Posted: 11/10/12 13:53
by Dave Mindeman
Things I wonder about....
How does a CIA director keep a secret in a place where its their job to expose secrets????
If Texas wants to secede, can we just let it?
Do Florida's SOS and election officials need a remedial voting education?
When the Romney campaign named their GOTV system ORCA, were they thinking of a killer whale or a beached whale?
Does John Kline know he can come out now?
Should conservative bloggers be forced to give one massive apology to Nate Silver?
In what universe would self-deportation have been considered to be a good thing?
Legitimate rape. (Nothing more to say...just still wondering where that can possibly come from.)
When GOP does its debriefing, will they find anything they did right?
When a State Party bankrupts itself, has a major sex scandal, holds no state wide office, loses both Houses of the Legislature, loses a Congressional seat and nearly a second, nominates a US Senate candidate that loses by 30+ percent, and loses the electoral votes by 8 points....how does that Party have the gall to tell us what the voters said?
Just wondering....
We are witness to a grand miscalculation on the part of party elites. There are loads of reasons why this happened. The national party had their spreadsheets and calculated the electoral results using the myopic focus of a single goal--"beating Obama." The GOP took the hit in MN and elsewhere.
The party dismissed the calculating and 'boots on the ground' effort put forward by the coalition of fiscal libertarians drawn from both sides of the aisle. Elites and media went out of their way to dismiss and ridicule fiscal libertarians calling them "Paulites" without the recognition that Paul was building a powerful coalition of fiscal libertarians and never expected to win the Presidency. They were burned in effigy at the convention. The dems Primary was no different. The Governor couldn't run in his own endorsement process and still win. Expect the next election to see the GOP run candidates in the primary that don't even pay lip service to the caucus process. Expect the demise of the caucus process in MN.
The miscalculation on the part of the GOP related, in part, to the marriage amendment. Those in favor were going to show up at the polls anyway. Instead of a rally of support, they empowered the opposition to show up in droves and organize. Their own coalition was divided because of it. Many of the traditional supporters didn't even cast a vote for a President or voted for a third party candidate they could, in good conscience, support. Expect gay marriage in MN in 2013. I've heard rumbles about the ink drying on bills to move the measure soon.
Somehow, abortion made its way back into the debates. Really? This is so 1990s. That debate is long over. Too many elites view women as voters with reproductive organs, no brains, and overwhelmingly vote democrat. While that message is never articulated, women's intuition tells them it's there and they run. Bringing up reproductive rights again only serves to divide coalitions along fiscal responsibility and the role of government planks.
State party leadership was more interested in their own run for Governor than running the state. Remember how Zellers was voting No on the stadium and hoped it passed? Pure hubris. Of the 19 seats that turned red to blue in the MN house, 13 voted for the stadium. The caucus took some heat for that support, which contributed to the blood bath in this election.
Democrats rightly framed the Voter ID amendment as having the possiblity of disenfranchising their constituents at the polls. No voter on either side of the aisle views that favorably. Voting is sacred ground in this country. Again, divide and conquer, the democrats win.
The money spent on the amendments sucked up all the oxygen in the room. The Dems can now run the place like a banana republic dictatorship. Watch them unceremoniously place their heads through the noose, and tighten the rope around their own necks--all while balancing on the 'majority' tight-rope.
I don't hear a fat lady singing. At least not yet.