Given how my brain works (intermittently if at all, and easily distracted... "Squirrel!!!"), it's probably nothing. But still, a couple of DK posts and a few other blog comments I read recently got me to thinking...
About KKKarl Rove's apoplectic disbelief that Obama won Ohio in the last election. Skewed polls and all that, he was in utter shock that Rmoney had lost the state and lost the presidency. His hissy-fit was one of the great memories from election night 2012. But, what if...
It was all a big ruse?
Follow me below the orange, squiggly ruse explanorator...
Rove may be the butt of many a progressive's jokes, especially since that night. And it seems, to me anyway, that he has fallen off of the political radar of late. But he is actually a very smart man and an incredibly shrewd political dynamo. Anyone capable of getting Dubya eight years in the White House has some major skills, and a bag of tricks bigger than most could imagine, I would guess. My "horrible" thought centers about this: even if Rmoney had taken Ohio's EC votes, wouldn't Obama still have won reelection, albeit by a much closer margin? Did Rove simply assume that a couple of other states besides Ohio would swing to the R column? I've not watched the Fox News replay in a while, but IIRC (my memory is just as suspect as the rest of my brain) he was all upset about Ohio, but not nearly so much about any other state.
Could this be a grand scheme to reverse the tables in 2016? Could similar pre-election polls show a likely win for the Dems in Ohio or some other key, swing state, only to have the polls unskewed or re-skewed or whatever, this time in the Rs' favor? Voter suppression, vote rigging, machine tampering, etc., are well within the realm of possibility with the GOP, especially if they've done it before, and gotten away with it before, as so many assume. Wouldn't this be a perfect ruse to explain why pre-election polls and even exit polls were wrong, and Rove is once again "shocked" and "surprised" at the final outcome?
I don't see how he could seriously have thought Rmoney was going to win. Yes, Rmoney thought he would be the winner right up until the last moment, but he was within the bubble that Rove helped to build and maintain. Surely Rove was fully aware of information beyond the bubble that he helped to filter and keep outside the bubble. Could he have possibly concluded their imminent defeat, and concocted the whole 2012 election night temper-tantrum to set up a more plausible 2016 election surprise?
Rove, 2012: "I can't believe we lost!!!"
Rove, 2016: "I can't believe we won!!!"
The thought that any current occupant of the GOP clown-car wins the White House next year is scary enough. But it's a given that one of them WILL be the nominee. And as crafty and conniving as Mr. Rove is, such a scenario, IMHO, is entirely believable, and far more scary.