Karl Rove reflects on Romney's loss
Rove, speaking Wednesday night at the Jefferson Educational Society Global Summit IV in Erie, Pennsylvania, downplayed the significance of President Obama's victory last Tuesday, chalking it up largely to the fact that he was not opposed in the primary and that his campaign bet big on negative advertising.
"President Obama now has a unique status in American politics," said Rove. "He's the first president to win re-election with a smaller percentage of the vote and a smaller margin over his opponent than he won in his first election."
Even so, the former George W. Bush political strategist acknowledged that the GOP has some room for improvement going forward. Not only do Republican candidates need to better understand and appeal to women, Latinos, and Asian-American voters, he said, but they also need to do a better job of extending the GOP ground game in all 50 states. To do that, Rove said, it's critical the party set about understanding the much-lauded Obama campaign's system and finding a way to reengineer it for their own purposes.
"Tactically, Republicans must rigorously re-examine their '72-hour' ground game and reverse-engineer the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in order to copy what works. For example, a postelection survey shows that the Democratic campaign ground game was more effective in communicating negative information," he wrote in his Wall Street Journal column today. "It would be good to know why--and how to counter such tactics in the future."
Rove, who essentially created the model for post-Citizens United outside donor groups - or so-called "super PACs" - with American Crossroads, the group he co-founded, also conceded that super PAC money could have been more effectively spent in the 2012 campaign. He argued that too much of that money had gone to consultants, not targets.
Rove's group certainly did not produce the kind of financial return for which it had aimed: According to a study by the Sunlight Foundation just 1.29 percent of the nearly $104 million American Crossroads spent in the general election ended up going to a winning race.
Many attributed Rove's personal investment in the presidential race to his election night reaction, live on Fox News, upon hearing Ohio called for Mr. Obama, which Rove protested on the air. He recounted Wednesday night he was watching the numbers on election night and that the race still looked close, but admitted he was "sensitive" to the possibility that a state be called too early.
"I must admit I am sensitive about this. In 1980 Democrats complained that the networks called the 1980 presidential election prematurely thereby driving [down] turn out in Senate races in the West," he said. "I don't make decision about when I go on the air. My superiors at Fox said, this is an interesting point, let's have him make the point ... And [Democratic strategist] Joe Trippi and I are sitting there comparing notes and both of us say, 'what do they know that either Chicago doesn't know or Romney doesn't know, or that the Secretary of State is not showing on their website.' 999 votes, does that look like a convincing win to you?"
Ultimately, Rove put much of Romney's loss on low turnout for both parties.
"This is the first time in 16 years in which the number of people voting in a presidential election dropped from the previous election," he said. "President Obama got 90.1 percent of the vote that he got in 2008 and mitt Romney got 98.6 percent of the vote that Mitt--that John McCain won in 2008. Both sides did a good job of generating their partisans but both parties failed to get a higher turnout."
In the meantime, at a meeting of Republican governors in Las Vegas Wednesday night, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal laid the blame of Romney's loss squarely on the candidate and his campaign.
"His campaign was largely about his biography and his experience," Jindal said. "But time and time again, biography and experience is not enough to win an election. You have to have a vision, you have to connect your policies to the aspirations of the American people. I don't think the campaign did that and as a result, this became a contest between personalities and - you know what? - Chicago won that."
"We need to acknowledge the fact that we got beat," Jindal added in an interview with the Associated Press. "We clearly got beat and we need to recognize that."
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A PROUD WORKING CLASS AFRICAN AMERICAN.
We need to run a country.
Helping people achieve their goals, helps the country. The cost of college is large and must be paid by those who generally don't have much because they are just starting out. Mitt's policies would have slashed college support. That is just plain stupid. So much for the youth vote.
Taking choice away from women is a type of slavery. The GOP does not support helping single women with children. Pro-life without child support is hypocracy. Pedaphellic Catholic priests incensed about contraceptives is just more hypocracy - Got to have those vunerable children to play with. So much for the single women vote.
Mitt has experience in enterprise. Ya, raiding companies, taking the money and spinning them off with crushing debt or selling off assets to make a quick buck. Shallow and insubstantial changes in regulatory policies, closing a few loopholes are going to fix the economy and deficit? Get an independent GAO evaluation and see if those ideas are worth anything. The deficit is the GOP's fault, not Obama's. To get credibility from me, the GOP must acknowledge their contribution rather than a blanket blame on Obama. So much for the educated people vote.
I find that the GOP policies are the problem pulling this country down, down, down. The GOP must reverse course on almost everthing before it is too late and that includes CO2 emissions and taxes. It may help if taxes are targeted for specific items like the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, the interest on the debt, military, SS, medicare, running government. The taxes would expire once the debt was paid (Iraq, Afganistan, stimulus etc).
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I thought the same thing, since addelson could very easily have sent some wiseguy from Vegas to at least break KKKarl's knee caps!
I guess there is still time for that before the next election. LOL!
This just adds to the fallacy of the assumptions surrounding mitt romney's now infamous comments about the indolent "47 percent" of Americans who regard themselves as victims and therefore pay no taxes. As the American Conservative magazine (no less) pointed out recently, nine of those 10 states are in the red-as-ruby Old Confederacy.
Put another way, again by the American Conservative, "On the other hand, eight of the ten states with the highest non-payment rates are solidly Republican. The exceptions are New Mexico and Florida."
The top non-paying states getting more in return than paying in are:
Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, New Mexico, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Idaho.
So spare me all that red state angst about the federal deficits and national debt. When you stop spending New Jersey's money, Social Darwinist Texas, and produce a plan to replace it with your own revenue stream, then you've earned an opinion in the matter.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/where-do-the-47-percent-live/