It's the platform, stupid

Because I am very busy professionally, and because life is too short generally, I don't have time to research into what the rightwing media must be making of things like this:



This image, pulled from Huffington Post, shows in map form a running compilation of state and national polls that indicate the direction the Presidential race is headed today, and it updates constantly. There are many other poll aggregators online--I just happened to choose the Huff Post one because it's better-looking and easier to read than most. But its conclusions are in line with all the rest. It shows Obama leading with a likely electoral vote total of 332 to Rom's 191 with only NC's 15 votes still in the toss-up category (but, amazingly, with a 76% probability of an Obama lead even in that state that he won but just by the slimmest of margins, in 2008). 270 is the winning number, so Obama even has a lot of room to decline from this and still pull out a victory. 

I assume that the rightwing mediasphere is doing two predictable things: 1) blaming the leftwing mediasphere for distorting the whole thing in Obama's favor; and 2) turning its guns against its own candidate for not running a crazy enough hardline wingnut Teabagger-style campaign. Because, as you know, being a huge crackpot wins you elections, right? That's exactly the case that Bachmann and Santorum made for their own candidacies against Romney earlier this year, and...oh. Nevermind. They lost, totally humiliated by a dull and patrician Mormon who, not that many years ago purported to be pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights. Hmmm. While I don't go directly to rightwing media sources for insight, I have recently heard rightwingers quoted elsewhere making assertions that should be rather alarming for the GOP going forward, if not for the Rom crew this year. Some GOP wonk whose name escapes me said on NPR a couple weeks ago that this would be the last election where their candidate could try to base victory solely on the white-guy vote because demographics will make that impossible very quickly, which is probably some part of why VA appears lost to them for the second time in a row and why NC might be lost a second time. An appeal to new voters is prescribed. But Senator Graham of SC made the eyebrow-raising remark recently that there are not enough "angry white guys" to keep the GOP in business nationally much longer. Oddly, his implicit solution to that problem seems not involve appealing to news kinds of voters but rather literally generating more angry white people by stepping up the reproduction of the white race. In other words, stick with the strategy of being the angry-white-guy party but just increase that share of the population somehow. Then I also heard someone else say that if this Rom thing doesn't pan out this year and goes the McCain way, then this is the last time the GOP is going to fuck away its Presidential chances by running a "moderate." Next time, they're uncorking the serious craziness! 

This all suggests a lot of worry on their part about why they just can't manage to beat Obama. After all, they have spent most of four years building an image of the President as a socialist demon, a Nazi, a radical Muslim, someone born in Kenya with "post-Colonial" views, and other kinds of monsters. This they have compounded with specious claims about Obama's legislative and economic record, and they have arrived at a picture of an incredibly vulnerable, more-vulnerable-than-Carter, incumbent President that is easily beatable. But their problem is that they appear to actually believe their own cartoonish picture of the President. This is the problem with True Believers. Political calculation is one thing, and political hypocrisy is another, and I can respect both as strategies when deployed by people who know that's what they're doing. But people who actually believe crazy shit are dangerous to themselves and others because they can't recognize their own lies anymore. This time, it's totally backfiring on the Republicans and will continue to do so for a long time unless they start to understand this fact: it is not the liberal media and it is not even your douchey, lame-ass Prez candidate who is undoing your electoral prospects this year. It's your cynical, bleak, lousy, depressing, prejudiced, jaundiced, hate-based, and totally suck-ass platform of dumb policy ideas and antiquated attitudes that is failing to win you this election. Go ahead and run with that next time, too, if you don't believe it. In fact, go ahead and make it even worse next time!

I'm a gay Democrat and I like seeing those losers lose! Especially this year!