The who's-on-first, 'post-election ramblings'

The NY Times' editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, has a flash of offensive brilliance--"Romney is so irrelevant now that’s it tempting to let his ['gifts'] comments gather dust on the remainder table of history"--but instantly retreats to a defensive position of briefly explaining just how ignorant Mr. Romney is, when it comes to the many whys of why he actually lost. I suppose Rosenthal's second thoughts were only right, but I sure liked that ghostly shroud he first had tossed over the vastly uncomprehending Mr. Romney. 

Continues Rosenthal:

The sad fact is that Mr. Romney is not out of touch with the Republicans’ post-election ramblings. It seems like no one in his party has figured out that it wasn’t "gifts" or bad luck that caused him to lose. It was his ideas.

Of course we'll never know if they were his ideas, since there was no Mr. Romney. This ... this thing was a creation, for sure, of others' ideas; it was an assimilated Borg; it was a Frankenstein monster, as freakishly constructed as Mary Shelley's. But was anyone else home? Who knows.

The greater puzzle lies in the reference to "Republicans' post-election ramblings"--or, merely, "Republicans." Who are they now? There are indeed Republican ramblings--such as Karl Rove's rather casual cures, from fixing the ground game to "appearing [less] judgmental and callous on social issues" (I particularly liked appearing)--to Republican rumblings, such as Bobby Jindal's Mitt-you're-an-idiot demurral. But which is the Republican one?

The game is on.

Meanwhile, such is the incoherence with which congressional Democrats are supposed to negotiate.

Comments

[Turgidson]

I find this whole "Obama bought off the electorate with free stuff" thing fascinating.

I get that some of the yoyos on the right will go this route - after all, they've been calling Obama a socialist since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, and this "free stuff" reasoning dovetails nicely with that existing meme.

But it was really Mittens who was (mendaciously, of course) offering free stuff - in the form of massive tax cuts that would somehow unleash prosperity, pay down the deficit, and not require immediate cuts to entitlements, other popular spending, or elimination of popular deductions. It was all fairy dust bullshit that he had no intention of delivering - partly because it was impossible, and partly because he was just bullshitting the electorate to distract them while he and his rich buddies stole all the nation's wealth that wasn't nailed down.

But it was he who was offering gifts. Obama's policies were and are decidedly mainstream ideas for how government can play a role in creating a fair society, and would have been bipartisan as recently as 5 years ago.

But, conservatism and the GOP can never be wrong, so we're hearing about gifts and free stuff and how the electorate is a bunch of moochers who let the real patriots in the GOP down by voting for the Kenyan socialist again. Oh well.