This past election season I received more robocalls than I have friends. Lots more. Each morning I was greeted with so many urgent e-mails telling me I had to save the country. The combination of guilt and depression made me crawl back to bed.
Friends accused me of having little faith, but with the Koch brothers and Citizens United, I couldn't help it. Apparently Citizens United wasn't so united. Thank God. (Actually, thank the person who leaked the "47 percent" video.)
On election night the race for president was decided mercifully early. So I switched to Fox News to get their slant. (To be honest, I switched to watch them go berserk.) Fox had just declared Obama the winner, but, much to my delight, Karl Rove was having a hissy fit.
Whining like a school girl, Rove insisted there was still hope for Romney to win the presidency. (Can you say cuckoo?) As the camera followed her, the female anchor had no choice but to walk off the set to Fox's "decision room." As the experts stood by their decision, Rove steamed like a pile of … well, you get the picture. I suppose for Rove a fair election must be a bitter pill to swallow.
Comedian Dennis Miller was equally unhinged. Looking like he was on anti-depressants or not enough of them, he was on Bill O'Reilly's show bemoaning that Democrats had "demonized Romney, a great man and a great patriot." (So great that during Vietnam he moved to France.) Remember when Dennis Miller used to be funny?
Also bonkers were Ted Nugent (with Ted how can one tell?) and Donald (Birther Boy) Trump, who angrily tweeted that Obama had lost the popular vote. (In fact he may have won by 3,000,000.) Inexplicably, The Donald called "for a revolution," even though in most revolutions billionaires, especially those who own golf courses, are the first to be hanged.
It was a trying night for the right. As Alec Baldwin tweeted, "You know your party is in trouble when people ask did the rape guy win, and you have to ask which one?" There was Teabagger Todd Akin, Missouri Senate candidate and his infamous "legitimate rape" remark. (Adding that the female body can shut the pregnancy down.) And there was Indiana Teabagger Senate candidate Richard Mourdock who preached that a pregnancy resulting from rape is "something God intended." Surprise, surprise, both lost in states the GOP should have won.
GOP moderates optimistically see the election as a future chance for the party to reach out to women and minorities. They could start by knocking off the insane rape comments. And next time if a Sandra Fluke testifies before Congress about birth control included in her health insurance, maybe don't have Rush Limbaugh call her a slut.
It didn't help with black voters when Colin Powell endorsed Obama that John Sununu ignorantly suggested that he had done so because the president was "somebody of his own race." (Powell's heroic service to America and he has to listen to racist garbage?) Sununu desperately tried to walk back the gaffe (a gaffe being accidentally telling the truth), but nobody with a brain was buying it.
And perhaps at the next GOP convention, instead of Clint Eastwood talking to a chair (some thought he was funny, I thought he was weird) have the audience look more like America and less like a country club. Actually, in a way, Eastwood was the perfect choice: old, mega-millionaire, crabby, white guy. (Forgive me, but the only people of color I saw at the GOP convention were pushing brooms.)
And maybe in a historic period of wealth inequality 1%-er Romney, who has elevators for his cars, wasn't the ideal candidate. And it couldn't have helped when Sandy devastated millions that Romney was for eliminating FEMA.
Also it didn't seem terribly genuine for Romney to seek auto workers' votes when he had opposed Obama's bailout, which merely saved the entire industry. Worse yet was Romney's desperate suggestion to Ohio workers that Jeep was taking their jobs to China when he had to know it wasn't true.
Underestimating women (three female U.S. Senators in 1992, and now there'll be 20!) minorities, the gay and lesbian communities, the youth vote, union workers, so many on the right, like Newt (Moon Colonizer) Gingrich, predicted a Romney landslide. Similar forecasts came from the much-respected George Will and the much-disrespected Fox's Dick Morris. (Former Clinton advisor fired because he allowed his prostitute to listen in on conversations with the president.)
Poor Mitt. In Massachusetts he lost by 23.4 points, the largest in a candidate's home state in 100 years. (He also lost in his birth state, Michigan, and in New Hampshire and California where he has homes, the latter equipped with car elevators.)
In 2008, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blatantly announced that his top priority was seeing that Obama was a one-term president. His callous obstructionism failed both party and country. As cooperation is clearly what the voters are demanding, let's hope McConnell learned something from watching Chris Christie's working with Obama during Hurricane Sandy. If not, it's likely it may be a long time before the GOP elephant is in the room, that room being the Oval Office.
Jack can be reached at jnsmdp@aol.com
