama feared that he was such a huge change
for the country to digest, it was better if other things remained status
quo. Michelle played Laura Petrie, and the president was dawdling on
promises. Having Joe Biden blurt out his support for gay marriage forced
Obama’s hand.

The president’s record-high rate of deporting illegal immigrants infuriated
Latinos. Now, on issues from loosening immigration laws to taxing the rich
to gay rights to climate change to legalizing pot, the country has leapt
ahead, pulling the sometimes listless and ruminating president by the hand,
urging him to hurry up.

More women voted than men. Five women were newly elected to the Senate, and
the number of women in the House will increase by at least three. New
Hampshire will be the first state to send an all-female delegation to
Congress. Live Pink or Dye.

Meanwhile, as Bill Maher said, “all the Republican men who talked about
lady parts during the campaign, they all lost.”

The voters anointed a lesbian senator, and three new gay congressmen will
make a total of five in January. Plus, three states voted to legalize
same-sex marriage. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights
Campaign, told The Washington Post’s Ned Martel that gays, whose donations
helped offset the Republican “super PACs,” wanted to see an openly gay
cabinet secretary and an openly gay ambassador to a G-20 nation.

Bill O’Reilly said Obama’s voters wanted “stuff.” He was right. They want
Barry to stop bogarting the change.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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