Merry Liberal Christmas, Y'all!
Mitt Romney gave us all a wonderful present last night, didn't he?
Gosh, and I didn't get him anything.
Anyway, the most spectacular part of this type of thing, of course, is watching the GOP response. Historically, the GOP slams together into a unified message much more quickly than the Dems. It's been part of their strength, what's always made them the terrifying Borg-like adversary that they are.
But as Mitt's campaign has started to fall apart, there has been fewer and fewer obvious answers. Early on, a simple eyeroll was the easiest way to handle this stuff, but as the collapse hastens, you're going to start seeing various pundits tackle this problem in different ways. I've thought of five, and see if you can spot them in the coming days.
5) Doubling Down! As stupid as it may seem to you and I, this is probably the smartest strategy, one that pays the most dividends. Anything else, anything at all, is seen as a sign of weakness, so expect to see Mitt's most frothing-mad supporters saying that nothing happened, nothing was wrong, that this was a good thing Mitt did. Of course, among the GOP, he really didn't say anything that wasn't in line with ideological purity. So while nothing anybody could say would probably mend this with independent and liberal voters, walking it back would hurt him with his base.
4) It's Not What I Said, It's How I Said It- Romney's initial response has been to do this- he said his comments were "inelegant" and "off-the-cuff." Of course, Obama never got any slack for his "you didn't build that" comments, and Romney is going to secretly play off that to get equal treatment from the press. The press was pretty definitively able to prove that Obama's statements were taken horribly out-of-context, and anybody trying to go after him was slapped with a "Pants On Fire." Romney is going to claim that the entirety of the video will somehow vindicate him, and when liberal voters go after Romney for the horrible eat-the-poor sentiments expressed, the GOP will claim a false equivalency and say that if we can't talk about "you didn't build that," we can't talk about Romney's off-the-cuff gaffe either.
3) Going RINO: David Brooks has already come out with a column attacking Romney- not for what he said, but how he said it (see #4). The trick here is, as I've said, the GOP is all about staying on message. Ideological purity demands that you not criticize the party or the candidate, and though we're seeing a lot of the more sensible, thinking-man's pundits going after the Romney campaign lately, it's typically to criticize how they're running the campaign. Expect a few conservatives, though, to throw up their hands and actually start criticize Romney himself. "I can't do it," they'll say, "I can't support this guy who is clearly a sociopath." That's turning in your membership card, of course- the GOP doesn't want you unless you will ALWAYS vote for the Republican. Implying that there's anything a GOP candidate could do that would lose them your vote is madness in GOP circles. They call it "going full Frum." Look forward to your sad life serving as the conservative voice on the far edge of the table on MSNBC.
2) This Is A Distraction: The definition of a distraction to conservatives is "anything that makes our candidate look bad." So, since the GOP voters don't have any reasonable counter to the shit coming out of Romney's mouth (see numbers 5, 4, 3) they're going to claim that we shouldn't be talking about this- we should be talking about Libya, or unemployment, or abortion, or some other "more important issue" concerning Americans than the fact that one of the two candidates for president is clearly grossly unqualified for a job that requires your represent ALL your people. Bringing this up will prove that you're a socialist in the can for Obama, a liberal reporter in the can for Obama, or a RINO in the can for Obama. Stop it. Stop talking about it. LALALALALALALALALA NOT LISTENINNNNNG!
1) Blame The Media: This one wraps comfortably around the GOP like a blanket. Most voters aren't gonna go out of their way to watch the video themselves, just hear it described to them. So, they'll blame the media for clearly taking what Mitt said out of context. They'll blame the media for going out of their way to find bad things about Mitt, while clearly ignoring a bunch of bad things about Obama. The GOP imagines that there's a vault down at MSNBC, you see, where there's nothing but leaked gay orgy videos of Obama that they're keeping from the American people, right next to the original paperwork that shows that Obama was born in an Al-Qaeda cloning lab. So they'll point to this imaginary, non-existent stuff, say that the media is publishing some moderately-bad stuff about Mitt while ignoring the truly horrible stuff about Obama. The fact that this stuff doesn't exist only serves to prove how horrible it must be.
Every time you see one of these... TAKE A DRINK!
I'll see you in the hospital.