Can you say, ‘Rebuke?’

By Martin Hackworth

“A little child, boy or girl, will dream at night in their own dream world. And as they sleep they pretend that they believe…. Well I’m no child, but times it’s true, I pretend I’m not losing you. Because it hurts so much to face reality.”

— Lefty Frizell

This past Wednesday I encountered a number of friends and relatives wandering around in a funk – looking for all the world like someone had just shot their dog. What amazed me (without, mind you, particularly surprising me), was the degree to which they had all thought that they’d be still hungover from blowing out a few gaskets late Tuesday night, playing Pat Boone records at noise complaint levels and doing shooters with spiked punch, to celebrate the defeat of Barack Obama and pickups in both the House and Senate. This despite the fact that most polling organizations had predicted a narrow margin for Obama in the popular vote with a much wider Electoral College victory, and near status quo in Congress. The only two pollsters actually worth paying a lot of attention to: Nate Silver of the New York Times and Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, nailed the outcome with their well-crafted analytical models and no-nonsense approach to the aggregation of polling data. Though Silver is an admitted progressive, it did not prevent him from accurately predicting the Republican rout of the House during the 2010 mid-terms – a talent that was evidently lacking on the Republican bench in this contest.

I chose to watch the election returns on FOX because nowhere is the alternate universe occupied by many Republicans more prominently on display. There was Karl Rove, the same guy who, while inaccurately predicting the outcome of the 2006 election opined, “You’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to the math,” insisting that the the FOX decision team’s call for Ohio for Obama was wrong. Even anchor Megyn Kelly, looking at Rove like he was in need of medicine, couldn’t resist floating the obvious: “Is this just math you do to make yourself feel better as a Republican?” That elicited guffaws from across the country which could be plainly heard by just stepping outside. I reckon that Karl might be well-motivated to conjure up some new math because he probably has some ‘splaining to do to those he talked into funding his PACs: American Crossroads and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, to the tune of many, many large, for little discernible benefit.

Again, I am amazed but not surprised. These are, after all, the same people who are historically a little difficult to motivate with data, no matter how plain. These are the folks who believe, with the same vigor that they formerly applied to the belief that Mitt Romney would be the President elect right now with majorities in the House and Senate, that climate change doesn’t exist (or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it), that the country has the same voting demographic as it did in the Eisenhower era, that government should stay out of everyone’s business unless it has to do with sexual preference or reproductive rights, that everyone who gets a taxpayer-funded benefit (except them) is a deadbeat and that we should probably roll back every major public initiative of the past century because greed, criminal behavior, racism, sexism and disrespect for the environment would cease to exist if you just let the private sector run everything. Maybe they count in base eight or something in the Rove/Sununu/Trump/Palin chucklehead universe.

I feel bad for Romney. Aside from the fact that a guy with his intelligence and past record of common sense policies really should have know better than to seek succor in the great echo chamber that is the FOX-Republican party opinion machine, he’s a decent guy who in another time (like, say, the 1950’s) might have made a good president. I would argue that Romney was let down by his party and their enablers in the media because none of them seemed capable of looking at reality squarely and seeing it for what it was. Had that happened before late Tuesday night, perhaps things might have ended differently.

I don’t know if I agree with all of the post-election buzz that the Republican party is an endangered species in the new demographic America. The sentiment of the electorate is fickle and has shown a historic tendency to swing back and forth. I do think that the Republicans are going to have to recalibrate if they want to win national elections anytime soon, and recognize that rolling out the likes of Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann and Marco Rubio to show what a forward-thinking, racial, gender and ethically inclusive party you are is convincing to no one outside the box. Yo Karl – you feel me brother?

Award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist and the editor of MotorcycleJazz.com.