Cancel The Trip To Canada Part II: The Echo Chamber
We are now in Day 5 of the end of the Romney Presidency, and
the post mortems are brutal.
Earlier this week, we talked about Romney’s early misstep on
immigration, but that’s apparently been solved.
In one of the truly Hallmark moments that are talismans of the upcoming
holiday season, several prominent conservatives, including the redoubtable Sean
Hannity, declared themselves great admirers of Latino culture. Antonio Banderas, Ricky Martin (he’s gay as
well!!!), Hernando Cortez. Big tent, Latino
vote in 2016? Done.
Still, that leaves us with 2012. What happened? People are asking questions.
The (really) big donors are wondering what became of their
money; many are accusing the Romney team of being incompetent. If you
are wealthy or a large corporation, you might try charitable endeavors and give
eight figures to a museum, a hospital or university and get some warm feelings
and your name on the marquee. But a
political contribution is an investment, pure and simple, and finding out you
spent badly is galling. No one wants to mark to market a losing bet. There has to be someone to fire here.
Speaking of firing people, Donald Trump has tweeted urging
the aggrieved to rise up, march on Washington, and take back their country from
the usurper. Mr. Trump is apparently
still clinging to the delusion that Obama lost the popular vote.
Darrell Issa is demanding an investigation of the “alleged
hurricane”. First witness, the actor
hired to play Chris Christie (the original having been sent to an internment
camp for the insufficiently loyal and overly ambitious.)
Sarah Palin is perplexed.
And, this priceless gem: “Obama voters chose dependency over
Liberty” (Steve King, R, Iowa)
But finally, there is Karl Rove, whose prime time Fox News
meltdown is being studied by Method Actors the world over.
Fear not for Karl.
Plenty of cash, a major gig on Fox, a regular “Opinion” piece in the
Wall Street Journal, and an industry all to himself. Life may be very bad right now, but Karl, it
gets better.
So, why did Karl blow?
Well, losing clearly hurts-particularly when you expect to win. There were a lot of people measuring the
drapes in the White House, and themselves for made-to-measure formalwear. Karl himself had reeled in and spent $300
Million Dollars, and sat at the very top of the punditocracy as well. He managed to find himself in a position not
unlike Silvio Berlusconi, both making and commenting on the news.
So, what went wrong? Well, those few minutes of drama on Fox probably tell you more than stories about ORCA, and the Obama turnout
machine, and Todd Akin, and John Sununu and all the other links that made up
the chain of the President’s re-election.
Karl Rove was the secret canary in the coalmine. It’s election night, and the man with his
finger in every pie, with access to every bit of exit-polling data, with his
vast network of contacts, disclosed and undisclosed, cannot believe Obama is
winning. It’s simply not possible. And
Karl is sure of it.
He was not alone. The
Denver Post compiled a map of predictions from 8 conservative commentators, all
of who predicted a Romney victory. Rove had it a fairly close 279/259, but four
of the eight (Dick Morris, George Will, Michael Barone, and Dean Chambers) had
Romney over 310. Interestingly enough,
the tightest race (275/263 Romney) was Leslie Sanchez’ call.
Add in folk like Newt (“Romney will dominate with over 300
electoral votes and 53% of the popular vote”), Glenn Beck (321-217), Larry
Kudlow (330 with a “sweep of the Midwest”), Alex Castellanos (about 300) and
Bill Bennett (305).
Some didn’t do numbers, but as the campaign waned, they all
closed ranks. The red meat guys like
Krauthammer and Jim McTague of Barron’s slashed away at Obama, while people
like Michael Gerson, Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan talked up Mitt’s
Presidential demeanor and Obama’s purported smallness.
A few of these folk aren’t experts, and some were just
parroting the party line, but most of them believed. They all repeated the same talking points:
the public polling data was inherently untrustworthy because the mainstream
media were in the tank for Obama, the weightings were skewed towards the
Democrats, Obama could never get the same minority turnout as he did in 2008,
Independents were overwhelmingly pro Romney.
The electorate demonstrated, rather decisively, that they
were all wrong. But why? It is clear that they didn’t trust anyone
outside their own circle. Selected
“reporters” were given diffuse data points by Neil Newhouse, the Romney
pollster. Gallup was rejected when it
showed an early Obama lead, and then embraced when it showed Romney with a good
margin. Many relied only on Rasmussen,
the public polling organization that mysteriously comes up with positive
numbers for the GOP is every election. McTauge dug up a retired Republican
pollster to come up with his forecast.
Dick Morris simply added roughly six points to Romney’s totals in each
state and declared him the landslide winner.
None of them, for a moment, could step outside the echo chamber to take
note of anything contrary.
They all wanted it in their gut, and they all engaged in
magical thinking to get there. The Obama
who bungled the first round of debt ceiling negotiations, and the first debate,
was the only thing they could focus on.
Unqualified, mean-spirited, unpatriotic, socialist, weak, etc. It was inconceivable to any of them that any
thinking person not on the dole could possibly consider voting for Obama.
And so they stayed within the zone, parroting each other’s
columns, quoting each other as authoritative, sourcing only from the
Romney-friendly. They closed their eyes
to everything else, and, in the words of Peggy Noonan “I suspect both Romney
and Obama have a sense of what’s coming, and it’s part of why Romney looks so
peaceful and Obama so roiled."
But Karl Rove is different.
The man doesn’t sleep. He’s not a
man of faith, he’s pure operator. It was
his ground game that pushed Bush over the top in 2000 and particularly in 2004,
where potential irregularities in Ohio (where Kerry won the exit polls by 4%,
but Bush somehow won the state) went uninvestigated. And when Karl Rove went nuts, and started
babbling about how he had people in Ohio on the phone and you couldn’t call the
election, a little ice went through my heart.
The Ohio Secretary of State, Jon Husted, has been at the forefront of
using any means possible, legal or extra legal, to insure a Romney
victory. Husted had been tinkering with
the rules, and the voter tabulation software, literally up to the day before
the election. Rove also had friends in Florida (not then called) where Governor
Scott was known to engage in some partisan electoral activities. In other battleground states, Republicans
controlled the voting apparatus. Romney
had four planes stocked with campaign workers and lawyers ready to take
off. Karl Rove knew something, and it
didn’t jive with what he was seeing on his screens. Maybe it was too late in the process, maybe
there were too many votes already counted and reported, maybe key operatives,
for whatever reason, couldn’t pull the trigger.
Maybe it was just shock. And
maybe Obama’s team was just a little too tough, and a little too smart, and had
a little too much turnout already public to make it a bridge too far for even
Rove’s people. We are just never going
to know for sure.
The echo chamber kept the GOP victory soundtrack going, even
in the face of late deterioration in Romney’s numbers. But Karl Rove knew better. He wasn’t counting on dreams.
Karl’s Edvard Munch moment; was it despair, or
disbelief?
MM
