Karl Rove Defends His $300 Million Disaster... [View all]

[Indi Guy]

Source: Talking Points Memo

Karl Rove boasted on the eve of Tuesday’s election that all signs pointed towards an electoral college landslide. He was right about the result, just wrong about the candidate. And now it’s up to Rove to explain to donors why, after blowing through $300 million of their money, President Obama is still President Obama and Harry Reid still runs the Senate.

Judging by Rove’s election night tantrum on Fox News, this was not a situation he was well prepared for. In a surreal stretch of television, he refused to believe the network’s call of Ohio, lashed out at producers for making it, then spouted a blizzard of county by county statistics to justify his increasingly untenable case.

“Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?” Fox host Megyn Kelly asked at one point, “Or is this real?”...

...Two days later, Rove started the hard work of explaining why the Democrats were simply too much for any one billionaire-funded super PAC to handle...

Read more: http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/karl-rove-offers-long-list-of-excuses-after-300-million-debacle.php

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• Mother Nature: “Hurricane Sandy interrupted Mr. Romney’s momentum and allowed Mr. Obama to look presidential and bipartisan.” Rove telegraphed this argument even before election day, but the fact remains that there’s almost no polling evidence at all for it. Obama’s swing state lead had stabilized well before the storm hit.
  
  
• Editors: “Then there was the anonymous New York Times headline writer who affixed “Let ‘Detroit Go Bankrupt’ to Mr. Romney’s November 2008 op-ed on reorganizing the auto companies, which the Obama campaign brought up again and again in the industrial Midwest. The president made it appear that Mr. Romney favored liquidation of the companies (which he did not), instead of an orderly reorganization (which he did).”
  
  
• The Hired Help: “A hotel employee with a cellphone camera taped Mr. Romney talking at a May fundraiser about the “47%” of the population that do not have any federal income-tax liability. When released in September, the video added to public doubts about Mr. Romney’s wealth and character.”
  
  
• Dirty Tricks: Rove told Fox that Obama won by “suppressing the vote.” Not by, say, imposing voting restrictions that disproportionately affect certain demographics, but by running mean ads about Bain Capital...
  
  
• Mitt Romney: Rove said the Republican nominee ran a “valiant race,” but suggested that the failure to rebut the Bain attacks was exclusively a Romney issue. “We don’t do defense all that well,” he said. “It’s better to have the candidate (respond).”