Mitt Romney. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)If Nate Silver can put his reputation on calling the race 90% for Obama, why can’t I? In any case, on the small chance Romney has won tomorrow and this is my Dewey Defeats Truman moment, let’s just pretend this headline was a joke and I what I really meant was what Romney’s loss would mean for the Republican party, were it to occur, which it will.
My point here really is to point to an excellent piece of disillusionment from James Poulos. Here he is on the Republican party of today:
Most importantly, I believe Mitt Romney’s willingness to say anything this campaign season is far more illustrative of a problem with today’s Republican Party than it is of a problem with Mitt Romney. Consider that Romney has simply done whatever it takes to get his party’s nomination and maintain its voters’ full support, and that the path he must tread to do so is paradoxically very narrow. His scattershot remarks, his willingness to commit alternately to a policy, to its opposite, and to nothing at all — rather than terrifying indications of a man with no rudder, I see them as frightening proof that Romney would be simply rejected by his party if he delivered a Huntsman-style campaign where what you see is what you get.
I think the admitted etch-a-sketch campaign that Romney has had to run has to do both with what he had to do to win his party’s nomination and support, and the relationship that a campaign that could achieve that has to the median voter in this country. America has a conservative streak, but not a severely conservative streak.
In Pictures: Election Day 2012, Voting Across America
One important factor I think we will observe over the next four years is that the economy is going to gain a lot of jobs no matter who wins. With an Obama win, what many republicans will learn from this is that most of the problem with our jobs market has not been Obama holding it back. This will provide the GOP with an important lesson that Democrats, with their head full of idealism and hope and change, have learned over the past four years: the limited ability of the President to control the economy.
Eight years of the Bush administration gave Democrats a long time to fantasize about what a liberal president could do to this country. A similar, if opposite, fantasy about what a liberal president can do has developed in the minds of republicans in the last four years. It’s time for them to be disillusioned.
