Seriously, though, this conversation I’ve been having with anchors-aweighlove is exactly why this “Romney has lost the election” stuff needs to tone down its jubilation until November… the truth is that Romney’s not going to lose many supporters over this. People who are already invested in him winning (or in Obama losing) will spin it however they need to in order to take it as something an actual human being who wouldn’t sell their living bodies to an alien mineral-extraction plant for the right price might say.
Don’t underestimate the capacity of the human mind to selectively ignore, to interpret three different parts of the same sentence in five different contexts, or to believe two wildly contradictory things from one minute to the next if it means that the thing they really, really want to be true can still be true.
Romney made a fat profit off providing services to abortion providers. As governor he presided over the legalization of gay marriage and instituted a health care reform program that’s slightly to the left of ObamaCare. He and his running mate have personally pushed a lot of the things they blast President Obama for doing or stonewalled the things they blast him for not doing and none of this matters to the Republican base.
The continued glimpses of his cold-heartedness and venal opportunism and basic out-of-touchness, they are making the road easier for President Obama. They are, I hope, swaying some “swing voters”. But there is no point… up to and including murdering his running mate and trying to operate his body like a ventriloquist dummy at the VP debate… there is no point at which the GOP base is going to turn around and say, “Well, we’ve clearly backed the wrong candidate.”
He’s running against President Obama. He’s their candidate. He’s the right candidate because he’s their candidate. if he did straight up kill a dude and were arrested for it, there would be people claiming it’s some kind of a procedural shenanigan to rig the election.
Okay, this post has devolved into hyperbole, but the basic point is: this doesn’t lose him the election. If we work hard and we knuckle down and we vote, it might be something that in retrospect we can look back on as one moment that helped put the thing over the top.
But it’s not going to be the moment that the election was decided.
