Thursday, November 01, 2012

CONFIDENCE FAIRIES AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES

On Morning Joe today, Mark Halperin explained what he says is Beltway conventional wisdom: Romney may lose because Romney is perceived as losing:
MARK HALPERIN: I'm going to take a risk here and peel back the curtain to tell you what insiders are thinking. This is not my opinion and this is not a projection of who’s going to win but insiders in both parties look at the last few days of swing state polls and say, "The President may have this." ... Right now, there's a danger for Governor Romney that elites are starting to think, in the last 24 hours, that these leads are, as the Obama campaign has said for a long time, small but persistent and consistent. And, I think, it may not effect the coverage that much but there's a bit of a tipping point here. Romney needs to go into the weekend, for his own sake, with the race tied in the conventional wisdom rather than what some people are now thinking, that these polls suggest the President will win this with the Electoral College dominance that he's had.
Halperin says that "insiders in both parties" think Obama may have it in the bag -- but it seems to me that the GOP camp is much more focused on how this perception game plays out, because the GOP camp has really been fixated on creating the perception that Romney is in the lead. I'm not aware of any moment when Obama or a surrogate told a crowd at a rally, "Vote for us -- we're winning." But Romney has said that a lot. And Team Romney has worked very hard to persuade the press that he's winning.

Which means that if Obama wins, the right will insist that stories saying Romney was losing caused Romney to lose. There'll be right-wing books with titles such as In the Tank: How the Mainstream Media Stole the 2012 Election for Barack Obama. Large portions of these books will be devoted to the notion that Nate Silver, above all others, ruined Romney's chances with his evil math-based objective propaganda.

I know, I know: if Obama wins, it's hardly news that the wingers will whine about something. But it will be odd if what they whine about is the notion that they should have been able to win this thing just by persuading us that they were winning it, but evil opponents unfairly deprived them of the opportunity to create their own reality.

7 comments:

Beth said...

It's right out of Bush's playbook. In 2000, when all was up in the air, Bush just acted as if he won. Romney needs to grasp at any straw he can at this point. And really, what other choice does he have other than to talk about winning?

Nefer said...

Why shouldn't they say that? After all, just saying he "won" the debate made him a debate "winner", and he went up in the polls based on his "win."

The President was pilloried as a terrible horrible no good very bad loser for not effectively refuting Romney's lies, when the narrative should have been that Romney was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad loser for lying his ass off to such an extent that his pants nearly burst into flame right in front of us.

Victor said...

If Obama wins, books the write about the election are the last of our worries.

After their treasonous actions on the economy, and the unemployment staying high as a result, they thought this election was in the bag!
They'd finally do what they'd wanted to do since Election Day of '08 - rid this nation of that pesky Nigrah.

THEY WILL TOTALLY LOSE THEIR SH*T!!!

Four more years of a Blackie in the WHITEY'S House, will have them asserting their 2nd Amendment rights rather adamently, I believe.

There WILL be blood.

I really, really, hope I'm wrong.

Palli said...

Romney is perceived as a loser. Although he's a rich one.

JD Rhoades said...

Actually, the whine I'm hearing from here n the heart of Wingnuttia is that Obama's stealing the election with rigged voting machines. Someone's second cousin's best friend knows a guy who shook hands with someone who saw his vote get switched from Romney to Obama, so it must be true.

Of course, they can have more than one whine.

BH said...

Yea, verily, the whines of the vanquished lumpenright will fall upon my ears like unto the songs of angels. And I ain't particular about their delusional choice(s) of reason(s) to do the whining, either.

marcel said...

See Stabbed in the back