How Many Republicans Are Already Wondering How It Would Have Been Different If A "True" Conservative Had Been Their Nominee?

Many American voters are wondering why Romney didn't have George W. Bush at his convention in Tampa and why he doesn't use him in his campaign. People have actually told me it's disrespectful of the last Republican president and of all the people who voted for him. Clinton's masterful participation in Obama's Charlotte convention brought it into even greater focus. As Greg Sargent noted in his Washington Post column Saturday, "the Obama campaign believes that true undecided voters see Clinton as a kind of “referee” figure on the economy-- hence the ad’s back-to-back footage of Clinton and Obama both making the case that electing a Republican president would take us back to the policies that got us into trouble in the first place. Clinton will play a major role in trying to get swing voters to feel that things are indeed recovering."

But Romney has no time for George W. Bush. He's using his spokespeople to go all-in for vicious racism and full on delusional divisiveness. As former Bush speech-writer and advisor David Frum put it this weekend, while discussing 2016, Obama's America, "Dinesh D'Souza nicely sums up the issue in this election: black people want your house and Obama will give it to them."


Friday night many people noted that when Clinton left the White House to Bush, the Dow was at 10,587 (on Bush's inauguration day). When Bush left, Obama got a Dow at 7,949.09 (on his inauguration day). Friday the Dow closed at 13,593.37. Just stating this makes right-wing financial nerds go into orbit... but, whatever it means or doesn't mean, it's a cold hard fact, that the Fox bubble mentality can't erase.

For all the hundreds of millions of dollars sociopathic billionaires like mobster Sheldon Adelson and John Birchers David and Charles Koch have been shoveling into Romney's campaign, the whole operation is already teetering on the brink of collapse. Journalist Dave Weigel sniffed around a meeting of the Republican non-financial base over the weekend, the annual Values Voter Summit-- which Ayn Romney withdrew from at the last minute-- but which Paul Ryan found himself as one of the headline speakers. One of the dominant figures of aggressive right-wing bigotry and hatred is Bryan Fischer-- and he didn't like Ryan's attempt to turn the HateFest into a pep rally for the disintegrating Romney campaign. Dave talked with disappointed homophobe Fischer after Ryan's speech.

"He didn’t say one single word about marriage,” says Fischer. “This is the safest environment in the United States of America to talk about marriage. I’ve got to believe that that came from on top. Marriage won 61-39 in North Carolina-- in 2012! That’s in a state that President Obama won in 2008. Marriage is a winner. It’s just a mystery to me that they won’t touch this thing."

He shrugs. "Mitt Romney should be leading by 10 or 15 points. The fact that he’s not is Mitt Romney’s problem. It’s because he’s run such a lackluster campaign that’s been so vague on ideas."

Weigel talks with other right-wing activists who go into greater depth about what Frum exposed-- that the whole GOP enterprise is based on racism and hatred of poor people-- that Obama and the Democrats have made people dependent on the government. And then there's the lunatic from Georgia in the tri-corner hat, William Temple: "We picked probably the weakest candidate we could. Someone like a Herman Cain or a Michele Bachmann would have ’em fired up." No doubt. And John Heilemann had an even worse prognosis for the flailing Mormons and corporate executives running Romney's operation: Desperate.

For Romney, the first blaring sign that his reaction to the assault on the consulate in Benghazi had badly missed the mark was the application of the phrase “Lehman moment” to his press availability on the morning of September 12. Here was America under attack, with four dead on foreign soil. And here was Romney, defiantly refusing to adopt a tone of sobriety, solemnity, or seriousness, instead attempting to score cheap political points, doubling down on his criticism from the night before that the Obama administration had been “disgraceful” for “sympathiz[ing]” with the attackers-- criticism willfully ignoring the chronology of events, the source of the statement he was pillorying, the substance of the statement, and the circumstances under which it was made.

That the left heaped scorn on Romney’s gambit came as no surprise. But the right reacted almost as harshly-- with former aides to John McCain, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan creating an on-the-record chorus of disapproval, while countless other Republican officials and operatives chimed in anonymously. “This is worse than a Lehman moment,” says a senior GOP operative. “McCain made mistakes of impulsiveness, but this was a deliberate and premeditated move, and it totally revealed Romney’s character; it revealed him as completely craven and his candidacy as serving no higher purpose than his ambition.”

This bipartisan condemnation would have been bad enough in itself, but its negative effects were amplified because it fed into a broader narrative emerging in the media across the ideological spectrum: that Romney is losing, knows he is losing, and is starting to panic. This story line is, of course, rooted in reality, given that every available data point since the conventions suggests that Obama is indeed, for the first time, opening up a lead outside the margin of error nationally and in the battleground states. So the press corps is now on the lookout for signs of desperation in Romney and is finding them aplenty-- most vividly in his reaction to Libya, but even before that, in his post-convention appearance on Meet the Press, where he embraced some elements of Obamacare (only to have his campaign walk back his comments later the same day).

The peril to Romney’s candidacy of being seen through the lens of desperation can’t be overstated. The paramount strategic objective of any campaign is to maintain control of the candidate’s public image-- and if the media filter begins to view his every move through a dark or unflattering prism, things can quickly spin out of control, to a point where nothing he says or does is taken at face value. “Romney is in a very bad place,” says another senior Republican strategist. “He’s got the Republican intelligentsia second-guessing him, publicly and privately. The party base has never trusted him and thinks that everything bad it ever thought about him is being borne out now. And he’s got the media believing that he can’t win. He’s right on the edge of a self-fulfilling downward spiral.”

Even Herman Cain might have done better. In 2016, I bet the Republicans aren't going to saddle themselves with another Wall Street-approved Establishment shill like McCain or Romney. Next time they'll want to go down fighting for someone they really believe in... how about an Allen West-Jan Brewer ticket? Think how happy the Values Voter Summit would be over that one! Some pundits are interpreting polls to prove that severely right-wing voters have already abandoned Romney and will sit the election out. "The numbers," writes Tom Dougherty, "are clear that self-described conservatives are not supporting Governor Romney in sufficient numbers to win the election. Additionally there is anecdotal evidence that Evangelicals and Tea Party supporters are not embracing the Romney-Ryan ticket at levels that would be expected.

Obama has a 7% greater support level among liberals than Romney has among conservatives, and a 6.8% favorable delta among likely voters who are “bolting from the base.” Without any demographic adjustment, using the raw data from the polls in those five states, Obama has an average lead of 2.5%.

If conservatives were supporting Governor Romney at the same level liberals are supporting President Obama, without any change to the level of support from self-described moderates, Romney could have a 4% plus lead in five states that have a total of 73 electoral votes

With my current electoral map showing Obama with 237 votes and Romney with 222, 73 votes is the ballgame, and by a comfortable margin.