Sotto Voce: Bitter Recriminations Edition

Good thing I wrote that "What If Romney Loses" post last week. Now, I can start at #11

11. You ever get the feeling that Republican candidates and their consultants have never run for office before and/or never participated in a national election?

12. Mitt Romney is a fine man: decent, charitable, hard working, brilliant, etc. For the first time in my lifetime, the lesser candidate won the presidency.

13. But

14. After crushing the first debate and taking a 5% lead in many polls, he took the foot off the pedal, didn't he?

15. The most shocking stat out of the election was that Romney underperformed McCain by 3 million votes, (second most shocking was that Obama underperformed by approxiamtely 7 million).

16. We heard all about how the GOPGOTV effort was going to blow everyone away, but that didn't happen, did it?

17. If you want  to be angry, read this first-person account about Romney's Project ORCA, which was supposed to mobilize 30,000 GOP precinct workers. The GOP establishment is literally throwing away money and votes.

18. Everyone's talking about how they missed this, or missed that, in the polls; but it's amazing how everyone missed the depressed turn-out among Republicans. We told ourselves this was a "broken-glass" election (as in, crawling over broken glass to vote), but it really wasn't. There was an enormous, unspoken unhappiness out there that our side missed.

19. But, you're not going to hear me knock social conservative voters. They loyally turned out as they always do.

20. Social conservative leaders and politicians on the other hand? You guys are killing us. Todd Akin should have been thrown bodily off the ticket for what he said about how women's bodies can "shut that thing down" during rape. Instead, you guys closed ranks and insisted that he stay in.

21. Richard Mourdock, meanwhile, showed how frankly unprepared social cons are in dealing with basic politicking. He had advanced warning that "abortion/rape" questions were going to be an issue...and still f***ed up.

22. We got along for many years with the formulation that abortion should only be allowed for cases involving incest, rape and to save the life of the mother. What happened?

23. During the Iraq War, you could always count on a Lincoln Chaffee or George Voinovich to undercut the president. On Gitmo and "torture," there were Lindsay Graham and John McCain, ready to give aid and comfort to the left. Ben Bernanke has given the president whatever feeble lift in the economy he might need. And when it came time to be a man and strike down Obamacare, John Roberts was at the ready to vote to the left of Anthony Kennedy.

24. Which brings me to Chris Christie.

25. Has there ever been a time when a prominent politician made a very public display of support for the incumbent president of the opposing party the week before a national election? If, yes, someone has to tell me where, when and who, because I think what Christie did was unprecedented and unforgiveable.

26. I mean, does the guy read the newspapers? Was he in a coma in 2005? Back then, Democrats were not interested in working with W to deal with the aftermath of a destructive hurricane. Why are we repaying that perfidy with political cover for a leftist president?

27. The day after the election, the stock market tanked. I swear, I heard over and over on the radio that the sell-off occurred because of the recession in Europe and "investor worries about gridlock in Congress." No mention at all of the just concluded presidential race. What a joke.

28. The other joke is that, the day after the election, suddenly the news was full of talk of the "looming fiscal cliff," something that I'll bet will come as a suprise to the typical low-information voter. Maybe someone should have brought that up during the campaign.