[Vision2020] Romney Is President

[Joe Campbell]

"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." True dat!

On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>wrote:

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