Where are we in the Romney campaign? Denial? Anger? Bargaining? Depression? Acceptance? We seem to be in a mish-mash of all five. Romney is denying that there's anything wrong with his campaign. Republican pooh-bahs are angry that he won't take their sage advice. News media blowhards are bargaining that the debates will keep his campaign (and their jobs) alive. The Republican rank-and-file are getting really depressed. Nobody yet (except for me) accepts that Romney is one of the walking dead and these last five weeks of the election are purely pro forma. Unless in the October 3 debate Barack Obama tells the nation that he really is (1) a crypto-Muslim, (2) Kenyan, (3) Indonesian, (4) Saul Alinsky's love child, (5) a Communist, (6) a Socialist, (7) a Liberal, (8) an illegal alien, (9) Satan's little helper, and (10) the anti-Christ, the campaign is finito. Obama wins; Romney loses and takes the entire Republican ticket down with him. You don't win a national campaign in the last weeks of the election. You win months before election day when you persuade people that you are a serious candidate with serious things to say. Maybe it takes months for your message to settle in--Americans are very slow thinkers--but you lay the foundation for victory a long time before you claim it on election night.
Romney is a house built on sand; he has no foundation. He ran as the default candidate. You don't like Obama; then by default you'll vote for Romney. He made no case for himself; he proposed nothing; he offered no vision. You'd think that somebody who has spent his life in corporations at least would have adopted that fatuous corporate happy-talk about goals and aspirations and team-work. But no, Romney can't manage even that inane level of discourse. It's just: here I am, vote 4 me.
Nope, the nation ain't buying what Romney's peddling. They know a knock-off when they see one. He's fake. Not just skin-deep fake. He's fake all the way to the bone. He lies. He distorts. He flips and he flops. He says whatever the moment seems to require. There's simply nothing genuine about Mitt Romney. Republican primary voters smelled the stink of fakery he emits; that's why they didn't vote for him; he won the nomination solely because he had more money than anybody else and outlasted his poorly funded opponents. Can't do that in a national election. Not even when the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson are your sugar daddies. A national candidate has to have substance. Shadows have more substance than Mitt Romney.
This election is over and done with at the presidential level. Congress is another question. Romney's failure is poisoning Republicans all across the country. The Senate, once thought to be a Republican chamber in waiting, has now moved beyond them. Contests that a month ago were no-contest are now heating up with Republicans fighting to keep their own seats. The House is in play. I'm out on a limb here: I think the Democrats will take the House with a tiny 5-7 seat majority. Some governorships and statehouses will fall to the Democrats. On the Wednesday morning after election night, we'll wake up in a country that has only one national party, the Democrat Party, and a regional party, the Republican Party, that is quarantined to the states of the Old Confederacy and a scattering of small central and western states. The Republicans are trapped by their base of angry, embittered white males. The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon is now their prison.
It's possible that we've seen the last Republican president. The party may shatter into two: one party for the reactionary fundamentalist whites-only kooks; one party for secular conservatives. Neither would be a national party capable of winning elections and governing. Looks like we're in for a generation of Democrats in the White House. Given a party full of Todd Akins and Michele Bachmanns, that's not such a bad future. If you're inclined to disagree, pause for a few moments and ruminate about this: President Rick Santorum.
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