Republican Party “Missing the Point” Rationalizations for Losing the 2012 American Presidential Race Seem to Have Begun — the Party’s Characteristic Magical Thinking Continues

© 2012 Peter Free

 

10 November 2012

 

 

Disclaimer

 

I write this as a political independent and long ago Rockefeller Republican.

 

 

It is a mistake to see too much in the results of the 2012 U.S. election, but . . .

 

I probably can safely predict that the Republican Party is going to continue along its demographically deluded way.  For this Party, it seems, “the South is always going to rise again” — no matter the demographic evidence to the contrary.

 

The magical thinking that concentrates on “trickle-down economics” and science denial seems also to apply to the Party’s own political analyses.

 

Today, for example, party leaders are trying to blame Governor Romney’s lack of campaign funds (after the Republican primaries) and Hurricane Sandy for his 2012 presidential loss.

 

We have further learned that Governor Romney’s team had been absolutely certain that he was going to win the presidency because Democrats had skewed public opinion polling that showed otherwise.

 

On its own, the Romney team’s mistaken prediction might not seem like much.

 

But, when one thinks about it, Republican leadership’s wishful thinking regarding the election also reflects the unrealistic bubble mentality that affects virtually everything that prominent Republicans think and do.

 

 

Were hundreds of election polls grossly wrong — just because Republicans wanted them to be?

 

This is the crux of this essay.  Reality’s evidence cannot safely be disregarded.

 

For scientifically minded people (like me), probabilities and meta-analyses are understanding’s fodder.  We are accustomed to thinking in terms of facts and scientifically discernible probabilities, so as to make sense of an uncertain, usually ambiguous world.

 

Pertinent here, Nate Silver’s approach to conglomerating widely gathered (2012 election) polling data and applying statistically weighted interpretive algorithms to it makes sense.  Agglomeration of data smooths out inevitable statistical bumps.  Sound algorithms take past evidence (of poll prediction success) into account.

 

Apparently Mr. Silver’s approach, so similar to the process of “doing” Science, does not make sense to Republicans — many of whom “know” that the Earth is only a few years old and that human beings were uniquely and miraculously created from virtually nothing just a short time ago.

 

 

Thinking as they do, would Governor Romney and his team really have performed well in the role Commander in Chief?

 

I am leery of anyone who thinks that facts can be disregarded or invented.  And equally suspicious of people who automatically assume that what they want is what is actually on the ground, or just around the corner.

 

Governor Romney’s certainty that he would win the presidency reveals a man who is allegedly good with (predatory) money numbers, but bad with Reality Arithmetic everywhere else.

 

Note

 

Governor Romney’s business model at Bain Capital allowed him to foist the financial expense of his analytical mistakes off on the very businesses that Bain had acquired.

 

That kind of easy escape does not parallel the much higher risks involved with “real” entrepreneurial enterprises.

 

Ignoring the voluminous evidence that the election was going to be close, but that the incumbent President was pretty consistently leading, was dumb.

 

This tendency to ignore distasteful facts (and to demean the people whose efforts uncovered them) probably means that Governor Romney would also have been inclined to ignore evidence that continued American military interventions abroad are geopolitically unwise.  Had he been elected, many more of our troops would predictably have died for very poor reasons.

 

 

The moral? — Some people are basically stupid, no matter how avariciously canny they are

 

Facts make a difference and not everything is a conspiracy.  Scientific mindedness serves us well in most aspects of our lives.

 

I distrust people who do not strive, each day, to see Reality through Desire’s obscuring fog.

 

The Republican Party, for the last few decades, has refused to accept these tenets.  Which is why an increasingly large number of Americans think that the Party is filled with bigoted fools.

 

Given the nature of human prejudice and closed mindedness, Republican Party denial is almost certainly going to continue.  Republican leaders will flail around for excusing (seeming rational) reasons that justify their Old Boys’ Club wish not to change.

 

It is time for “these guys” to go politically extinct.

 

Perhaps then we can successfully separate fiscal conservatism and sane government ideas from the democratically unappealing attributes of the Privileged White Boy Aristocracy.