Sneak Peek – Republican Diagnostic Manual!

Can’t wait until 2013 for the fifth edition of the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association’s catalog of mental health disorders? No need to rely on your old, dog-eared copy of the DSM-IV. Here’s an exclusive taste of the DSM-MMXII, GOP edition, an admittedly incomplete catalog of the party’s post-election pathologies.

Pathological Liar: (n) An individual who habitually tells lies so exaggerated or bizarre that they are suggestive of mental disorder.

OK, maybe these whale-size fibs aren’t quite that bad. But they nevertheless earn a place in the Greatest Political Lies Hall of Fame.

Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook.”

See: Watergate.

Bill Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

See: dress, blue.

Barack Obama: “You can’t change Washington from inside, only from the outside . . . . That’s how some of our biggest accomplishments like healthcare got done — mobilizing the American people.”

See: Obamacare and Big Pharma, cozy relationship between. See also: Kickback, Cornhusker.

And now, a brand new entry!

John Boehner: “I’m the most reasonable, responsible person here in Washington.”

See: U.S. credit rating, downgrade of. See also: Brinkmanship, esp. as related to debt ceiling increase. See also: Economy, hostage-taking of.

Delusion: (n) A fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader, sat down with the Wall Street Journal opinion page for a post-election spin session. One line from the amusingly softball interview puts paid to the notion, advanced by the president, that the Republican “fever” might break after a loss. It’s apparent that McConnell is still deep in the skewed-polls, Romney-landslide haze that prevented the GOP from seeing its own looming rout.

But don’t Messrs. Obama and Reid think they’ve just been given a mandate to raise those tax rates? “Yes, well, we Republicans in the House and Senate think we have a voter mandate not to raise taxes.”

And Senate? I can buy the idea that, by maintaining their House majority, Republicans earned an endorsement from voters to continue their obstructionism. But let’s review what happened in the Senate: The GOP lost nearly every competitive race, including seats in Missouri, North Dakota and Wisconsin that once looked imminently winnable. Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren, two of the most liberal Democrats to run for office in recent memory, defeated moderate Republicans, while centrist candidates Heidi Heitkamp and Claire McCaskill turned out victories in solidly red states. The GOP picked up a single seat in Nebraska, where Deb Fischer trounced political veteran (and big-city carpetbagger) Bob Kerrey. Democrats increased their majority, leading to a 55-45 split (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats). Where exactly is McConnell finding his Senate mandate?

Similar delusions plague Michael Barone, the Washington Examiner columnist whose descent from reasonable analyst to First Degree Hack has been ably chronicled at New York Magazine and Washington Monthly. Now, a possible explanation for Barone’s ineptitude (Romney wins 315 electoral votes!) emerges: He doesn’t read the news. Or rather, he reads the Washington Examiner and tunes into Fox News. I count two bizarro alternate reality scenarios in three sentences:

Then consider the results for the House of Representatives. Not many people split their tickets these days, but the discontented voters who re-elected a Democratic president also returned a Republican House, probably by a similar popular vote margin. On the latest count, they lost only seven seats, even though Democratic redistricting plans cost them 11 seats in California, Illinois and Maryland.

First, about that popular vote margin . . . . The Washington Post’s Fix blog reports that “Democratic House candidates appear to have won more of the popular vote than their Republican counterparts on Tuesday, despite what looks as though it will be a 35-seat GOP majority.” Aaron Blake writes:

According to numbers compiled by the Post’s great Dan Keating, Democrats have won roughly 48.8 percent of the House vote, compared to 48.47 percent for Republicans. Despite losing the popular vote, Republicans are set to have their second-biggest House majority in 60 years and their third-biggest since the Great Depression.

Mitch McConnell’s “mandate” is complete fantasy, but even John Boehner, the Speaker of the House who last week asserted that Americans “re-elected our majority in the House” and so “made it clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates,” is on shaky ground. Democrats picked up at least eight seats in the House — hardly, as the equally delusional American Spectator would have it, “a resounding re-election.” The reality is more complicated. “What saved Boehner’s majority wasn’t the will of the people but the power of redistricting,” writes Ezra Klein. “That’s a neat trick, but it’s not a popular mandate, or anything near to it — and Boehner knows it. That’s why his first move after the election was to announce, in a vague-but-important statement, that he was open to some kind of compromise on taxes.”

Which brings us to Barone’s second point. About those “Democratic redistricting plans” . . . . The very next line of Blake’s post undermines that claim, which is particularly strange considering that Republicans have spent the past year touting the advantage their dominance of state legislatures has given them to draw favorable boundaries and protect vulnerable incumbents. Blake again:

The numbers seem to back up what we’ve been talking about on this blog for a while: Redistricting drew such a GOP-friendly map that, in a neutral environment, Republicans have an inherent advantage.

A recent Fair Vote study found Republicans were clearly favored in 195 House districts, compared to Democrats being favored in 166. Some of this is because Democratic voters are more concentrated in urban areas, but it’s also because the GOP drew some very favorable redistricting maps in important states like North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Post’s Wonkblog points out that Republican-led redistricting essentially handed the GOP 11 newly safe seats in the House. While redistricting can’t account for the entirety of the GOP’s continued hold on the House, it did play a significant role. “Republicans used their control over the redistricting process to great effect,” Ezra Klein writes, “packing Democrats into tighter and tighter districts and managing to restructure races so even a slight loss for Republicans in the popular vote still meant a healthy majority in the House.” Even Barone’s own newspaper admits that “the GOP has locked in its House gains through cleverly-drawn districts that isolate Democratic voters,” and the National Review writes that “one reason they won so many seats anyway is that 2010 was an unusually good Republican year, and Republicans were therefore able to draw the lines of congressional districts following that year’s census.” Most damning: “What the House success demonstrates, in part, is that Republicans can do well when they choose the voters rather than vice versa.”

And just like that, another Michael Barone delusion evaporates. Oh, well. At least Mitch McConnell will have some company in the psych ward.

Projection: (n) a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.

Anti-abortion crusader Charmaine Yoest reflects on the election:

This is not a lesson learned, but it bears repeating as context: It’s an uphill climb against a demagogue with a loose relationship with the truth.

Yeah, Obama did have a tough time running against Mitt Romney and his loose attachment to honesty. Cf. Romney: “Chrysler plans to start making Jeeps in, you guessed it, China.” Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne: “Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.” Chrysler’s head of product designer, Ralph Gilles, responding to Donald Trump’s repetition of the inaccuracy: “You are full of shit!”

*****

At the Weekly Standard, Jay Cost blames Obama’s “identity politics” for turning voters against Mitt Romney. (Hey, isn’t that what political advertising is, uh, supposed to do?)

Team Obama worked assiduously on turning Mitt Romney into the “other.”

Cost seems to think Dinesh D’Souza (“Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s”), “Dreams from My Real Father” auteur Joel Gilbert (“My election . . . was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii”) and John Sununu (“I wish this president would learn how to be an American”) are all Democrats. Apparently, Mitt Romney (Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe”) never tried to paint the president as the “other.”

*****

Republican strategist and American Crossroads founder Karl Rove, whose $300 million push to boost Republican candidates ended in “colossal failure” on November 6 — his super PAC earned a whopping %1.29 rate of return on the $100 million it spent on the general election, and just 6% of the total went to winning candidates — continued his plunge into the deep end in an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News with a novel explanation for Mitt Romney’s loss:

He succeeded by suppressing the vote, by saying to people, ‘You may not like who I am and I know you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, but I’m going to paint this other guy as simply a rich guy who only cares about himself . . . . They effectively denigrated Mitt Romney’s character, business acumen, business experience and made him unworthy.

Pot, meet kettle. This is particularly rich coming from the guru of smear ads himself, the tactical leader of a party that routinely engages in actual voter suppression. It’s tantamount to claiming that Coke engages in Pepsi suppression whenever it runs an ad extolling the crisp, thirst-quenching benefits of merits of its product. It would take a lot of chutzpah for Coke to level such a charge if it was, at the same time, slapping a tax on every can of Pepsi purchased by a non-white consumer or pushing laws that required Pepsi to be sold from behind the counter. As the Huffington Post notes, Rove seems confused about what it means to suppress the vote. He “didn’t actually give any examples of ways in which Obama made it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right at the polls — things like voter ID laws, which have been pushed by GOP legislatures around the country.” Reporter Amanda Terkel continues: “Rove did say that Obama had aired attack ads and painted Romney as out-of-touch with the concerns of ordinary voters, but these are fairly common tactics in politics, and Rove is certainly no stranger to them.”

Want to see some real voter suppression, Karl? Take a look at what your own party has been up to lately. It hasn’t been Democrats sending “poll watchers” from organizations like True the Vote into minority neighborhoods to aggressively challenge “suspicious” voters. In the past year, GOP governors and state legislators have passed laws that:

• Restrict early voting in states like Florida and Ohio, where the process is used disproportionately by African-American and Latino voters.
• Purge suspected “non-citizens” and “felons” from the voting rolls in Florida and Colorado, despite little evidence that anyone on the hit lists are actually ineligible to vote. In Colorado alone, 4,000 voters received intimidating letters demanding proof of citizenship in order to maintain their registration. Hundreds of Floridians — over 60 percent of them Latino — were given 30 days to respond, or face being barred from the polls. Republican officials have pressed on in both states even after repeated and widely publicized errors that threaten to disenfranchise legitimate elderly, minority and military voters.
• Subject voters in 34 states to new or enhanced voter ID laws, even though there have been just 10 instances of in-person voter fraud (out of 2,068 alleged cases) in the past ten years. In Pennsylvania, which passed a photo ID requirement despite the inability by officials to produce a single relevant case of voter fraud, nearly 760,000 registered voters are estimated to lack state-approved photo ID.

Naturally, Rove is hardly the only conservative to see conspiracy theories in the Obama campaign’s advertising and get-out-the-vote strategies. There is irony in the fact that the GOP lost the election in part because of Chicago’s vastly superior GOTV operation. Perhaps Rove would like parties to be required to turn out the other side’s supporters as well. Want to drive a busload of evangelical church-goers to the polls? Sure, as long as you make sure there are a few atheists in the van as well. The National Review’s Yuval Levin, who is usually a more even-keeled writer, accuses the president of “using any low and mendacious tactic required to tell working-class voters (especially white, Midwestern ones) that Mitt Romney was an evil and uncaring plutocrat. Those voters were not going to support Obama, but they could be kept away from Romney, and evidently they were.”

Yeah, because there’s nothing “low and mendacious” about calling President Obama “un-American,” accusing him of waging a “war on religion,” claiming (falsely) that he “gutted” the welfare-work requirement . . . . I could go on.

And whatever happened to those pre-election predictions of a massive “enthusiasm gap” favoring Republicans? The inimitable Peggy Noonan, known for “feeling” her way through politics, suggested on the Monday prior to the election that the “joy and intensity” of the crowds at Romney rallies indicated that “maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about . . . a Romney win.” She continued: “All the vibrations are right . . . There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm.” Michael Barone, whose Hackitude Badge has been previously noted, wrote that “just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting — and about their candidate — than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so.” (He then went on to predict Romney would win, uh, 315 electoral votes.) Post-election quarterbacking finds Barone admitting, contra Rove, that “the challenger didn’t inspire the turnout surge he needed.” Well, I guess in the face of such low-down “voter suppression” tactics, Romney was just powerless to inspire. That’s a sharp contrast to two early-November predictions from unofficial Boston surrogate Jennifer Rubin, who — even more than Barone — has become something of a laughingstock even in conservative media:

Romney did have likability problems, that is, until Americans got a good look at him for themselves. He was able to reverse the negative impression left by tens of millions of dollars in ads and hostile mainstream media.

And:

In big and large assaults, some petty and some sweeping, Obama and third-party groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make Romney an unacceptable alternative. It seems to have failed, spectacularly so.

Rove must not have gotten that memo.

Finally, a question for the Rove. Was there really so much “voter suppression” going on that a chunk of that $300 million in Crossroads cash wouldn’t have gone a long way toward combating it? Conservative pundit Byron York complains that “undecideds or weak Republicans were deeply influenced by Obama’s relentless attacks on Romney in May, June, July and August,” to which I would respond: Yeah, in August. What were Rove and Romney doing in the months between August and November? Sitting on their hands? As Jed Babbin of American Spectator writes: “The most basic of political skills — as I wrote back in April — is the reflex to attack when your opponent exposes a weakness. This is so fundamental that no campaign can succeed without it.” By not effectively mounting a counterattack, Rove didn’t perform on the fundamentals. More Babbin: “Rove’s outfits alone gathered about $400 million from donors and simply didn’t do their job.”

This points to Rove’s biggest failure, and to the strongest evidence for my armchair diagnosis. The central talent of Karl Rove — the thing that earned him monikers like “The Oracle” and “Bush’s Brain” — is his ability to run a good (if ruthless) race. He can’t manufacture better candidates – see George Bush – but he can manufacture better campaigns that sell subpar candidates to a wary electorate. In 2000, Rove convinced America that a malaprop-spouting, fact-challenged cowboy from Texas deserved a chance in the White House. In 2012, given what was arguably an easier sell – a turnaround expert running in a year desperate for economic turnaround – Rove couldn’t close the deal. When he blames Obama’s negative advertising, he inadvertently indicts his own. In 2004, he would have explained John Kerry’s by saying that the Democrat’s ads weren’t good enough to combat the Swift Boat “suppression” tactics that aimed to convince swing voters he was a wind surfing, cheese eating surrender monkey. A more intellectually honest man would realize that the explanation for Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 is no different. The challenger and his allies failed to mount a coherent, timely response. The only difference is, this time, Rove was the one who didn’t measure up.

Wikipedia, take it away “An example of [projection] might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or ‘projecting,’ those same faults onto another person or object.”

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

Variously attributed to Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet, this definition of insanity certainly applies to a subset of Republicans. While some in the party have called for a post-election reevaluation of the GOP’s hostility toward Latinos, women and the mooching “47 percent,” others have doubled down on the hard-line conservatism that produced Mitt Romney’s dedication to “self-deportation” and Todd Akin’s repellant remarks about rape. There are reasonable voices in the wilderness, to be sure. Charles Krauthammer (OK, semi-reasonable voices) writes that, to win more Latino votes, “Republicans can change their position, be a lot more open to actual amnesty with enforcement.” Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal suggests that demonizing gays is not a winning strategy: “Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it’s lawful and consensual and doesn’t impinge in some obvious way on you.” And former Bush administration official Karen Hughes slams the party for “Neanderthal comments,” writing bluntly at Politico that, “if another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”

But not everyone is on board. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer railed that “America is not demanding a second liberal party.” Laura Ingraham, naturally, concurred in a blog post, dismissing the idea that Republicans “now need to pander to minorities and update their platform to make it more appealing.” Instead, the radio host placed the blame squarely on the electorate: “What exactly is wrong with conservative principles? Anything? No. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We don’t need to change to appeal to voters. We need voters and their mindsets to change.”

Is it really an effective strategy to castigate the very voters you hope will look favorably on your party in 2014? Are minorities and low-income Americans really crying out, Please, alienate me? More Republicans than Ingraham and Bauer certainly seem to think so.

A sampling of the most counterproductive, definition-of-insanity attempts to double down on what didn’t work in 2012 has to begin with the top of the Republican ticket, Mitt Romney himself. Forced in the run up to the election to repudiate his remarks about the 47 percent who “will vote for the president no matter what . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims,” with the mea culpa that “I said something that’s just completely wrong,” Romney now blames his loss on the “big gifts” Obama gave to minorities, women and other members of the 47 percent.  Post-election, he suddenly has the chance to express his views without consequences. Freed from accountability to the electorate (and from his own predilection for offering similar gifts to the elderly, coal magnates and hedge fund managers), he essentially repeats the takers vs. makers rhetoric that cost his party the race. His remarks on a conference call to wealthy donors are reminiscent not only of the 47 percent comments but of his tone-deaf assertion to the NAACP that its members should “vote for the other guy” if they’re “looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for.” Via the Los Angeles Times, some key bits from Romney’s conference call, all of which elaborate on his theme that the president employed “a proven political strategy, which is, give a bunch of money from the government to a group and guess what? They vote for you.”

The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people.

The president’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.

As if speaking in generalities about large chunks of the electorate isn’t bad enough, Romney digs the hole deeper, articulating exactly which perks each demographic group was bribed with.

With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.

With regards to African American voters, ‘Obamacare’ was a huge plus — and was highly motivational to African American voters. You can imagine for somebody making $25—, or $30—, or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare — particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 a family, in perpetuity, I mean this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus.”

With regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for the children of illegals — the so-called Dream Act kids — was a huge plus for that voting group.

Nothing like using Numbers USA-approved language like “illegals” to win over Latinos!

The funny thing is, the voters Obama supposedly bribed with health care, “amnesty” and welfare make up a larger portion of the electorate than the millionaires whose capital gains tax breaks Romney wanted to preserve. African Americans, Latinos, college students, middle class families who will now have access to health care — these are not just a handful of Americans. In painting a picture of a country divided between two types of people — Romney voters, who are worthy producers, and Obama voters, who are shiftless grifters — the former candidate outlines a vision of America that Ezra Klein characterizes as “so ugly as to be bordering on dystopic.” And in implying that Obama’s supporters are moochers whose votes can be bought, Romney – the bloodless CEO for whom every human interaction is a transaction and every neighborly impulse has a price – misses the lesson that others in his party seem to be learning. The greatest gift Obama gave his constituents carried no price at all: respect.

Indeed, the swiftness with which other Republicans – who will face voters in 2014 and 2016 – have distanced themselves from Romney’s remarks is notable. As The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis quips, Republicans are “fleeing” from Romney “at such a high clip that the United Nations Refugee Agency may need to step in to regulate the flow.” Running fastest is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who lectured that”we have got to stop dividing the Ameriacan voters. I absolutely reject that notion, that description. I think that’s absolutely wrong.” Florida Governor Rick Scott called the comments “inappropriate” and “not true,” while former Virginia Representative Tom Davis opined that “it shows a huge misreading of the electoral landscape. A rather elitist misread. Where does he think his votes came from in rural America?” Even Republicans who defended Romney in the wake of his “47 percent” gaffe are ready to throw him under the bus now that he is no longer the nominee. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a top Romney surrogate who excused the previous remarks as “an analysis to donors,” said that “our mission should not be to deny government benefits to people who need them” and that “I don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work.”

As James Fallows, the left-leaning Atlantic writer, notes: “If you’re running for elected office and find yourself in the business of blaming the voters, stop. Odds are, you’re losing. Or you’ve just lost.”

*****

Though Romney managed to insult all the GOP’s trouble demographics in one incident, other conservatives have stuck to denigrating one interest group at a time. First up, women. It bears repeating: If you don’t like being called sexist, stop saying sexist things. And that goes double for sexist, misogynist things. None of these right-wing commentators are helping the GOP out with female voters.

Here’s Emmett Tyrell, the editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, writing about the liberal half of America:

For instance, there are the delusional women (usually single) who apparently see themselves as luscious targets of libidinous ecstasy from the male of the species and occasionally from the female of the species. They must have, as a matter of rights (thitherto overlooked in the Bill of Rights), free contraception devices of all kinds. It is a very serious matter. In fact, it is a matter of national security.

Tyrell must be really fascinated with these allegedly egotistical females because he comes close to self-plagiarism in a column for the Washington Examiner. Though he is ostensibly discussing General Petraeus’ downfall, he manages to work in another tirade against “delusional women.”

They seemed to see themselves as irresistible to the male of the species, and thus it was a matter of national security that they receive all manner of free birth control from intrauterine devices to extra-uterine devices to ad-hoc ergo-propter-hoc uterine devises.

Classy! The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge also goes all-in on the misogyny:

The truth is that America is now a leftist country. It’s Rachel Maddow and Jeremiah Wright’s country. You know that divorced fortysomething female neighbor of yours? The one who’s not half as bright as she thinks she is, and doesn’t know much about Libya or the national debt, but watches Katie Couric’s new show and just kind of didn’t like Romney because she, well, just kind of didn’t like him? America is now her country. It’s Dingbatville.

Really, why did we ever give those dingbats the right to vote in the first place? Or perhaps Judge would just prefer to restrict the franchise to those fortysomething Hannity and O’Reilly watchers who likewise know little about Libya or the national debt.

*****

Moving on: Despite vocal urging by high-profile Republicans like Susana Martinez, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, plenty of other conservatives are discouraging the party from “pandering” to the Hispanic vote. Felon (and National Review contributor) Conrad Black certainly isn’t pandering:

In the last 40 years, as many as 20 million unskilled peasants have illegally entered the U.S. while 60 million low-paying jobs have been outsourced from it. For the first time, a coalition of pigmentational minorities and government employees and other benefit recipients outvoted the bulk of the traditional white majority. If this is the template for America’s electoral future, strains unimaginable since the Civil War will result.

Peasants? Yikes. Also at National Review, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a self-described “Mexican-American wife and mother of six,” offers a piece for the National Review in which she lambastes “racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza”:

All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.

Somehow, I doubt implying entire racial groups are handout-addicted druggies who can be swayed by something as trivial as dirty MTV videos is going to play well with Campos-Duffy’s fellow Mexican-Americans.

*****

Government assistance in general continues to come under fire from some conservatives, who apparently did not grasp the damage done by Romney’s “47 percent” blunder. David Catron is not heeding the advice from Florida Governor Rick Scott, whose prescription for the GOP — “what we’ve got to do is say we want every vote, we want to take care of every citizen in our state” — at least pays lip service to the idea that not every single mother on food stamps is a Cadillac-driving welfare queen:

More than half the electorate had morphed into a collective vampire determined to suck the lifeblood out of the shrinking and besieged cadre of producers.

Columnist Cal Thomas doesn’t much like 21st century America either — a little strange, considering how conservatives are always nattering on about American exceptionalism and cities on a hill:

Great nations and proud empires have always collapsed from within before they were conquered from without. President Obama’s re-election mirrors the self-indulgent, greedy and envious nation we are rapidly becoming.

What ever happened to “love your country”?

Let’s not forget the ritual, if more subtle, gay-bashing that has become second-nature for social conservatives. The Times reports today on a new study suggesting that the LGBT vote was enough to tip states like Florida and Ohio — where Romney narrowly won the straight vote — to President Obama. This isn’t exactly a surprise, but it does demonstrate the way in which “traditional” ideology has driven away growing sections of the electorate. In a piece about General Petraeus’ resignation, Earl Tilford gives us this blithely bigoted gem:

Conduct unbecoming? Maybe, but again spare us the self-righteous indignation. Just last June, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta effusively praised the initial celebration of “Gay Pride Month.” The Obama administration has hardly set the bar high when it comes to sexual conduct.

*****

Finally, a guy who may not technically be crazy, but whose actions — yes, that’s a real tattoo — suggest something may be a little off. Was the $15,000 (coughed up by an anonymous Republican on eBay) worth it?

Numbers Don’t Lie, But Do They Fib?

Nate Silver’s election forecast (NYT)

Few things in politics are as simultaneously fascinating and frustrating than the horse-race polls. Part of me is interested enough in how the country sees the candidates to scroll through the cross-tabs, parsing which income levels throw their support to Romney and which age groups break for the president, but part of me wants to roll its eyes and wonder, What’s all the fuss? Between the polls themselves and the endless analyses that they produce, a lot of energy is wasted on a question that could best be answered simply by waiting until November 6. This time of year, the polls come fast and furious; National Journal counts 82 in the last 12 days alone — and that doesn’t even include state-level surveys for down-ballot races for the Senate and House. Unsurprisingly, the media wastes more ink on spinning the numbers, or at least reporting on the spin, than on the actual results themselves. There are, after all, only so many lead articles one can write about President Obama’s three-point lead, or about the swing vote in Wisconsin and Ohio. Discussion of those points and percentages, however, could fill books.

Thus we are treated to the spectacle of Fox News contributor and Wall Street Journal columnist Karl Rove declaring that Obama is “in desperate shape in territory he carried with ease in 2008” while his employers provide evidence directly to the contrary: “Headwinds for Romney in Latest Poll Results,” the Journal writes, offering a laundry list of states in which the Democrat is topping the Republican, including a surprisingly large eight-point margin in Iowa. “Obama has edge over Romney in three battleground states,” Fox reports, and even admits that the president’s lead is more than a paltry percent or two: “Obama tops Romney by seven percentage points among likely voters in both Ohio (49-42 percent) and Virginia (50-43 percent). In Florida, the president holds a five-point edge (49-44 percent),” roughly the same margins found by the WSJ. (Don’t give Fox too much credit. The next line: “The good news for Romney is that among voters who are ‘extremely’ interested in this year’s election, the races are much tighter.”

Though Romney likes to accuse President Obama of making excuses for a poor economy, his backers come up with an astounding number of their own excuses for Romney’s lagging numbers. And the longer the Republican trails in the polls, the more strained and unbelievable the excuses become. Success is defined down; now Romney is winning simply by virtue of running anywhere close to the incumbent — an incumbent, you’ll remember, that in the Republican worldview has done such a horrible, incompetent job that he should just resign tomorrow. His game plan “doesn’t need a turnaround,” Romney said in a CBS interview. “We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president to the United States.” Republican pollster Whit Ayres makes the case that Obama’s steady lead is too narrow to say anything about Romney. “Ayres said Obama’s average lead in the public polls was 2.3 percent in June, 2.5 percent in July, 2.4 percent in August, and has been 2.6 percent in September,” National Journal reports, quoting Ayres as saying (a tad defensively, I’d imagine): “It is a flat line…. That doesn’t strike me as a done deal, a race that is over.”

So why aren’t the American people seeing through the Obama facade? A sampling of the grasping-for-straws logic: blame it on the convention bounce, the Bill Clinton “sugar high,” the food stamps that the president is ostensibly doling out to buy the votes of the poor. “This year’s DNC was the latest incumbent convention in American history!” exclaims Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard. “That absolutely has to be taken into account when examining the president’s standing in the polls, and it means we would be wise to discount his margin by a little bit.” Admirably reaching beyond the worn-out (and ultimately inaccurate, as Reagan actually led in the polls after the convention) Reagan-Carter comparison of a late-breaking challenger, Cost argues that “historically speaking, this president is in weaker shape than any postwar incumbent who went on to victory, with the possible exception of Harry Truman.” Sean Trende, a conservative analyst whose association with Real Clear Politics and its reputable daily poll averages gives him a veneer of neutrality, makes the case that the polls just aren’t registering the dire state of the economy. “So if the election were held today, President Obama would probably win comfortably,” he writes. “But the election isn’t today. In the next seven weeks, the economy, the president’s tepid job approval ratings, and Romney’s spending campaign will continue to exert gravitational forces on Obama’s re-election efforts.” For Romney to overcome the president’s current lead is “not a particularly tall order.” The Washington Examiner, which runs at least one article per day discounting Obama’s edge in the polls as fabricated by the liberal media, tries to put a positive spin on Romney’s status, opining that a poll of 12 swing states “shows Obama up by just two points over Romney 48 percent to 46 percent” and immediately adds a caveat: “That same poll showed 22% of voters could change their mind before election day.” Considering that conservatives spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out “fishy” percentages in mainstream polls, it’s curious that no one at the Examiner found it notable that every other survey puts undecided voters around a mere six percent of the electorate. Of course, this is the same outfit that describes a poll conducted for the flagship Murdoch broadsheet thus: “A new NBC/WSJ poll purports to show that Obama is beating Romney 50 percent to 45 percent.” Well, a poll either shows something or not. You can argue over its accuracy, but a poll can’t purport to show a result any more than the SAT can purport to give Junior a score of 1425.

For as closely as both sides watch the polls for any hint of an uptick for their candidates, partisans actually spend the majority of the time trying to discredit numbers they don’t like.  Conservatives are almost uniformly more hostile to polling (and more hostile, I’d note, to anything that smacks of science – evolution, climate change – or academia in general). Not coincidentally, such hostility spikes when the data is unfriendly, as it has been for Romney over the past week or two. Don’t like the results? Quibble with the methodology. Before most surveys shifted to a likely voter screen in the past month, Republicans complained that the universe of registered voters favored Democrats who wouldn’t actually turn out to vote. Now that the likely screen is in place and the results are equally as dismal — Romney indeed does better among likely voters, but not well enough to erase the president’s edge of one to eight points — conservatives have fallen silent about this particular argument. Predictions that Romney would swamp Obama once polls switched to a more favorable pool didn’t pan out (somewhat improbably, the Fox News and UPI polls actually have Obama doing better among likely voters), so they’ve gone back to their standard whine about polls in general: Like the rest of the media, pollsters are unavoidably biased toward liberals and are doing their part to boost the president’s reelection chances.

The most common “evidence” for such bias is that pollsters – everyone except for the vaunted Rasmussen, who self-identifies as conservative and pens opinion pieces about the dangers of giving government bureaucrats control over health care – routinely oversample democrats. “It is hard to imagine more pro-Obama turn-out being devised by either Marist or Quinnipiac,” wails radio talker Hugh Hewitt in the Washington Examiner. (He ironically faults the methodology of polls “paid for by the MSM.” Apparently Fox News, which gives Obama a larger lead than nearly any other poll, is now mainstream media.) The argument contains a grain of truth, though the impact of such alleged oversampling is almost certainly exaggerated. There are legitimate reasons that more respondents identify as Democrats, beginning with the simple fact that more people simply identify as Democrats. The Pew Research Center’s national numbers put Dems at 32 percent of the electorate, Republicans at 24 percent, and Independents at 38 percent. Elections are close-run things, dividing the country almost exactly down the middle, but it is a fallacy to assume that party identification precisely tracks voting patterns. (If you believe 50 percent of the country must be Democrats and 50 percent Republicans, what happens when one party registers hundreds of thousands more new voters, as Dems did in 2008?) Sean Trende writes that “the same thing has occurred in every election. The losing side objects to the partisan composition of polling. The polls then proceed to get the final result roughly correct.” In 2004, it was Democrats doing the complaining; this year, it has become “a consistent theme among Republicans this cycle: looking at the party ID numbers and discounting polls that show substantial Democratic advantages.”

Polls do indeed include more Democrats, but this is due less to conspiracy than the edge the party has held for decades in voter identification and turnout. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site, which sees conspiracies behind more trees than the John Birch Society, flags a poll from Marquette University that shows an unusual uptick in respondents identifying as Democrats — and immediately concludes that “the University inflates their sample and lifts Obama into a 14-point lead.” When “reporter” Mike Flynn wonders, “Why did the school only radically change its sample after Romney began erasing Obama’s lead in the polls?” he showcases his ignorance. Most reputable pollsters can’t “change” their samples because they don’t choose their samples to begin with, at least not on the basis of party ID. With the exception of Rasmussen, polling outfits treat party ID as a response — something they are asking people, the point of conducting a survey in the first place — rather than as an intrinsic characteristic, like race or gender, for which the sample should be weighted. The Pew Research Center, a frequent target of conservative attacks, supplies this explanation: “Party identification is one of the aspects of public opinion that our surveys are trying to measure, not something that we know ahead of time like the share of adults who are African American, female, or who live in the South.”

There are far more mundane explanations for a seeming excess of Democrats than Marquette’s liberal academic cabal. Even if 2010 (when Tea Party fervor prompted a surge in Republican turnout that gave the parties parity at the polls) is used as a reference point instead of 2008 (a year of unprecedented liberal enthusiasm), the party ID numbers, with their steady increases in Independents at the expense of Republicans, still favor Democrats. In other words, even in a year in which Republicans voted in above-average numbers, they barely equaled the depressed number of Democrats. 2012 is not 2010 — most obviously, it is a presidential election, not a low-turnout midterm — and the partisan breakdown at the exit polls should land somewhere between 2008 and 2010. Andrew Hacker, writing in the New York Review of Books, observes that Republican confidence in a 2010-esque electorate may be “misplaced.” Forty-five million invigorated Republican voters turned out for the Congressional election, “well below the some 67 million they will need this year for a presidential majority.” In addition, “The 2010 electorate was also older, conspicuously white, and invigorated by its Tea Party allies . . . But 2012 will bring a much larger and more varied number of voters to the polls.” The question, of course, is how many “more varied” voters will show up. Will anti-Obama grievances produce an electorate that more closely resembles 2010, or will the president’s 2008 coalition of minority-educated-female voters reassert itself?

Regardless of the exact numbers, when conservatives complain that a poll has Democrats at +8. they ignore the fact that even the most tentative turnout estimates have Dems at +4 to begin with. A look at the responses to Pew’s long-standing question of “what would you call yourself?” shows that the country’s percentage of Democrats has held steady over the past two decades (from 33 percent in 1990 to 32 percent in 2012), while Independents have made major strides (29 percent to 38 percent) almost entirely at the expense of Republicans, who have lost eight percent of voters (31 percent to 24 percent). Conservative critics ignore the surge in people identifying as Independents, who are obviously voting for one candidate or the other – and to keep the near fifty-fifty split, it must often be the Republican. In an ideal conservative poll, party identification would be weighted in the same manner as other demographic characteristics like age or income. Indeed, Rasmussen employs just such weighting, which is one reason its results diverge from practically every other survey, giving Romney a one- or two-point edge that is seen nowhere else. (Rasmussen also has other issues with its methodology — see below.) Rasmussen’s tactics are a solution in search of a problem, as Sean Trende points out: “The problem is that party identification is not an immutable characteristic, such as race, age, or gender. It fluctuates.”

Another weakness in the conservative oversampling argument is its focus on party identification rather than ideology, which Trende notes tends to be “more consistent over time and . . . less susceptible to question wording and ordering.” A sample that is heavily Democratic is not necessarily heavily liberal. A Washington Post poll that talked to 25 percent Republicans, 34 percent Democrats and 34 percent Independents found that a whopping 39 percent actually identified as conservative, while only 29 percent described themselves as “liberal” and 20 percent as “moderate.” This is hardly a new trend, as the electorate has contained far fewer self-described liberals for years. Presumably, as most presidential elections are nearly 50-50 affairs, some of those “conservatives” vote for the Democrat, just as some of the people registered as Democrats in the surveys criticized by the right obviously vote for the Republican candidate. Such discrepancies are particularly evident in the South, where many older people in bright-red states are still registered as Democrats, a relic of the years in which the party still had a lock on white voters in the region. Even National Review, in its more sober moments, admits that Democrats have an advantage. Katrina Trinko offers “another possibility” to the usual accusation of bias:

At this particular point in the race, a higher percentage of voters may be identifying themselves as Democrats. That doesn’t mean they will still see themselves as Democrats on Election Day, but for whatever reason (such as excitement over the convention) they do now.

Interestingly enough, even center-right analysts like Sean Trende note that party registration is not the same thing as party loyalty; in a CBS/NYT poll of swing states much criticized by conservatives, the Florida breakdown was 27% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 32% Independent — ratios slightly more favorable to Democrats than the 2008 exit polls (34 R/37 D/29 I) showed. But when the survey asked about party registration, the Republican numbers actually started looking closer to the parity conservatives insist should exist: fully 42 percent were registered as Democrats, with 36 percent as Republicans and 20 percent as Independents. How a person is registered is clearly not the same as how that person votes. Trende dismisses the idea that Romney’s poor poll numbers can be attributed to an oversampling of Democrats. Because the ideological sample tracks more closely with the 2010 exit polls that conservatives prefer over the 2008 polls that reflect an energized Democratic Party, “this suggests that the ideological orientation of the surveys isn’t particularly skewed, but that Romney is doing unusually poorly among self-identified moderates.” Conveniently, Romney backers never mention that, while the electorate may officially skew Democratic, it also skews heavily conservative.

By far the most bizarre and deliberately mendacious conservative objection to standard polling methodology comes via Republican pollster John McLaughlin, who tells National Review that “the Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting.” It’s worth unpacking his “argument” point by point to see just how off-base it is, and just how damaging such an analysis should be to McLaughlin’s business prospects. Would you hire an expert who can’t even get the facts straight on his own field?

So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted.

IVR polls (which use robo-calls — press one if you like Romney! —  instead of live interviewers) are indeed heavily weighted. But the only major robo-poller who weights its samples for party identification is . . . Rasmussen, which routinely puts Romney ahead of the president and hardly uses “Democrat-heavy models.” Nate Silver reminds us that “automated polls, like those from the Rasmussen Reports, have had lukewarm results for Mr. Obama. A Rasmussen Reports poll released on Thursday, for instance, put Mr. Obama three points behind in Iowa.” Despite reservations about robo-poll methodology, Rasmussen’s dubious weighting technique, and the exclusion of cell-phone owners, “Mr. Romney would much prefer the robopolls, warts and all.” So much for that lobbying.

You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ‘not enthusiastic’ to vote or non-voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30 percent range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead.

You could weight to whatever results you want. But legitimate pollsters don’t. Only Rasmussen does. As for Republican affiliation in the 20s and 30s being “low” . . . . in 2012, 24% of Americans identified as Republicans.

The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this. Then there’s the debate between calling off a random-digit dial of phone exchanges vs. a known sample of actual registered voters. Most polls favoring Obama are random and not off the actual voter list. That’s too expensive for some pollsters.

This is perhaps the weirdest criticism of all. Polls that call random digits still only speak to registered voters. In fact, the very first question on the survey — and I gave out lots of them as an interviewer at a push-poll outfit in 2004 — is a screen: “Are you registered to vote at this address?” The polls favoring Obama have never talked to “random” people. Earlier in the year, they spoke with all registered voters; as the election years, they have narrowed their sample even further to “likely voters,” a change which helps Romney put which still leaves him trailing the president by one to two points. And how interesting that McLaughlin should prefer the “actual voter list,” considering the efforts his party has made to kick Democrats off voter lists across the country . . . only to find out, as in Colorado, that the vast majority (around 99 percent) of those suspect names were legitimate Americans, not illegal immigrants itching to get deported by showing up at the voting booth.

Of course, liberals have their own critiques of poll methodology, many of which I – naturally – find more convincing than the fallacies trotted out by the right. They are certainly arguments made by a higher number of experts, as opposed to pundits whose only knowledge of statistics comes from twisting them to fit a thesis. While not every argument is as tinged with partisanship as the Huffington Post’s contention that Gallup undersamples minority voters, Nate Silver’s questions about the validity of polls (like Rasmussen) that rely on robo-calls (which aren’t allowed to dial cell phones) instead of live interviews or that fail to include cell phones in their samples are reasonable concerns at a time in which approximately one-third of Americans don’t have or regularly use landlines. Such Americans, of course, are disproportionately minority and low-income, which suggests that pollsters who don’t include them are employing the same logic behind the Republican argument that voter ID requirements are “fair” because they only disenfranchise a small slice of the electorate . . . . a slice that happens to vote nearly 100% Democratic. (For what it’s worth, Rebecca Rosen makes an interesting, though neither particularly persuasive nor fully fleshed-out, counter-argument at The Atlantic that the cell phone gap is meaningless because most well-off people have landlines, and the well-off are much more likely to vote.) Indeed, the surveys that exclude cell phones routinely lowball Obama’s lead in comparison to the live-interview consensus. Given that robo-poller Rasmussen also weights its surveys by party identification, which liberals would argue creates a sample with a higher percentage of Republicans actually exist, Nate Cohn observes at The New Republic that “it’s not hard to envision how [robo-polls] could systemically underestimate Obama’s standing. In a certain respect, it’s surprising that Obama ever took a lead in Rasmussen’s tracker after the DNC, since it required Obama to hold an unrealistically large advantage among independent voters.”

Some of the complaints are flimsier, like the Obama campaign’s objection to a New York Times “panel-back” poll that re-surveyed people previously contacted for an earlier poll. “The usual complaint is that the respondents who agree to be reinterviewed are different from those who don’t,” political scientist John Sides writes at The Monkey Cage. Re-interviewees are obviously more willing to talk to pollsters, with all the free time and affability such willingness implies, and may have been more motivated to seek out information about politics in the interim. Why this is a disadvantage for Obama is not entirely clear; why, for example, would the opinions of such a sample, even if affected by the initial survey experience, necessarily be cooler toward the president?

The left also engages in its own version of data cherry-picking, delving into the crosstabs of polls to find hopeful signs buried below more neutral or negative top-line results. Professional spin doctors like top Chicago strategist Jim Messina downplay positive numbers to avoid a sense of complacency in campaign volunteers. “I think you will see a tightening in the national polls going forward,” he predicted on a conference call with supporters. “Ignore the polls . . . . None of that matters. What matters is your voter contacts in your state.” Liberal blogger Greg Sargent cites a National Journal survey that gives the president good top-line numbers (50-43) but focuses on details he finds particularly encouraging:

Crucially, though, Obama holds a commanding 57 percent to 34 percent advantage among those who say their finances are unchanged. One reason for that critical tilt in his direction: Voters who say their finances are unchanged also say, by a resounding 53 percent to 33 percent margin, that they believe the country has been better off over these past four years because Obama, rather than another candidate, won in 2008.

It wouldn’t, after all, be as convenient to quote from the National Journal’s own analysis of the poll, in which Ronald Brownstein offers the caveat that “the saving grace for Republicans is that even as these surveys show Obama opening a consistent advantage, the president has not been able to push his support much past the critical 50 percent level, even after several difficult weeks for Romney that began with a poorly reviewed GOP convention.”

Often, the same numbers produce opposite interpretations from the two parties. While Republicans offer rough parity in the daily tracking polls as a sign of success — Romney pollster Neil Newhouse’s famous “sugar high” memo touted “a margin-of-error race with an incumbent President” — liberals see the glass as half-empty for Romney. “Obama has pulled into a tie with Romney on the economy in the last eight national polls,” Sargent crows in another post. “That’s after Romney led on the issue in many polls for nearly a year.” The sheer number of polls, especially unreliable push-polls conducted on a state level by a candidate’s own campaign or by a partisan lobbying outfit (e.g. the Chamber of Commerce), also enables contrasting versions of reality. CNN reports “good news” for swing-state incumbents, writing that “Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio holds a seven-point lead over Ohio state Treasurer Josh Mandell, the GOP candidate, in two surveys over the past two weeks.” Meanwhile, over at National Review, we’re told that “Mandel is down four points, but it remains a competitive race.” Interestingly enough, while CNN only reports on numbers from reputable outfits like Quinnipac and the WSJ/NBC poll and often cites its sources, the National Review only offers the nebulous “down four points” formulation. Four points in what, the internal polls ordered by Mandel’s strategists and used (as all candidates use internal polling) to bolster one’s case among supporters? The best way to deal with such “data” is to brush it off, as the Post’s “Fix” blog does with a similar claim by liberals: “Democrats insist they have data that shows Arizona to be a low single-digit race, but we remain unconvinced Obama can win there after losing it in 2008.”

Because there are only so many ways to spin a single set of “for whom would you vote” numbers, and because the candidates are running roughly even in the daily tracking polls, both sides turn to the more specific (and often more touchy-feely: which candidate would you rather invite to dinner?) questions to “prove” their frontman’s superiority. Andrew Sullivan highlights the liberal focus on Romney’s unfavorables: “Has a major-party Presidential candidate ever had to focus so much energy on getting his own party to be willing to vote for him?” Indeed, Romney’s favorability ratings actually slipped five points in September, despite the unflagging attempts by everyone from Ann Romney to former Bain co-workers at the Republican National Convention to “humanize” him. “Romney ranks as the first challenger in memory to have higher unfavorable than favorable numbers this late in the race,” reports National Journal, providing gleeful Chicago strategists with an irresistible hook for the next morning’s e-mail blast. Strangely, the Republican rebuttal amounted to this: “The fact is that while Obama was driving Romney’s negatives up, Obama’s own negatives were going up.” It’s not clear which polls supposedly showed a dip in Obama’s approval ratings; over the last month, his numbers across multiple surveys, as collected at Pollster.com, have either increased or held steady in the low fifties.

While Republicans talk up Romney’s advantage on the economy and the deficit, Obama’s supporters point to the president’s massive lead in favorability and likability ratings, as well as the edge voters hand him on helping the middle class and understanding the problems of average people. Romney’s edge on the economy and job creation is in fact evaporating; the president outpolled him on this question for the first time in the latest NYT/CBS survey, leaving “handling the federal budget deficit” the only issue on which the Republican led. Foreign policy, Medicare, the middle class, even honesty and trustworthiness: on none of these questions did Romney garner the better ratings. Nevertheless, Boston insiders continue to insist that high unemployment and low consumer confidence will ultimately sink the incumbent, bragging that “voters already believe Romney has a better chance of fixing the economy. We have to tell them just how it will be better for them.”

Cataloging the various partisan attempts to pick apart or promote friendly poll results is a never-ending exercise. Analyzing the minutiae of the polls themselves could (and has) filled books. To come up with his 538 election forecast, Nate Silver runs 25,001 simulations each day. Most of this math is, needless to say, over my head — and over Romney’s and Obama’s as well. But it all boils down to who’s ahead. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy extracts perhaps the most relevant — and, for Romney, perhaps the most damning — nugget from all the noise:

According to the Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls, which averages out all the most recent surveys, Obama is leading by more than three points. Since the start of the year, Romney hasn’t led the poll-of-polls. He has only drawn level once—immediately after the Republican convention.

Of course, Romney could stage a comeback. (And if you believe Rasmussen and Gallup, he’s doing well enough to not even need a comeback.) There are still 40-odd days until the election, which is why there is such a gap between Silver’s November 6 forecast, which puts the likelihood of an Obama victory at 77.6 percent, and his “Now-cast” (if the election were held today), which favors Obama a whopping 95.6 percent of the time. None of the poll results or favorability ratings will matter one whit in November, when it comes down to a single figure: 270, the number of electoral votes required to win the White House.

 

Bonus: More Romney Ridiculousness

Romney speaks in Scottsdale on April 20 (image: Joshua Lott/Reuters)

In an attempt to put the fractious primary season behind him, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a pilgrimage to the annual RNC meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. His tone considerably more conciliatory since he denounced Newt Gingrich as an “influence peddler” who “resigned in disgrace” from the speakership, Romney praised the entire field of candidates, claiming that “each contributed to the process.” Paul and Gingrich, who are still officially battling Romney for the nomination, might not feel so great about being called part of “this extraordinary team.” (When in his life has Ron “Dr. No” Paul ever been a team player?) I suspect both men would also be surprised to learn they will be playing “a vital role in making sure that we win in November,” but who knows. Stranger things have happened. Perhaps even Gingrich will embrace the “George Soros-approved candidate” by the time Fall 2012 rolls around. Politico reports:

Mitt Romney thanked all of his vanquished GOP opponents by name at a Republican National Committee unity lunch here Friday.

“You know their names, but it’s a long enough list I wrote it down,” he said, proceeding to list them — from Herman Cain to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

“Some still running, some have gotten out of the race, but each contributed to the process,” he added, including Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich. “Thank you to this extraordinary team. We have all fought hard and well.”

Eight names is “a long enough list” that Romney had to write it down? He had more debates with these folks than some couples have dates before marriage. Seriously, who was he afraid he’d forget — Tim Pawlenty? Just getting past three names would give him an edge on Rick Perry. Oops. And even with a list, Romney managed to snub pie-in-the-sky candidates Buddy Roemer and Gary Johnson, who hardly need salt rubbed in their wounds.

Most damningly, however, Romney is asking voters to trust him with the presidency. Will the leader of the free world need crib notes to remember the difference between Khomeini and Khamenei? (Hint: one of the ayatollahs died in 1989.) How about Cabinet members? (After all, sixteen is twice as many as eight.) At the United Nations, will Romney take a page from the Herman Cain playbook and draw a blank when asked about the president of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”? (Islam Karimov, FYI.)

In the four short years since George “C-Student” Bush occupied the White House, Americans have let out a collective sigh to find that President Obama’s malapropisms are usually restricted to small South Atlantic islands. (OK, that and “57 states.”) The last thing we need is a Commander in Chief who writes the answers to the test on the palm of his hand.