Let us count Dick Morris' layers of slime

The layers of primordial ignorance in this, Dick Morris' latest ass-salvation, could be plumbed by a fifth-grader: 

Republicans lost the race, [Morris] says, because they made the same mistake he did when he made his famously wrong prediction about a Romney landslide: Both errors stem from a misunderstanding of America’s demographic changes. When Republicans won in 2010, it was easy to believe things had returned to normal. But the 2012 presidential election showed that the GOP’s electorate model "was wrong, and it was wrong for all times." Latinos, women, and gays are "voters who would like to be Republican," he says. "The Republican party just isn’t letting them."

How was it "easy to believe" that America's thundering demographic changes had suddenly stopped and actually reversed as of 2010? And how could any professional analyst have missed the fundamental, empirical fact of 2010 as rather typical of a presidential incumbent's midterm setback? And how could any analyst have dismissed with such cavalierism the collective authority of countless 2012 polls in Obama's favor?

And just why would Latinos, women and gays "like to be Republican"? Morris doesn't say; he simply asserts they would.

But the singularly inescapable problem for the Republican Party, which of course Morris also evades, is why in heaven's name anyone with even a smidgeon of human decency would for even a minute ponder converting to a political party that is so bone-chillingly typified by the creepy likes of a crawling, sniveling worm such as Dick Morris?

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

I am nostruck so much by how wrong they were (that is just being human), as I am by how sincerely they believed in spite of the hard data in front of them.

In a weird way, Morris is on point and accurate. Apparently, they adjusted their modeling assumptions for voter turnout for all the demographic groups - because they, really, really, REALLY believed that.

After that, the projections were all sunshine and magic unicorns.

This reminds me of when I learned that my father is Santa Claus. I'm still not over that.

[Turgidson]

They dismissed the polls in Obama's favor because the poll respondents had a liberal bias.

Also, Peggy Noonan saw some Romney yard signs, which is always a sign of unbridled enthusiasm and imminent triumph.

The GOP always thinks the voting blocs that hate them would actually love them if they just woke up, as Queen Ann Romney might say.

[Jimiskin]

I think Morris was sure they would win for the same reason Karl Rove was sure. They both knew "the fix" was on and the results would be the same as the last time they fixed the election. What they did not count on was the fix being un-fixed.

[majii]

Neither insight nor humility are in Morris' make up. He seems to be unaware of how repulsive he sounds when he writes that when republicans won in 2010, he thought things had returned to "normal." His definition of normal seems to be a government in the hands of a republican majority. This doesn't account for those of us who don't think that a republican majority in Congress "means that things have returned to normal." I would argue that it means the opposite, because republicans have the tendency to impose their beliefs on others through the legislation they enact, and imo, there's nothing "normal" about this in a nation as diverse as ours.

So, Morris thinks that Latinos, women, and gays "want" to be republicans but the party won't let them. Morris misses the picture on this one, too. He and the party members should be asking themselves why these and other groups of Americans are running away from the GOP as fast as they can, but this would require serious introspection and facing some very unpleasant truths about the party. The recent history of the GOP since the 1980s has shown that whenever the party attempts to "rebrand" itself, nothing changes--the policies are still the same, and this is the problem.