Speaking of crazy times…
Barack Obama is still our President.
So, that happened.
Here’s something to think about, though: the Romney campaign was supremely wrong in their assessment of what would happen. They were completely taken off guard. There was serious amounts of information collected and they were unable to decode it for meaning.
Really stop and think about that when you’re considering whether the GOP is paving a path somewhere you want to go.
Sure, there are plenty of campaigns that fight hard and lose, and a great deal of campaigns still have more than one runner. No one would run if they thought they were going to lose, so most people that run think they have a shot at winning, and sure, a lot of them do.
In these modern times, with the polling, market data, campaign strategists, intense focus groups and statisticians, being taken off guard so completely like that on the actual day of the election is near impossible.
It’s not like they thought it was going to be a squeaker. They thought it was going to be a landslide for Romney.
The truth was completely opposite.
They did not win the popular vote and they did not win the electoral vote. The popular vote was closer, but still a very comfortable victory for Obama. The electoral vote was no contest. It was a slamming defeat of Romney.
Meanwhile, the information was so stunningly available that it was absolutely no surprise to everybody else when President Obama won a second term.
So.
Stop. Think again.
What does that mean?
You wanted a President of the United States who, together with people he hand picked for their ability to shoot straight with him and present him with the best information possible, could not decipher poll data. Could not understand gathered intelligence.
If you’ve been listening to the right-wing think tanks and their ideas on what works, derived from their own intense investigation of the data that all the other scientists, economists and statisticians disagree with, perhaps it’s time to consider that your data is bad.
Maybe trickle down economics really just doesn’t work. We’ve been trying it for 30 years, after all. We have the lowest tax burden we’ve had for generations and it doesn’t seem to be actually making the much ballyhooed “job creators” create jobs.
Maybe jobs happen when a business has higher demand for their product than their current workforce can produce, and not when there is simply more profit (as there has been a greatly increasing profit in many business indexes for years now). Maybe continuing to coalesce more and more profit to the top has simply created a larger bottom and a smaller top.
Maybe climate change is real.
Maybe reproductive rights really do help create a culture that is more successful overall.
Maybe civil rights for gay people really won’t in any way effect heterosexual marriage.
Maybe the acrimony and anger and fear and bitterness that you, you personally, have been dealt a harder hand than anyone else, and you, you personally, have played it more responsibly and more true while everyone else coasts along on your hard work and the hard work of the other responsible Americans is really more about your own feelings and less about reality.
Maybe, perhaps, it really could be that you’ve been functioning on bad information and you need to reassess.
Or you could just blame everyone else. Your call.
pollychromatic 