How the media won it for Obama...

[Gob]

1. The Media’s Biased Gaffe Patrol Hammered Romney: The media unfairly jumped on inconsequential mistakes — or even invented controversies — from Romney and hyped them in to multi-day media “earthquakes.” Case in point: the GOP candidate’s trip to Europe and Israel in late July. A Media Research Center analysis of all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney’s trip found that virtually all of them (18, or 86%) emphasized “diplomatic blunders,” “gaffes” or “missteps.

2. Pounding Romney With Partisan Fact Checking: There’s nothing wrong with holding politicians accountable for the honesty of their TV ads and stump speeches, but this year the self-appointed media fact-checkers attacked Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.

For example, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter writing for PolitiFact branded VP candidate Paul Ryan’s convention speech anecdote about the closing of the General Motors plant in his hometown as “false,” even though Ryan was correct in all of his details. The slanted review became TV reporters’ talking points; the next day on NBC, correspondent Chuck Todd grumped that while what Ryan said “was technically factual, by what he left out, [he] actually distorted the actual truth.” Matt Lauer greeted Ryan the following week in an interview on Today: “There are some people who are claiming that you played a little fast and loose with the truth....”

3. Those Biased Debate Moderators: Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.

Such criticism may have encouraged the activist approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz in the vice presidential debate October 11, and by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the October 16 town hall debate, as both of those journalists repeatedly interrupted the Republican candidate and larded the discussion with a predominantly liberal agenda.

4. The Benghazi Blackout: Right after the September 11 attack in Libya, the networks proclaimed that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander stated on the September 14 edition of "Today." But as a cascade of leaked information erased the portrait of Obama as a heroic commander, the broadcast networks shunted the Benghazi story to the sidelines.

News broke online in late September, for example, that Team Obama knew within 24 hours that the attack was likely the result of terrorism. That starkly contradicted claims from White House press secretary Jay Carney, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and President Obama himself that the attack was a “spontaneous” reaction to an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube. Yet, ABC took nearly two days to bring this story to viewers, while CBS and NBC held off for three days.

5. Burying the Bad Economy: Pundits agreed that Obama’s weakness was the failure of the US economy to revive after his expensive stimulus and four years of $1 trillion deficits. But the major networks failed to offer the sustained, aggressive coverage of the economy that incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush faced in 1992, or even that George W. Bush faced in 2004 — both years when the national economy was in better shape than it is now.

According to a study conducted that year by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, from January through September of 1992, the networks ran a whopping 1,289 stories on the economy, 88% of which painted it in a dismal, negative light. That fall, the unemployment rate was 7.6%, lower than today’s 7.9%, and economic growth in the third quarter was 2.7%, better than today’s 2.0%. Yet the media coverage hammered the idea of a terrible economy, and Bush lost re-election.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/ ... vor-obama/

[Gob]

Let's not forget too...

Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s remark that there weren’t enough “angry white guys” to bring Republicans to power seemed prophetic in the light of President Barack Obama’s victory.


A decline in the number of white voters and a surge in voters from ethnic minorities and women helped Obama on election night. Ohio, one of the key battleground states, was captured in part through a rise in turnout among African-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

Back in August, Graham had said: “The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

[Sue U]

What a bunch of whining pussies.

[dgs49]

Actually, the result can be summed up in one word: Stupidity.

The combination of MSM slant and Dems' ability to come up with compelling but either false or vacuous slogans secured the "stupid" vote, thus deciding the election in Barry's favor. And of course, when you win 95% of a significant demograph due to nothing but racism, that doesn't hurt either.

50%, with every conceivable advantage. Fucking pathetic.

[Scooter]

You've been calling it for Romney all along, what's the matter, can't get over the fact that your messiah didn't measure up enough to beat a candidate that should have gone down in flames?

Suck it up, loser.

[Grim Reaper]

And of course, when you win 95% of a significant demograph due to nothing but racism, that doesn't hurt either.

You mean these guys?

[Big RR]

Come on Scooter and GR, Romney ran such a stellar campaign it couldn't possibly have been anything but stupidity and racism.

[Gob]

But having lost, the party now is likely to engage in internal civil war, as it struggles with its policy demons – how to respect a woman's right to make her own health decisions; how to make itself acceptable to the country's huge African-American and Hispanic communities; how to live and work alongside gays and lesbians and to grant them the same citizen rights enjoyed by straights. Above all, to work together as a nation, formulating policies that work towards middle-of-the-road compromises in economic and social policies.

On election night, Ross Douthat of The New York Times, self-described as a "less starry-eyed conservative", wrote: "A weak nominee in many ways, [Romney] was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn't particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012." But in a purists-v-pragmatists showdown, how can the self-appointed true-believers be cajoled into backtracking from their faith-based absolutes – abortion is killing is murder; homosexuality is depraved, disgusting; Islam is a threat to the fabric of the nation, even when it is "over there".

This calls for painful self-examination, but without it there will be even less chance to win in 2016 and beyond. By some analysis, the burgeoning black and Hispanic communities have reached a political critical mass – the point at which the white electorate shrinks to a level at which the Republicans can no longer be elected has arrived.

Instead of "taking back" the country, this is a party that has to work on accepting the rest of the country. An unnamed Republican strategist was quoted early in the campaign by National Journal, arguing that this was the last contest in which the party could attempt to win on the back of what the Journal described as the "white Anglo vote". "If we lose this election there's only one explanation – demographics," the South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Politico in the days before the poll. "[And] if I hear anyone say it was because Romney wasn't conservative enough I'll go nuts – we're not losing 95 per cent of African Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we're not hard-ass enough."



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election ... z2BZzl3BE3

[Scooter]

Electoral-vote.com, which correctly predicted the outcome except (so it appears) for Florida, has compiled a list of takeaway messages from this election, for those who are wise enough to learn from them:

• It's not just the economy, stupid. It's the whole package
• Abandoning large constitutencies, like women, Latinos, and young voters is not a winning formula
• The partisan identification in 2008 was not a freak accident. There are more Democrats than Republicans
• The candidate matters: on paper Rick Perry and Mitt Romney were great, but the real men weren't
• Nominating a sneering plutocrat who likes firing people and writes off half the country is not a wise move
• If you can't release your tax returns because they are full of poison, don't run for President
• There aren't enough billionaires to buy the election
• Don't talk about gay marriage unless you are supporting it
• And above all, don't talk about rape except maybe if you are proposing to castrate rapists

They also provide an analysis of the new electoral math showing that Republicans are going to have a very difficult road to victory if they think they can get there by veering further to the right.

[Gob]

I can add to that list Scoot.

Don't invite batty old men who talk to empty chairs to be your conference highlight.

47% of the country is nearly half the voters.

Try for someone who looks human, not plastic.

Don't get a candidate from a wierd cult.

Don't invite Meatloaf to "sing".

[Crackpot]

Don't lie about an industry shipping jobs overseas in a state that you need to win where 1 in 8 of the electorate work in that industry and know better.

[Crackpot]

Don't moderate on positions your base holds dear while standing firm on positions that turn off independents.

[Long Run]

LJ named the main reason awhile back -- Romney was just not a very good candidate. He got better than awful in the last month, but likeability counts for a lot and he wasn't, plus he kept making mistakes. The state polls were right, who would have guessed.

$6 Billion to get the status quo.

[Grim Reaper]

The combination of MSM slant

Something else to make fun of here. Fox News is the number one cable news channel. The number one newspaper is the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the same guy who owns Fox news.

The top three talk radio shows are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck.

So apparently being the leader in several categories makes Fox News and friends not mainstream somehow.

[Sue U]

LJ named the main reason awhile back -- Romney was just not a very good candidate. He got better than awful in the last month, but likeability counts for a lot and he wasn't, plus he kept making mistakes. The state polls were right, who would have guessed.

$6 Billion to get the status quo.

It's not exactly the status quo. The GOP lost six seats in the House and the Dems had a net gain of 2, 3 or 4 (depending on how you count Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson) in the Senate. (In any event, they took Dick Lugar's seat in IN, Scott Brown's seat in MA and Olympia Snowe's seat in ME, if you count Angus King caucusing with the Dems).

This was a pretty solid defeat for the GOP. In addition to his substantital electoral college victory (332-206, once FL votes are official), Obama carried the popular vote by about 2.8 million voters. The Republicans shot themselves in both feet with the whole Tea Party thing, alienating millions of voters who might have otherwise been convinced to dump Obama. (And that doesn't even count the fact that Romney might as well have been wearing a top hat and monocle throughout the campaign.) If this election demonstrates anything, it's that the American people reject the GOP's brand of social extremism and political obstructionism. The party has to get out of its own echo chamber and get to work actually addressing the business of the country through political compromise, or it will ubdoubtedly suffer further losses in the 2014 mid-terms.

[Guinevere]

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Big RR]

Reject Sue? I hope that's true, but I think what this election demonstrates is that we are fairly evenly split on those questions. There's a pretty big group of right leaning people who at least accept some of those extreme positions as acceptable, if not desirable, and I think the results show pretty big split in the American electorate between red and blur states. The elctoral college may skew the results, but 2.8 million votes is hardly a commanding lead for Obama, and shows that enough people are disaffected with his positions (such as they are) that even a candidate as inept as Romney gave him a pretty good run for the money. We need compromise and consensus to move forward, but given the division among the electorate, I don't see that coming. Do you really expect anything different?

[oldr_n_wsr]

Addmitedly I am very notionally politically uninformed although I do pay attention to local politics. But being a "head of household" and fiscally conservative, I would like the feds to be the same. Of course the feds have much more to deal with, but they also have many more people to deal with those "money problems".

What I want is for them to stop taking as much money as they do. Come the new year I am scheduled to pay $5k-$7k more in federal income taxes. I did no get a raise anywhere near to cover that. I no longer have that money to spend, invest or save. So now I shrink my spending even further. How does that spur the economy? My son moved out and my wife wants to redo his room. Sorry, no can do. No furniture purchases, no new TV, no redo of the floor or new carpet.

The feds need to get their fiscal house in order and not on my back. A little bit is ok, 6-8% of my salary in new taxes is not.

[Andrew D]

A few more indicators of how bad this election was for the Republicans:

Obama crushed Romney among minorities: 93% of the African-American vote, 73% of the Asian-American vote, and 71% of the Hispanic-American vote. Minority populations are growing much faster than is the Caucasion-American population. From 2000 to 2010:

--> the African-American population grew 2.2 times as fast as did the Caucasian-American population,
--> the Hispanic-American population grew 7.5 times as fast as did the Caucasian-American population,
--> and the the Asian-American population grew 7.6 times as fast as did the Caucasian-American population.

Obama also beat Romney by an 11% landslide (55% - 44%) among women. And he beat him by even more among single women (67%). Women consistently vote in higher percentages than do men.

Obama also beat Romney among younger voters (60%). The Romney demographic is dying off, whereas the Obama demographic is growing.

As of 2010, pundits -- including liberal pundits -- were saying that the Democrats' retaining control of the Senate was virtually impossible. A large part of that was that 23 seats up for election were held by Democrats, whereas only 10 were held by Republicans. But the Democrats ended up holding every single one of those 23 seats, including 5 which the Republicans should have won without breaking a sweat.

The Democrats actually won the popular vote for the House of Representatives. Were it not for egregious Republican gerrymandering, the Democrats would control the House. (Which would be far better for America.)

Of the nine "battleground States," Obama very nearly ran the table. He won eight of them (once Florida's result is made official); the only one he lost was North Carolina.

The Democrats took back both houses of the Maine Legislature and both houses of the Minnesota Legislature.

The Democrats now hold supermajorities in both houses of the California Legislature and in both houses of the Illinois Legislature.

The two principal reasons for those election results do not even include media bias or Hurricane Sandy or stupidity. Nor do they include Romney's weakness as a candidate or his campaign team's strategic blunders. Nor do they include the most risibly absurd assertion I have seen yet -- Rove's claim that Obama and his campaign suppressed the vote.

The two principal reasons for those election results are:

(2) The Republican party has, year after year, decade after decade, ignored those demographic groups in which Romney got hammered, content instead to allow itself to become increasingly the party of white men; and

(1) The Republican party's policies are simply not the policies that any majority of Americans wants.

[Andrew D]

Two more happy things about this election:

Delightfully, the right-wing pundits were dazzlingly wrong:

--> Rove predicted that Romney would get 279 electoral votes,
--> Gingrich predicted that Romney would get more than 300 electoral votes,
--> Barone predicted that Romney would get 315 electoral votes,
--> Will predicted that Romney would get 321 electoral votes,
--> Morris predicted that Romney would get 325 electoral votes, and
--> Ludlow predicted that Romney would get 330 electoral votes.

If we are lucky, that spread of progressively ludicrous predictions will persuade at least some Americans who actually believe the right-wing twaddle spewed by people like that should no longer believe it.

(In fairness, an honorable mention goes to Ann Coulter: She predicted that if the Republicans nominated Romney, they would lose. And she was exactly right.)

And, even more delightfully, all of that right-wing money accomplished almost nothing. Rove's two Super-PACs spent $390 million of other people's money -- people who now are not at all happy. One of those Super-PAC's success rate was 13%; the other's was 1%. And the success rate of Sheldon Adelson's infusion of some $70 million of his own money was exactly zero.

It turns out, apparently, that Americans' votes cannot be so easily bought after all.