A Different Kind of Autopsy

[libertpaulian]

A DIFFERENT KIND OF AUTOPSY
The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party



“FOX News can now project that President Obama has won the crucial battleground state of Ohio,” reported Bret Baier, who was sitting next to an equally stunned Megyn Kelly.

How could this have happened?!  Romney had gained so much momentum in the past couple weeks.  The unemployment rate was still high.  Job creation hadn’t surpassed 2007 levels yet.  The Middle East was still unstable.  Obamacare was an unmitigated disaster, and its full rollout wasn’t even scheduled until next October.

FOX News had cut to a reporter who was in Chicago, reporting on the obviously jubilant crowd at McCormick Place, and when the cameras had returned to FOX Headquarters in New York, the inevitable was reported…



“FOX News can now project that President Obama will win re-election, and Mitt Romney’s path to the Presidency has been foreclosed due to his loss of Ohio,” Megyn Kelly reported.

“Because now we can project that Barack Obama will win Ohio and Oregon,” Baier piped in, carrying an obviously somber tone.  “We can now definitively say that President Barack Obama will be re-elected.  Mitt Romney will come up as a loser in this race.  Republicans thought they had an amazing shot to take down a President who had high unemployment rates, a nation split over his health care law, they thought this was their time, but this is not the time.  Democrats fought back, and the Obama campaign fought an aggressive effort to paint Romney as a corporate raider, and it worked,” Baier said, more matter-of-factly than anything.

However, what Baier said was more profoundly true than he realized.

“Republicans will look back, starting tomorrow, and wonder what happened.”

"What happened?!" indeed.  Not only had the GOP lost the White House, but they had lost two seats in the Senate and eight seats in the House of Representatives.  The only silver lining to their miserable night was that they picked up the governor’s mansion in North Carolina.  The candidate was Pat McCrory, the center-right mayor of rapidly-liberalizing and diversifying Charlotte.  He ran on a message of fiscal responsibility and good government, which helped the GOP win back the office they hadn’t held in 20 years.


FINAL RESULTS


Presidential



President Barack Obama/Vice President Joe Biden: 332
Former Governor Willard Mitt Romney/Congressman Paul Ryan: 206

Senatorial



Democrats: 55 (+2)
Republicans: 45 (-2)

Congressional

Republicans: 234 (-8)
Democrats: 201 (+8)

Gubernatorial



Republicans: 33 (+1)
Democrats: 17 (-1)

Mitt
November 6, 2012



What in the world went wrong?!  He hit all the right buttons…Obamacare was bad for the nation.  Unemployment was still high.  Something needed to be done about immigration.  Russia is not to be trusted.  Pulling out of Iraq may have been too premature.

Then again, there were the weaknesses.  He shouldn’t have made the stupid gaffes. "Corporations are people, my friend!"  "I like to fire people."  "I had the chance to pull together a Cabinet as Governor of Massachusetts, and the applicants seemed to be men…[the women’s groups] brought us binders full of women."  He shouldn’t have allowed Obama/Biden and the DNC to define the GOP agenda early on.  Maybe he should have vetted Paul Ryan a bit more carefully.  Akin in Missouri and Mourdock in Indiana sure didn’t help matters either.  Oh, and why in the hell did the GOP have to keep addressing abortion and gay marriage?  There were too many possibilities to count for the losses that ran through his head, apart from the obvious one: He ran an atrocious campaign for the political climate he was running in.  He ran a 1992-style campaign in an era of social media and political progress.

When Romney’s top aide came up to him and said that Obama had won Ohio and Iowa, was poised to win Virginia, and virtually tied with him in Florida, he knew it was all over.  The worst part of it all?  He didn’t have a concession speech prepared.  Hell, he didn’t even have an outline of one.  Romney was so sure that the sluggish economic conditions, the polarization over Obamacare, and the closeness in the polls would be his saving graces in the end.  However, his overconfidence turned out to be his downfall.

With the weight of losing his quest for the Presidency a second time and his third shot at a federal office, Mitt went up to Ann, who in turn gave him a loving kiss and embrace.

“You gave it all you got.  Given what you were up against, I’d say you did great.”

Governor Romney had initially decided not to immediately concede Ohio, but after an hour had passed and a huge dump of votes from Cuyahoga County had come in, he knew there was no way he was going to win this thing.  Even if he somehow miraculously won Ohio, there was still the business of Virginia and Florida, both of which were leaning in the President’s direction.  It was all over.  He had to concede now.

Mitt turned to his media aide and told him, “Give a brief release to the media that I’ll be speaking to my supporters shortly.”

With that, Mitt got out his laptop and began scrambling some words together that would at least give some semblance of a concession speech.  As he was typing whatever garbled nonsense popped up on the screen, he thought back to what Bret Baier said earlier and found himself repeating the words out loud.

“What happened?!”