Romney Is No New York Doll

Greg Whiteley's film, Mitt debuted at Sundance in Utah Friday. The documentary is a very up-front and personal look at Romney's two failed attempts at the presidency. At the bottom of this post is a trailer that will give you a good feel for the movie, which was made by director Greg Whiteley. According to Byron York, Whiteley's film New York Doll, had impressed Romney enough for him to grant Whiteley the kind of access needed to make this kind of movie. Don't start wondering which of the two Dolls' album is Romney's favorite. The 2005 film "brilliantly chronicled a broken-down rock musician's conversion to Mormonism." It was the Mormonism part, of course, that drew Romney, not the idea of the band who wrote "Trash," "Jet Boy," "Vietnamese Baby," or "Who Are the Mystery Girls?"

Martin Longman explains why so few Americans will actually ever see Whiteley's movie about Romney. "The man told too many lies." Steve Benen documented them and by late August "it was up to 533.

It was just incredible how frequently and shamelessly Mitt Romney made outright false assertions. And I think forcing nearly half the country to defend that kind of behavior has a crippling effect on the moral character of America. It’s very similar to the way the GOP’s standards were permanently damaged the moment that they had defend Sarah Palin as an acceptable potential president. Suddenly, it was not just acceptable, but virtuous, to be ignorant about foreign affairs. Reading the papers became something only snobs do. It was okay to treat a vice-presidential debate the way you’d treat a beauty pageant.

When Mitt Romney decided to run a campaign built entirely on mendacious statements, he destroyed any vestige of truthfulness in his party. I was so happy to see him lose and was amazed that he’d managed to lie even to himself about his prospects for success. If this movie portrays him as somehow honorable, that is just one more lie. Call it the cherry on top.

Whiteley (l) and Romney ® at Sundance

That isn't the narrative that Whiteley addressed and it sure isn't the narrative that Byron York expounded on in the Washington Examiner.

For viewers who follow politics closely, especially for Republicans who desperately wanted to defeat Barack Obama, there is a revelation in Mitt that is not just unexpected but deeply disheartening. At a critical moment in the campaign-- the two weeks in October encompassing the first and second general election debates-- the Romney portrayed in Mitt struggled with a nagging pessimism and defeatism, unable to draw confidence even from a decisive initial debate victory over President Obama. Deep down inside, the Romney seen onscreen in Mitt seems almost resigned to losing to Obama in those crucial showdowns.

It didn't start well. Team Romney went into the first debate bruised and reeling from the controversy over Romney's "47 percent" remarks. Mitt includes a scene from Romney's debate preparation in which Sen. Rob Portman, playing the president, used the controversy to nail Romney in a quiet but devastating way. The "47 percent" statement was so damaging, Portman/Obama argued, not only because it was made behind closed doors-- and thus represented Romney's true feelings-- but also because it was the foundation of Romney's policy proposals. Romney didn't have a very good answer.

...The film picks up on Election Day, with Romney making a final campaign swing. Flying into Boston for the night, he looked down and saw the city's traffic at a standstill. Someone said lots of roads were closed. Why? Romney asked. "The Secret Service has everything shut down as if you're the President of the United States," he was told.

"Queen for a day," Romney said to no one in particular, almost bitterly, and certainly without a trace of a smile.

That night, at his hotel suite, Romney was pessimistic after a string of early-state losses. When he heard the race was very close in Florida, he immediately saw bad news. "If it's a squeaker in Florida-- then Ohio, there's just no way."

Ann Romney mentioned that the campaign had had hopes for Michigan and Pennsylvania-- hopes that weren't turning out. Then Romney mentioned Wisconsin. "Oh-- that's probably gone, too," he said. And it was.

As defeat settled in, Romney discussed what to say in a concession speech-- which, for all his natural pessimism, Romney had not considered ahead of time. And it was in that moment that some of Romney's passion about the race finally came out, far from the view of voters and television cameras. Stevens suggested that the losing candidate should play an almost "pastoral" role, "soothing" the American people after a long and divisive campaign.

"I don't think it is a time for soothing and everything's fine," said Romney. "I think this is a time for [saying], 'This is really serious, guys. This is really serious.'"

"To get up and soothe is not my inclination," an obviously anguished Romney continued. "I cannot believe that [Obama] is an aberration in the country. I believe we're following the same path of every other great nation, which is we're following greater government, tax rich people, promise more stuff to everybody, borrow until you go over a cliff. And I think we have a very high risk of reaching the tipping point sometime in the next five years. And the idea of saying 'it's just fine, don't worry about it'-- no, it's really not."

Given what has come before it in the film-- Romney's defeatism in the debates-- the scene leaves the impression that perhaps in his heart of hearts Romney never really believed he could win. That also seems the message of one of the last scenes of "Mitt," the day after the election, when Romney addressed staff at his Boston campaign headquarters. The old lack of confidence came out again as Romney suggested he never felt comfortable in the race. He passed on something someone at headquarters had told him: "In some ways, we kind of had to steal the Republican nomination. Our party is Southern, evangelical and populist. And you're Northern, and you're Mormon, and you're rich. And these do not match well with our party."

A candidate who did not believe he could beat the president in debate, who always felt second-best to his father, who believed the country was moving away from him, and who didn't even feel at home in his own party. The Romney campaign faced many uphill battles in the 2012 campaign. Mitt shows us that some of the most intense were in the candidate's mind.

Over the long run, history will forget Willard Romney entirely. The impact of the New York Dolls will be remembered for far longer and will always be more important.

In a real dog-bites-man story, it seems Republicans want to see their party become (gasp) MORE CONSERVATIVE!

To hear Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz (right) tell Fix-master Chris Cillizza the story of the big push made by party bigwigs (knowing how bad Willard Romney sucked) to persuade NJ Gov. Chris Christie to jump into the 2012 GOP presidential sweepstakes, go here.

"[E]ven in the face of calls for more moderation, it should come as no surprise if Republicans actually move in the other direction, sharpening their conservative positions."

-- Sean Sullivan, in a washingtonpost.com blogpost
today, "Republicans want their party to
change -- just not the way you think"

by Ken

This is a story Dan B uncovered while researching his book on the 2012 presidential election, Collision 2012. As Chris C notes, it's well known that there was a breakfast at which GOP insiders encouraged New Jersey's finest to jump into the race, there doesn't seem to have been any previous reporting of just how serious that attempt was.

Clearly it wasn't ideology that was on the minds of those GOP heavy hitters, although it can't have escaped anyone's notice that New Jersey Fats would have been unencumbered by the cripplingly imbecilic crackpottery that had become the party line in the struggle to the death being waged for the hearts and minds of 2012 GOP convention delegates. No, those power brokers were filled with dread at the thought of Willard atop their ticket because he was, well, so extremely Willard.

Not everyone in the GOP leadership got it, of course. For me the most enduring image of Election Night 2012 is the forced transformation of party insiders' smug confidence of victory into seething, uncomprehending rage as election results quickly vindicated those GOP heavy hitters' dread. Who can forget Karl Rove making a public spectacle of himself live on Fox Noise trying to bully the cold hard facts into submission?

As a result, this time for once it was trounced Republicans rather than Democrats who were left to puzzle out the bitter lessons of their electoral smackdown. Did anyone really believe the 'phants would be any better at it than their eternally clueless donkey counterparts?

No matter what happens on Election Day, you can count on Democratic insiders to divine the lesson that what they need to do is be more spinelessly mush-mouthed and fake-Republican-esque. And no matter what heppens on Election Day, can we not can count on the Republican faithful to conclude that what they need to do is be more conservative?

Note that I say "the Republican faithful," not "Republican insiders." Republican insiders not only can but must be more pragmatic, because insiders understand that winning elections is important. There's not much fun in being on the insider of nothing. And in the months since that dark night in November, we here at DWT, like observers everywhere, have been observing the surprisingly wide range of GOP notables who have said surprisingly candidly that the party can't survive by hermetically sealing itself into a tinier and tinier space on the farther and farther Right.

Which undoubtedly has a lot to do with why Governor Christie's name figures so prominently in speculation about 2016. He's the Unwillard. Of course this has to do in part with the mere fact that Big Chris can walk and talk and breathe like an actual human being, a standard that none of the top 100 2012 GOP presidential candidates could begin to reach. (Think: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum. Need I go on? Okay, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, Minister Hucksterbee. And I haven't even mentioned Big Willard.) But a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're living in the 21st century, not the 15th.

But again, this is the perception of some of the less blinded party insiders, not the mindset of the party faithful. Which leads me to wonder what was going on in the head of whoever wrote the head (if not the author himself) on Sean Sullivan's washingtonpost.com "Fix"-blog post today, "Republicans want their party to change -- just not the way you think."

Republican voters say it's time for the party to change. But simply moderating the GOP's views is not the prescription they are offering. In fact, what they want is just the opposite, a more conservative Republican Party.

On the heels of two straight presidential election defeats, Republicans have been doing a whole lot of soul searching, with a broad consensus emerging that the party must retool to be viable in the future. It's going to be a complicated process, a new Pew Research Center survey shows. The poll indicates there is remarkably little agreement over how the party should remake itself, with GOP voters split over whether the party needs to move to the right or left on several hot button issues.

By a 54 percent to 40 percent margin, Republicans and GOP-leaning independent voters want party leaders to be more conservative rather than moderate. This makes intuitive sense -- most Republicans themselves identify as conservative. But it runs counter to the takeaway that most Americans, the media and even some leading Republican figures have been trumpeting in the aftermath of 2012, which has been that the GOP needs to move to the middle, away from right-leaning views on social issues seen as a hindering the party’s efforts with independent voters.

"So how to change?" Sean asks. He notes that 67 percent of Republican leaners say the party "needs to address major problems," and 59 percent say the party "needs to reconsider some positions." But there, he says, is "where the consensus ends."

Sean goes on to break down some specific issues -- same-sex marriage, abortion, government spending -- drawing on this chart from the Pew study:

And he points out that Republicans, unlike other groups -- Democrats, Independents, and "All Americans" -- included in the results of a December 2012 Washington Post-ABC News poll, believe that what their party needs is not "better policies" but "a better leader to communicate." (Yeah, right, that's what was wrong with the 2012 GOP presidential field, with Michele and T-Paw and Herman and all the Ricks. They just needed better communications skills!)

Finally Sean notes "another finding in the Pew poll that could nudge Republicans to the right, or at least keep them from moving to the left": the fervor of the Teabaggers.

While tea party-aligned supporters make up just 37 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, they make up about half of the primary electorate (those who say they always vote in primary elections). In 2012, tea party supporters made up an average of 61 percent of the electorate in Republican primary contests contests where network exit polls were conducted.

The result? More conservative Republicans nominees up and down the ballot.

True that, Sean, and I guess this as well:

You may have heard a lot in recent months about how the Republican Party should moderate its ways in the wake of the 2012 election. But this much is clear: Most Republicans don’t want it.

Still, let's have a quick show of hands: all those who didn't already know this. Anyone? Just Sean, I guess. File this one under "dog bites man."

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Right-wingers at sea both literally and figuratively, says Richard Cohen

"Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land."

-- Richard Cohen, in his WaPo column "Republicans adrift"

by Ken

This observation by columnist Cohen is prompted by a pair of right-wing ocean voyages: the famous one in 2008 when loony tunes gathered by The Weekly Standard headed north to Alaska and made a shocking discovery, and one just this past November, organzied by National Review, when the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam chugged out of Fort Lauderdale carrying a shipload of crazies who no doubt booked passage thinking they would be celebrating the Great Triumph over the Devil Obama but instead cruised the Caribbean licking their wounds.

Cohen draws on a report by New York magazine's Joe Hagan who went along as a paying customer and then wrote about it. "To his considerable credit," says Cohen, "Hagan abstained from shooting these particular fish in their barrel and instead portrayed them as dismayed and somewhat disoriented refugees from an America that used to be."

There were, it seems startling revelations -- at least startling to this crowd. Revelations like this one from a Romney economic aviser, Kevin Hassett: "Minorities came out like crazy. White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-Americans voting than they expected." {Yes, this is apparently a direct quote. Cohen notes, "Who 'they' might be is not exactly clear.") Or there was this prescription from GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen ("who thought better of Romney chances than did the voters"), with regard to those weird minority voters who came out of nowhere: "You show them that you really care. You talk to them as grown-ups on a range of issues." There ya go, old white guys! Easy-peasy!

A menacing sense of foreboding permeates Hagan's article. The passengers both fear and hate Barack Obama. To them, he is the nightmare president -- allegedly alien in outlook, morality and economic approach. An economic cataclysm is imminent, and the nation has wandered into an icky swamp of immorality. "I'm afraid," a passenger told Hagan. "Write that. We're scared to death."

I chortle not. I was once a National Review subscriber, although never a conservative. In its infancy and for years afterward, the magazine was bursting with ideas. The writing was often fresh and engaging -- Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne and Garry Wills were contributors -- and liberalism, to which I also subscribed, was already showing signs of intellectual exhaustion.

Now, though, it is conservatism that is both intellectually exhausted and nearly indefensible. It is the movement of the ideologically ossified, of gun zealots and homophobes, of the immigrant-phobic and the adamantly selfish. It insists that government must be small (an impossibility!), education must be local (a stupidity) and that debt, no matter what the reason, is immoral and reckless. The movement has lost its reliable monster. Godless communists have been replaced by the church ladies of Planned Parenthood. History giggles.

Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land. In 2008, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker wrote about the voyage of the M.S. Oosterdam, which chugged up the Alaska coast carrying a tour group from the Weekly Standard. At Juneau, conservative notables, including Fox News commentator Fred Barnes, lunched with the governor, Sarah Palin -- and, as men often do on shore leave, swooned. Her remarkable qualities -- "how smart Palin was," according to Barnes -- and her considerable beauty left most of them a bit addled. A buzz went up. The zeitgeist was alerted. In due course, she was John McCain's running mate. Only the voters saved us from a debacle.

The National Review cruise encountered no such star of tomorrow. Instead, the emphasis was on yesterday. These passengers were people who had -- and maybe still have -- a sense of possession about America. It was once theirs. It once looked like them and acted like them and thought like them. No more. In more ways than one, they were out to sea.

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Bye-bye, Willard! Don't let the door slam behind you!

I grabbed this snippet off of washingtonpost.com's afternoon update yesterday. It's one of those cases where I didn't feel any great need to read the actual story but surely did enjoy the image conjured -- of Republicans of all stripes waving into the distance and wishing their decommissioned standard-bearer a heartfelt "good riddance" as he fades off toward the horizon borne by the Five Mini-Willards, all of them intoning the famous Romney Savage War-Wimp Chant, "Heck, no, we won't go!" -- to war, that is. -- Ken

"Romney seems to think that newsletters and meetings and money can solve the Republican Party's problems, that it can win the White House when it doesn’t have to run against a President who's bribing voters. He doesn't see that he's the problem: what he believes, what he says. . . .

"[P]art of his problem throughout this campaign, and the one before it, is that he's never been good at disguising his lack of respect for the American electorate. His changing positions, his evasions about them, his misrepresentations -- they all, ultimately, came off as a challenge: I think you're too stupid not to fall for this. And there are very few people who appreciate being told they're dumb, or the person who said it."

-- Alex Koppelman, in a newyorker.com News Desk
post yesterday, "Romney Gets the Last Gaffe"

by Ken

On the whole I'm inclined to let the R's do their own recriminating amongst themselves, secure in the knowledge that they will analyze the 2012 elections to death and come up with almost exclusively the wrong lessons. This isn't to single out R's or movement conservatives; it's the way all movement pols "analyze" elections. If the election had gone the other way, at this very moment we would have the whole of Dem officialdom tearing its hair out (such hair as is there, anyway) and recriminating and finger-pointing and drawing exactly the wrong lessons from the morass -- just as they're now drawing many of the wrong lessons from the victories.

Still, there's something special to the departure from public life of Willard Inc. (At least I hope it's his departure from public life.) Just this afternoon the Washington Post's pretty good political reporter Dan Eggen posted a piece that was headlined "Romney sinks quickly in Republicans' esteem."

The former Massachusetts governor -- who attracted $1 billion in funding and 59 million votes in his bid to unseat President Obama -- has rapidly become persona non grata to a shellshocked Republican Party, which appears eager to map out its future without its 2012 nominee.

Romney was by all accounts stunned at the scale of his Nov. 6 loss, dropping quickly from public view after delivering a short concession speech to a half-empty Boston arena. Then came a series of tin-eared remarks this week blaming his loss on Obama's "gifts" to African Americans and Hispanics -- putting him squarely at odds with party leaders struggling to build bridges with minorities . . .

The messy aftermath of his failure suggests that Romney, a political amalgam with no natural constituency beyond the business community, is unlikely to play a significant role in rebuilding is party, many Republicans said this week.

I'm really not eager to flog a dead horse -- or whatever species of carcass that is. I really didn't expect to add significantly to the lovely NYRB blogpost of Garry Wills's I quoted from on Wednesday, "Garry Wills on Willard: 'What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?'" But son of a gun if the son of a gun didn't that very day go and make it necessary to reopen the dumping operation.

GOING OUT ON A NOTE OF GRACE? NOT WILLARD'S WAY

I confess that I was surprised on Election Night by the reasonableness, even graciousness, of Willard's concession speech -- when he finally gave it, having apparently given up on the hope that Karl Rove wasn't blowing it out his butt in insisting that the networks were calling everything prematurely. I had no way of knowing how sincere or insincere he was. We'll come back to the problem of fact-checking his "sincerity." For now, let me just say that I have no way of knowing. Still, if the goofball had left it at that, he could have gone out on a note of relative grace.

That, however, isn't Willard's Way. I'm sure by now everyone has heard about the stunning performance the buttwipe gave on the post-mortem conference call with fat-cat donors on Wednesday in which he explained away his defeat (never mind that in electoral-college terms it wasn't a defeat, it was a rout) as the product of the president's "gifts" to pampered demographic groups, "especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people."

The New Yorker's Alex Koppelman, in the News Desk post from which I've already quoted up top, makes a necessary point: "There are, as there were after the release of the 'forty-seven per cent' video, some people asking whether this is really what Romney believes, or whether he thinks it's what his audience wants to hear."

And I have to say, when it comes to "authenticating" Willard, I really have no tools. It never sounds to me like he believes anything he says -- or at least that he believes any regurgitation of nonsense any more or less than any other regurgitation of nonsense. The only thing that can be said for sure is that when he regurgitates in direct contradiction of his other regurgitations, I take it as a given that he can't possibly believe both. My hunch always is that he doesn't believe either, but I have no way of knowing. I just dismiss most of what he says, as I've written here numerous times, as "stuff he says." The famous "47 percent" campaign pander certainly had a certain ring of belief, but again, I don't know. How could I?

But Alex Koppelman offers what he believes is some evidence on behalf of Willard's belief in what he mouthed off about the "gifts."

[W]e have prior evidence that this is in fact what Romney thinks -- indeed, that it is the explanation that his campaign as a whole has settled on. At the end of last week, in an article about the reasons why the Republican nominee's team simply hadn't expected to lose ["Why Romney Never Saw It Coming"], Slate's John Dickerson reported:

Romney advisers . . . envy [Obama's] ability to leverage the presidency for his campaign. Young voters were told about new provisions for student loans and Obama's support for same-sex marriage, an issue that appeals to young voters. Hispanic voters were wooed by the president's plan to waive the deportation of children of illegal immigrants. One Romney aide also included the much-debated changes to welfare requirements as a policy aimed to win over African-American voters. "It was like they had a calendar," said one Romney aide. With each month, the Obama administration rolled out a new policy for a different segment of their coalition they hoped to attract.

But jeez Louise, is there any incumbent officeholder who wouldn't attempt to do exactly the same thing? Here's Alex's comment:

The Romney people weren't entirely wrong to think this way -- not exactly. The Presidency is a powerful tool, and any incumbent who didn't use that tool to at least some extent would be foolish. And there were clearly times when Obama used policy announcements to great political effect. To reduce the whole election -- not to mention a significant part of the Administration's policies -- to such things, though? That's just absurd. At the very least, the man responsible for the health-care reform plan on which Obama's is based should know better.

"HE STILL CAN'T SEE IT," SAYS ALEX K

But there's another element of delusion on the part of Willard and his campaign which Alex finds more important.

In the same conference call, Romney talked about plans for the future. He wanted to keep his donors together somehow, he said -- "to meet perhaps annually, and to keep in touch with a monthly newsletter or something of that nature" -- so that they could help steer the G.O.P. and, presumably, the country. Which just makes the whole thing sadder: he still can't see it.

What is it he still can't see? This brings us to the chunk I quoted up top, which I'm going to repeat here, now in context.

Romney seems to think that newsletters and meetings and money can solve the Republican Party's problems, that it can win the White House when it doesn't have to run against a President who's bribing voters. He doesn't see that he's the problem: what he believes, what he says. Conservatives have constructed a myth that says certain groups -- blacks, Hispanics, women, young people -- vote Democratic because they're stupid, because they're lazy, and because they can be purchased with trinkets and baubles. It'd be one thing if they kept that myth a secret, but instead they shout it from the rooftops. Then, when it's over, they wonder why those people voted Democratic again.

Romney was never the worst offender on this score; he never delighted in it, as people like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh do. But he certainly participated. Indeed, part of his problem throughout this campaign, and the one before it, is that he's never been good at disguising his lack of respect for the American electorate. His changing positions, his evasions about them, his misrepresentations -- they all, ultimately, came off as a challenge: I think you're too stupid not to fall for this. And there are very few people who appreciate being told they're dumb, or the person who said it.

There are, of course, other, larger problems for the Republican Party to grapple with over the next few years. But they'll have trouble solving many of them if they can't get past this and realize that Democrats don't have to bribe voters -- not when their opponents are so interested in insulting them.

AS JOE CONASON POINTS OUT, NOBODY GETS
MORE GENEROUS "GIFTS" THAN WILLARD'S PEOPLE

Joe has written a fine column, which I read via Nation of Change: "Mitt Romney's Sneering Farewell to the '47 Percent.'" He devotes much attention to the nonfactuality of nearly all the drivel in both the "47 percent" mouthing off ("Recall how he disowned the '47 percent' remarks when he realized how damaging they were to his chances for victory, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News that what he had been caught saying at a $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraising event was 'just completely wrong'") and the new nonsense. He's especially charmed by the irony of the Willard camp, after making "Obamacare" the centerpiece of their denunciation of the Obama administration, blaming its popularity for their electoral booboo.

"But," Joe writes, "as a matter of feelings rather than facts, Romney evidently cannot stop himself from sneering at society's struggling people and the politicians who seek to improve their lives."

It is not as if the donors he was addressing don't want "gifts" from government — such as the big new tax breaks that Romney had promised them, the huge increases in defense spending that would swell their profits, or the various individual corporate favors that they regard as their very own "entitlements." Just don't expect that kind of honest introspection from Romney or his crowd.

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Obama Won... What Now?

Look, I don't know if the newly reelected President Obama will break free from the bonds of cautious mediocrity and act like the president he campaigned as. But we should give him a chance. He is the first Democrat to be re-elected with a majority of the popular vote since FDR. This was a big win, despite how the desperate Republicans and their media allies are trying to spin it. Let's see what he does with-- in George W. Bush's words-- "the political capital" he's earned. Let's see if he replaces Geithner with someone other than just another Wall Street shill. That will be a clue; after all, Wall Street lost big last night. Let's see if he does anything about what he said early in his victory speech (above) about fixing systematic Republican attempts at disenfranchising voters.

And let's see if he works on a Grand Bargain that doesn't screw over working families and seniors and that really forces the wealthy to start paying their fair share. The Democrats have a bigger and-- thanks to Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin-- more progressive majority in the Senate and, despite Steve Israel's gross incompetence, there are fewer obstructionist Republicans in the House. Reid says he's going to reform the filibuster so it can't be as easily abused by the Republicans eager to wreck the country in the hopes of partisan victories in the future. In yesterday's Washington Post E.J. Dionne outlined the contours and ramifications of the victory.

President Obama’s reelection was at once a deeply personal triumph and a victory for the younger, highly diverse and broadly progressive America that rallied to him. It was a result that ought to settle the bitter argument that ground the nation’s government to a near-standstill.

The president spent much of the year fighting the effects of a stubbornly sluggish economic recovery and facing implacable opposition among Republicans in Congress who made defeating him a high priority. He fought back by undermining Mitt Romney’s major asset as a private-equity specialist and by enlisting Bill Clinton as his chief explainer.

And he mobilized a mighty army of African American and Hispanic voters. They were all the more determined to exercise their voting rights after Republicans sought in state after state to make it harder for them to cast ballots. Latino voters turned out overwhelmingly for the president, guaranteeing that immigration reform will be on the next Congress’s agenda.

Just as important for governance over the next four years, the president took on an increasingly militant conservatism intent on vastly reducing the responsibilities of government and cutting taxes even more on the wealthiest Americans. In the process, he built a broad alliance of moderates and progressives who still believe in government’s essential role in regulating the marketplace and broadening the reach of opportunity.

...Obama campaigned explicitly on higher taxes for the wealthy as part of a balanced budget deal. He stoutly defended the federal government’s interventions to bring the economy back from the brink-- and especially his rescue of the auto companies. It cannot be forgotten that saving General Motors and Chrysler was the most “interventionist” and “intrusive” economic policy Obama pursued-- and it proved to be the most electorally successful of all of his decisions. The auto bailout was key to Obama’s crucial victory in Ohio, where six in 10 voters approved the rescue. Union households in the state voted strongly for the president, and he held his own among working-class whites.

The president also called for higher levels of government spending for job training and education, particularly community colleges. And he spoke repeatedly against turning Medicare into a voucher program and sending Medicaid to the states.

The voters who reelected the president knew what they were voting for. They also knew what they were voting against. Romney paid a high price for his comments suggesting that “47 percent” of the electorate was hopelessly dependent on government. Writing off nearly half the potential voters is never a good idea. On Tuesday, a clear majority rejected that notion. It rejected as well Rep. Paul Ryan’s categorization of the country as made up of “makers” and “takers.”

Jim Manley, former spokesperson for Harry Reid, also tried figuring out what Obama's victory Tuesday will mean. He starts by ask if Congress got the message from the voters and if they're ready to move beyond partisan gridlock. Not Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann of course; they're destructive sociopaths who aim to destroy everything around them. But, he says, McConnell and Boehner "have figured out that the tea party has done enormous damage to their brand, to say nothing about the economy, and that something has to change."

The problem however will be in how both thread the needle, because the speaker may have to worry even more about his right flank given the fact Paul Ryan will assume a greater role, while McConnell, a cautious politician by nature, is going to have to make sure he doesn’t get a primary challenger in two years and deal with the push from the strong right wing contingent in his own caucus.

And at the same time the Republican leaders must rein in the worst instincts of many in their caucuses, the president is going to have to play a more forceful role in the legislative process. That doesn’t mean he needs to put out a new detailed long range plan but he does need to make clear he is ready to personally begin negotiating immediately with the congressional leadership on a short and long term options to keep us from going over the cliff.

If he does so, Republican leaders will need to decide whether to abandon the tea party and work together to address this nation's challenges.

Done Deal For Obama? Don't People Undrestand GOP Election Fraud?

Folks who are poll-obsessed already know that by Sunday, Nate Silver had moved Obama's chance of winning the Electoral College (and reelection) to 85.1%-- pretty tough odds for Romney. And when I woke up Sunday morning I found an odd press release from Paddy Power, Europe's top betting house, that says they had already started paying out to punters who picked Obama to win and had already sent $650,000 worth of checks before a single vote is counted! 75% of the money that's been bet has gone Obama's way over the last two months. A Paddy Power spokesperson said: “Romney gave it a good shot and is doing well in the popular vote, but we suspect he’s had his moment in the sun and is likely to be remembered more for his legendary gaffes than Presidential potential. The overall betting trend has shown one way traffic for Obama and punters seemed to have called it 100% correct. Despite Romney appealing to the large evangelical and senior vote, America‘s sticking with black and cool.” As you can see below, they're still taking bets on how big Obama's win will be and on state races, etc.

Had Katherine Harris, Ken Blackwell, and Kathy Nickolaus been tried and then shot for treason-- which is, after all, exactly what those three were guilty of-- I would feel that there would be less of a propensity for Republican officials in the states they've captured in 2010 to try to steal the election now. We've all seen the attempts to limit voter participation in Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Hampshire, Georgia, Texas... all the states they control... but now they're looking for ways to subvert the vote-counting itself. Reince Priebus-- straight out of the Kathy Nickolaus school of election theft in Wisconsin and now the chairman of the RNC-- hired notorious election criminal Nathan Sproul to undermine democracy in Virginia, Florida and Colorado. It's what happens when no one is held seriously accountable for serious crimes. Viper-like Ken doll Jon Husted, Ohio's extremist Secretary of State, seems determined to be this year's Katherine Harris. He's already the 2012 posterboy for voter suppression, even after being slapped down by state and federal courts for his efforts to keep likely Democrats from voting. And now he has a new scheme to invalidate votes. Anyone who though these anti-democracy freaks were just going to accept the inevitable without a dirty fight, just doesn't know the nature of these people. And what do they have to lose? No one ever gets held accountable. So keep his graphic in mind when the GOP tries their coup d'état this week:

It won't always be as gross as the bomb scare at an Orlando area early voting station or serial election fraudster Patrick McHenry trying to subvert democracy at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, which Newsweek ranked the "most liberal college in America." But anyone who isn't expecting nationwide GOP attempts to steal the election, just hasn't been paying attention this year decade.

With electronic voting machines, which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the count can be decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can simply program voting machines to elect the candidate they want to win. Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not know for whom you are voting. Only the machine knows.

According to most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call. History has shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation for a clear winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election can easily put on TV enough experts to explain that the divergence between the exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is because women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately questioned in exit polls.

There have been recent reports that, because of costs, exit polls in the 2012 presidential election will no longer be conducted on the usual comprehensive basis in order to save money. If the reports are correct, no check remains on election theft.

...For now Republicans seem to have the technological advantage with their ownership of companies that produce electronic voting machines programmed by proprietary software, but in the future the advantage could shift to Democrats. Early voting aids electronic election theft. Successful and noncontroversial theft depends on knowing how to program the machines. The victory needs to be within the range of plausibility. Too big a victory raises eyebrows, but if the guess is wrong in the other direction theft fails. Early voting helps the voting machine programmers decide how to set the machines.

The absence of transparency is a threat to whatever remains of American democracy. In the Summer 2011 issue of the Trends Journal, Gerald Celente made the point that “if we can bank online, we can vote online.”

Think about it! Across the globe, trillions of dollars of bank transactions are made each day, and rarely are they compromised. If we can accurately count money online, we can certainly count votes accurately online. The only obstacles blocking online voting are entrenched political interests intent upon controlling the ballot box.

The lack of transparency has given rise to election litigation. On October 29, the Washington Post reported that “thousands of attorneys, representing the two major presidential candidates, their parties, unions, civil rights groups and voter-fraud watchdogs, are in place across the country, poised to challenge election results that may be called into question by machine failures, voter suppression or other allegations of illegal activity.”

Voting online, if properly arranged, can provide the transparency that the current system lacks. While the GOP might remain active in voter suppression, the Democrats could no longer vote graveyards, and the count of those who do manage to vote would not be subject to secret proprietary software.

In 2005 the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded that the integrity of elections was compromised by those who controlled the programming. Proprietary private ownership of voting technology is simply incompatible with transparent elections. A country without a transparent vote is a country without democracy.

Anyone know if Romney's most malevolent little shit of a son, Tagg, invested in a company that owns voting counting machines in Hamilton County, Ohio (Cincinnati)? That could be the best investment the sleazy Romney family ever made.

Soylent Mitt-- The One Percent Will Eat The Poor, And Other Prophecies By Hal Crowther

Unless you live in western North Carolina, you probably only know Cecil Bothwell as a progressive Blue America candidate who the Blue Dogs and DCCC screwed out of a chance to win the state's 11th CD. But Cecil is also an author-- Whale Falls: An exploration of belief and its consequences, Finding Your Way In Asheville: 2009 and The Prince of War: Billy Graham's Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire-- a songwriter and owner of Asheville's Brave Ulysses Books. This week he sent me an essay by Hal Crowther, who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. He's expressing, with great eloquence, what so many progressives-- especially in swing states like North Carolina-- are feeling this week as the election cycle comes to a miserable grinding halt. Have you decided whether or not to bother voting yet?

I've successfully immunized myself to the horse-race fever of presidential elections: the relentless polls and fundraising totals, the endorsements and lame speeches and could-be-fatal gaffes, worst of all the dim psychoanalysis and fanzine micro-dissection of candidates who always looked much alike to me. I was inoculated against most of this when I was fairly young, thanks in part to reading the convention reporting of H.L. Mencken, who took American democracy like a recreational drug and relished every hysterical high.

The political animal at his most ridiculous never amused me as much as he amused Mencken. His excesses can still reduce me to tears, even though I'm old enough to remember presidential candidates with actual convictions and commitments, instead of pollsters, bundlers and message-masseurs. It always catches me by surprise when the media resume their election coverage as if they'd learned nothing whatsoever from all the elections that came before. Are the media themselves now under such a state of siege, is the public's attention span now so brief that four years is enough to erase every scrap of residual wisdom? It looked that way to me when I read a news-service "think piece" in my local daily, an essay explaining "the stark philosophical differences" that separate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

I groaned so audibly that my wife asked me if I was having chest pains. This writer, I thought, is he 12 years old? First of all, no one mentions philosophy in the presence of Romney, who embraces any philosophy his ambition finds convenient and will, before his race is run, embrace as many more as his handlers recommend. And Obama, vilified on right-wing radio as a cross between Jomo Kenyatta and Malcolm X, between Rap Brown and Toussaint L'Ouverture? This is a white woman's son with a rich white man's education, a cautious, pragmatic man of the middle, like most Republicans used to be—like Mitt Romney before the White House bug bit him, like his father, George Romney, before him. Obama is a mild-mannered white attorney with a slight genetic handicap. He loves golf. In every way except that inappropriate pigmentation, he's a country-club Republican (vintage, not current) like Mitt.

In another climate, another decade, another turn of the wheel of fortune, they could have been comfortable running mates—if the fastidious Obama could have put up with an awkward fumbler like Romney. Philosophy? Romney has no philosophy, Obama only as much as he needs from week to week. The American political system seems designed to feed celebrity-addled media, which focus on the forgettable faces and generic utterances of the latest candidates, never on the forces that produce them or the deeper issues that tear this country in two.

Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, was featured in another front-page story presenting his intellectual pedigree. His infatuation with Ayn Rand was enough to convince me that he's an arrested adolescent, but there in bold letters on Ryan's list of mentors was my old schoolmate Bill Bennett. Sometimes we literally don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I chose to laugh. We will see these faces 10,000 times before Nov. 6. (I'd never stoop to the face game myself, but is Ryan actually Eddie Munster grown up and Nautilus-hardened?) Yet the only faces that matter in this election are the faces of the founders and dead presidents printed on America's folding currency. The U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens Uniteddecision is the Rough Beast whose hour has come round at last, unleashing evil billionaires and subterranean oceans of corporate cash, tidal waves of it, under which the American democracy may vanish like lost Atlantis.

We are in deep water, in deep trouble here. It matters not at all that Romney is a Mormon or that he was mean to his dog, not at all that Obama is a Protestant with a jump shot and a wholesome marriage. It does matter, though only symbolically, that Romney was what Rick Perry calls "a vulture capitalist" and that Obama is not white-- not white according to the old slave-state standard, which established that there's no such thing as half-white (or three-quarters or seven-eighths).

Who they are, or what they say or believe is beside the point; everything in this critical election rests on what they represent. Just because I choose to ignore the conventions, the debates, the PAC-paid TV commercials and the hurricane of expensive spin doesn't mean I think this election is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It is, in contention only with 1968, the most significant presidential election of my not inconsiderable lifetime. And I remember Ike's first victory over Stevenson very well.

This is one we can't afford to lose. If you're not sure who "we" might be, I hope to make it clear. Amid all the inanities and distractions of an election that parliamentary countries dismiss as a wasteful "beauty contest"-- though few beauties compete-- it's still possible to recognize certain omens, subtle signs that lead us toward the reality of America at a turning point. All summer the signposts kept appearing. One was the first anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, less visible now and no longer a media staple, but historic for its forceful assertion that economic inequality is the fatal malignancy that politics as usual will not cure.

The One Percent, remember? Between the bursts of assault-rifle fire that punctuated the summer season's motiveless massacres, beneath the mindless thunder of huge PACs colliding, behind the mind-numbing slapstick of Republican congressmen reinventing gynecology and skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee, a populist anthem seemed to be playing softly, for anyone who would pause to listen.

July 14, Bastille Day, marked the 100th birthday of the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie, who wrote "This Land Is Your Land" to warn the One Percent of his day that other people lived in this country, people who might not stand idly by while the plutocracy bought up our birthright and fenced it off. Woody's heroically subversive verse, "I saw a sign, it said 'No Trespassin', but on the other side, it didn't say nothin', that side was made for you and me," is a political and spiritual touchstone that divides Americans, and probably the human race, into two irreconcilable camps.

Who did I mean by the "we" who can't afford to lose this election? I meant all of us grinning, instead of scowling, when we hear that verse of Guthrie's. But the One Percent of 2012 owns a far greater percentage of America's wealth-- four times more-- than it owned when Woody rode the rails during the Great Depression. Gated communities, rare in his day, wall off whole counties in ours. And Lawrence Downes writes in the New York Times that Woody's son Arlo, the wistful hippy of Alice's Restaurant, is now a Republican. Say it ain't so, Arlo.

In August, Liveright published the collected diaries of Guthrie's British contemporary George Orwell, an equally eloquent champion of the eternal underdog. It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that they knew each other's work. In an entry dated June 3, 1940, reacting to some twit's lament that the war would deprive the rich of their cooks, Orwell wrote a line that would make a fine epitaph for Romney's candidacy: "Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist."

But the coincidence that grabbed me most forcefully was the death in August of the science-fiction writer Harry Harrison, whose 1966 novel Make Room, Make Room became the 1973 film Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. If you could call Soylent Green a cult film, surely the cult is very small. But I'm one old-timer who remembers it well. It's set in the New York City of a distant future-- 2022-- when the world is so hopelessly polluted and overpopulated that the rich have retreated to fortified barbed-wire compounds with armed guards, where they continue to lead the good life, somewhat circumscribed. The poor-- the rest-- mill about the streets in homeless herds, squat in abandoned buildings and subsist on government-issued crackers known as "soylent green."

A grisly twist the filmmakers added to Harrison's plot was that the crackers were actually the processed corpses of the poor, who could escape their misery in Ethical Suicide Parlors where they died peacefully amid video images of all the beauty and pleasure their lives had not included. Heston plays a police detective who lives in a wretched tenement with his decrepit partner (Robinson). Crimes among the rich occasionally enable him to enter their fortified apartments, where in one scene he steals a spoonful of strawberry jam, for him an unimaginable luxury. He also steals a single leaf of fresh lettuce and takes it home with him, where he and Robinson marvel over such a windfall before they divide and reverently devour it.

Most of you reading this are not arugula-deprived-- perhaps you have more salad greens wilting in the crisper at this moment than the average third-world omnivore has ever seen. One of the year's most depressing statistics is that obese America now wastes 40 percent of its food-- $165 billion worth annually-- while hundreds of millions of human beings suffer from chronic hunger.

Necrophagia is still rare, even in depressed and primitive red states, though the tea party (like the Donner Party) endorses it in cases of "legitimate" starvation. But poverty is spreading rapidly in America. It's increased by nearly 3 percent since the beginning of the 2008 recession and now engulfs one in six (47 million) citizens, its highest level since 1965. Among children the rate is much higher, 22 percent in 2010. And there's still a 10-year countdown to 2022, when Harry Harrison calculated that overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and global warming due to the greenhouse effect would have created the terminal dystopia of Soylent Green. Once dismissed as science fiction, in 2012 it's beginning to look more and more like prophecy.

Those of you with a weakness for New Age eschatology may be anticipating the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012, a calculation based on the 5,125-year cycle of the Mayan Calendar. But it's Nov. 6 that frightens me. The first giant step toward Harrison's dystopia was total corporate control-- absorption-- of all forms of government. Soylent Green, manufacturer of the ghastly crackers, is also a huge international conglomerate. In Harrison's scenario, corporate feudalism has long since succeeded in disenfranchising and degrading everyone without financial leverage. If the Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress and press forward with a Rand-Ryan-Koch brothers blueprint for America, we'll be right on schedule for something much like Soylent Green by 2022. The Hard Right, without apology, opposes unions, federal arbitration and regulation of the workplace. Are there people who actually hold jobs, or seek them, who haven't realized that this is a program to reduce them from employees to serfs to slaves?

You have to give the Republican high command some credit for the purity, the transparency of its purpose. When it chose Ryan, Randist ideologue and far-right budget wonk, to run with Romney, quarter-billionaire and gilded veteran of the vulture markets, the corporate plutocracy asserted its control of the Republican Party and the urgency of its desire. No more ego-clowns like Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, medieval theo-geeks like Rick Santorum or dizzy morons like Michele Bachmann, whose agendas only get in the way of the hunger of the One Percent.

What does it want, the big One? Everything. Everything. This micro-minority of the very rich now holds nearly 40 percent of all the private wealth in this country, a share that's tripled since 1980. The one-tenth of one percent, the obscenely rich, have tripled their annual income in that 30-year period, to an average of $5 million, while the inflation-adjusted income of the "bottom" 90 percent-- the American people-- has actually declined by 5 percent.

Numbers are numbing, but there are volumes of them, many more shocking than these, to attest to the metastasizing inequality that shames and cripples us. And the response of the very rich who now control the Republican Party? Well, they resent taxation, environmental policy and government itself if it threatens to interfere with the flow of profits and the steady stream of America's wealth into the deep, deep pockets of the greediest people who ever lived. We own nearly everything, the One Percent declares when it presents the populist-crushing ticket of Romney and Ryan, but we won't be satisfied until we get the rest.

If you find this level of selfishness and cupidity astonishing, you probably haven't read the novels of Ayn Rand that inspired Rep. Ryan to seek public office, as he has testified. A fair example of Randian philosophy in action: New Orleans is devastated by a hurricane, as it was in 2005 and might have been again during the recent Republican Convention, and there's only one emergency helicopter available. If you're a faithful Randian, you land it on the roof of the Exxon-Mobil headquarters, to make sure no top executives are endangered, even though hundreds of plebeians may be drowning or screaming from their rooftops.

No exaggeration. A less dramatic but equally effective exercise in social Darwinism is Paul Ryan's magic budget. It guts Medicaid, food stamp and low-cost housing programs by an estimated $3.3 trillion over 10 years, while tossing the very rich yet another tax cut. Rand's is a merciless philosophy, an intellectualization of the Law of the Jungle that says, essentially, screw the weak and the meek and make way for the bold and the greedy. If you have nothing, it declares, you deserve nothing-- not even a chance to protest that you never had a chance.

The gospel of Ayn Rand is the perfect contradiction of everything ever preached by Jesus Christ. It's much to their credit that several Roman Catholic groups, nuns and Jesuits, have chastised the Catholic Ryan for his attachment to the atheist Rand. Her appeal is limited to young people, usually male, who are arrested in the infantile stage Freud describes as pure id-- the "Gimme!" stage-- and who tend to overrate themselves as potential supermen.

Not all of them outgrow it. Ryan's Randian economics, which celebrate avarice and sneer at conscience, are a made-to-order framework for the Last Grasp, a daring bid for absolute power by the Republican One Percent. (Every millionaire with a murmur of conscience now votes Democratic.) How, you might ask if you don't understand America, could such a tiny minority control an election, with a program that seems to benefit so few and harm so many? The best answer is that the extremely greedy are not the only extremists in this country, and the Republican Party has built a formidable new power base by cynical appeals to every extreme.

A Big Tent the GOP may not be-- it's nearly 90 percent white and weighted heavily toward older males-- but a wild and colorful tent-full it is, more like a carnival sideshow than a circus big top. The gluttons share their stage with racists, nativists, misogynists, homophobes, gun freaks, religious fundamentalists and fanatics of all denominations, and gonzo libertarians who hope to restore the gold standard. Along, of course, with a healthy harvest of dimwits-- the extremely stupid-- and a fair sprinkling of apparent mental patients. In the last group I'm obliged to include birthers, deniers of climate change, EPA-eliminators and everyone who thinks a private citizen should be able to acquire 6,000 rounds of ammunition for an automatic weapon.

If you'll eagerly cut your own throat-- and your childrens' and your neighbors'-- to express Caucasian solidarity or preserve your right to an AK-47, you're just what they're looking for. In a nation where most people think clearly and behave generously, a party like the current Republicans would be impossible. The entire unruly menagerie, still bloody from its raw-meat primaries, hopes to coast to victory behind a squeaky-clean Mormon mega-millionaire, a reformed moderate who tries to hide his tax returns and his intimate history with Goldman Sachs.

When you describe this GOP contraption, it sounds like a vehicle that would never start, far less lap the field. But there are at least two compelling reasons why it could win. One is the horrible effect of the Citizens Uniteddecision, that triumph of corporate personhood that has unleashed the great PACs and multiplied the scandalous influence of money in American elections.

The gross, florid face of the new reality-- pandemic top-dollar "democracy"-- is the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the human embodiment of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Adelson is worth roughly $25 billion, which means that if he were a dollar, the embarrassingly rich Romney would be a Lincoln penny. He has vowed to spend at least $100 million to defeat President Obama, and since that announcement Republican candidates have followed him around like hungry puppies. Romney virtually carried Adelson's suitcase on his recent tour of Israel; the moment Ryan was chosen as Romney's running mate, he hastened to Vegas to kiss Adelson's ... ring.

Dirtier money than Adelson's would be hard to find. Is it a sane legal system that lets marijuana dealers rot in prison while casino owners, who exploit the far more destructive human weakness, can live like sultans? Among the many unsavory things about Adelson are his casinos in Macau and Singapore, where reporters have been exploring rumors of bribed Chinese officials and prostitution, and his ultra-right newspaper in Israel, which supports the immediate bombing of Iran and whichever wars that might precipitate.

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Adelson's Macau operation for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Daily Mail of London accused him of "despicable business practices" and charged that he had "habitually and corruptly bought political favour." The paper was consequently sued into silence. Unlimited legal intimidation is one of the great prerogatives of billionaires.

Adelson's lone virtue is a certain feral honesty. A former Democrat, he admits he became a Republican when he tried to crush his employees' unions and realized the Democrats wouldn't help him. He never tries to hide the fact that he uses his money to shape legislation to his own advantage, as well as Israel's. His billions in overseas income are currently taxed at the shamefully low rate of 9.8 percent, and no doubt Mitt Romney has promised him another tax break.

Can you swallow that? Monstrously wealthy international pirates like Adelson, with agendas that contain no benefits for America or Americans, are the tragic dead end of our political system unless we can overturnCitizens United and put Big Money back in its box. Along with the largesse of the heinous Koch brothers, who bankrolled the tea party and launched the outrageous crusade against climate science solely to protect their energy investments, Adelson's millions are now evident in the flood of televised ads disparaging Obama's health care reforms. According to Paul Krugman of the Times, hardly neutral but a Nobel laureate in economics, every one of these ads is a gross distortion and many are impudent lies. But in the field of political advertising, unlimited resources often overpower limited intelligence by repetition alone.

Yet Adelson and the Kochs aren't even the best cards in Romney's hand. The recidivist South, where the electoral map is now colored solid red by the most optimistic Democrats, is no longer worth pursuing by a president who isn't colored solid white. I don't know exactly what the tea party represents in Wisconsin, where it's in love with Ryan, but I'm pretty sure what it represents in the South. For years now we've watched surly old white men of modest means raging about "Obamacare," using silly words like "socialist" and "fascist," when it seemed clear that the president's well-intentioned but inadequate overhaul of the health care system could only work to their advantage.

Health care issues have nothing to do with their hatred of Obama. But it's still considered bad form (though less so of late) to say flatly "I want that black man out of the White House." I'll bet my ranch that 80 percent of the Southern tea party's active members voted for Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, and no doubt George Wallace before them. Most of them are old enough to have their roots buried deep in Jim Crow. And so here we go again, with progressive Southerners hanging our heads in shame.

Down here they don't fool us, the geezers in the leather vests and Johnny Tremain hats. Obama reanimated a generation of dormant racists, and they're determined to take back Air Force One. Of course the One Percent, who for the most part are not racist-- or anti-abortion, or gun-loving, or homophobic, or religious, either-- are delighted to play the race card and hope the Southern Sickness can defeat Obama. Once in office, the Wall Street Republicans are likely to ignore this unsavory constituency that elected them. Most ominously, only the NRA and Adelson's Israel lobby have the money and muscle to make a Republican president keep his promises.

Adelson-Romney-Ryan is quite a triumvirate. A colossus spewing rancid money, The Face-- handsome, impossibly rich and remote, no fixed identity-- and The Brain, dispensing phony theories to justify them all. It's cynical and improbable, but it's working well enough. This election is not at all about voting for a candidate you admire, or a party platform that echoes your ideals. It's about trying to defeat what you have every reason to loathe and fear.

Obama has not been the president I hoped he would be, and the Democratic Party, to which I've never belonged, may be a poor vehicle for anyone's passions. But the truth is that the bad people, the worst Americans, were once divided fairly evenly between the two parties. Not all Republicans were grasping and reactionary, not all Democrats (read the Dixiecrat, segregationist South) were broad-minded and compassionate. Since the GOP Southern strategy converted the Old Confederacy, however, most of the bad people are Republicans-- bad as in prejudice, predatory self-interest and social irresponsibility.

Incredibly, the GOP has convinced most of its blue-collar foot soldiers that government is their enemy and that corporations-- job creators?-- are their friends. This is possibly the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the ignorant. To a predatory capitalist, government is merely another factor, an impediment or a useful tool in his pursuit of carte blanche, the wide-open hogs-at-the-trough marketplace of his dreams. To the rest of us, elected government-- the result of our votes-- is our only leverage, the only weapon we have left in a "democracy" where clamorous dollars drown out human voices.

And those jobs? Campaign candy, free-market myth. If you're unemployed and broke and seeking salvation by voting Republican, let me assure you that the Soylent suicide parlor is an equally promising choice. The London-based Tax Justice Network recently reported that the world's super-rich-- a third of them Americans-- have cached between $21 million and $32trillion in offshore tax havens. Just pick a middle number, notes Al Lewis in the Wall Street Journal, and it's a sum that exceeds the annual gross domestic product of the U.S., China and Japan combined. That's right: Pirates have looted this country of wealth beyond our comprehension, and buried most of the treasure they're alleged to be reinvesting.

Though they dominate our world and covet all that's in it, Mitt and his mega-rich live in a world all their own. Very often they sound like it. As he dropped a nickel, a mere million, in Romney's cup and endorsed him, the North Carolina billionaire Julian Robertson explained that America needs a successful businessman to rebuild its economy. Excuse my condescension to my eminent fellow Tar Heel, but someone should tell Robertson that the U.S.A. is not a business, not a profit-seeking entity. A nation is a cooperative-- a commonwealth-- whose elected officials are charged with managing common resources for the common good. Do even Princeton graduates and hedge-fund wizards recycle Fox News clichés?

This coalition of wealthy vultures, Kool-Aid drinkers and political neanderthals is not the Republican Party of even 20 years ago, as Bob Dole and Dan Quayle, of all people, have protested in their recent warnings against extremists. The most intelligent Republicans are no longer well-intentioned, and the most well-intentioned are not intelligent. The party we saw in Tampa has strayed so far from an honest account of itself that almost nothing it says makes sense or rings true. It's true that the U.S. economy is still disappointing, but Republicans promise to heal it with the same Republican policies that made it sick: tax cuts, military misadventures, and lax regulation of markets and banks.

Their favorite word is freedom, yet they frown on every form of freedom I can think of-- civil rights, reproductive rights, workplace rights, gay rights, even the right to clean air and water. The only rights they defend are the right to make or steal as much money as possible and squirrel it away, and of course the sacred right to arm ourselves like third-world terrorists.

If they prevail decisively in these elections, and I'm not betting against them, it probably spells the end of the U.S.A. as a viable political experiment. Our cannibal capitalism will have killed us; the One Percent, having devoured the 99 percent, will be suffering indigestion. Give us just eight years of increasingly obscene inequality, environmental devastation, unchecked global warming, belligerent foreign policy, a shredding social safety net and a powerless proletariat, and the prophet Harrison's Soylent Green will be right here, friends, and right on time.

Cracker, anyone?