A Planet Where The Sky Is Yellow

There is still a lot of election postmortems being churned out, probably justifiably so.  One of the most perspicacious is that of David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times.  He notes that not only is the GOP bedeviled by crazies and extremists, it still persists in believing that if Republicans just keep repeating a phrase often enough a new reality is created.  This election gave the lie to that belief.

Here is what the facts turned out to be:

• Romney predominated only among older white men; Obama won 55% of women, 93% of African Americans, 71% of Latinos and 60% of voters ages 18 to 29.

• Rather than there being an enthusiasm gap, Obama pretty much replicated his winning 2008 coalition.

• The Obama campaign gurus in Chicago were not lying; they had the money, time and energy to get all their voters to the polls.

• The “enthusiasm” of the tea party and the religious right proved to be a detriment to the Republican cause. Their wacky candidates, including Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri, were disasters and their demand for ideological purity turned the GOP primaries into a clown show and their eventual nominee into a pandering hypocrite.

• The Republicans’ silly scare stories about voter fraud were used to justify restrictions on voting that black Americans, in particular, perceived as a threat to their hard-won right to vote. As a result, those folks were willing to stand in long lines for hour after hour in states such as Ohio and Florida so that their voices could be heard. And what they said was “four more years for Barack Obama.”

Will this change the GOP in time for the next election?

I doubt it, especially since both Senate Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker Boehner have already signaled their intention to obstruct any plan to raise taxes on the wealthy.  Congressman West of Florida, defeated in Florida by Democrat Patrick Murphy, is still pursuing a law suit to sequester the ballots and voting machines in an attempt to delay Murphy's swearing in (reminds me of what the GOP did to keep Sen. Al Franken out of his seat for months), even though his first law suit was thrown out.

It's probably going to take the election in 2014 to convince the still-sane members of the GOP (assuming there are any left by that time) that it might be time to return to consensual reality.