Ann Romney said one thing during her husband's presidential run that no one can dispute. "This is hard," she said, referring to the slog. (Actually, being president is hard, too, as George W. Bush once noted 11 times in a single debate.)
Here's one campaign call, though, that should never have been a head-scratcher: Running on white resentment is not a winning strategy, and the next Republican who tries it will lose, too.
Lyndon B. Johnson knew when he pushed through civil rights legislation that the Jim Crow South he'd grown up in would reject the Democratic Party for decades to come as a result. But somewhere, Johnson is smiling today, because the GOP's Southern strategy to capitalize on racial animus has now worked so completely that it has turned back to bite Republicans, with Mitt Romney overwhelmingly losing the growing share of America's minority voters. President Barack Obama won 93 percent of the African American vote and 71 percent among Hispanics.
Turns out, not even competing for them was a mistake. And here's how to blow more than a billion dollars and wind up right back where you started: Carefully alienate Latinos with talk of "self-deportation" and promises to veto the Dream Act. Vow that, if elected, you will cancel a widely celebrated reprieve from deportation for some young immigrants. Oh - and this is important - call those in this country without papers "illegals" every chance you get. Then, just sit back and hope that no one who finds that insulting turns out to vote.
Keeping African Americans out of the tent should be a snap at this point, but Romney certainly took nothing for granted in that regard. To review: He joked about Obama's birth certificate and pitched to the angry-white-guy vote with a wildly inaccurate ad about how the president had supposedly "gutted" welfare work requirements. (In fact, not a single waiver has been granted, although the Obama administration did invite applications for waivers.)
Romney surrogate John Sununu stated his startling belief that Colin Powell's endorsement of the president was a case of ring-knocking within the black brotherhood. And while behind closed doors, the candidate himself told donors he'd written off nearly half of America from the start - and had assumed that those who did not support him weren't interested in his jobs plan because they don't want to work.
In the final hours of the campaign, Romney either developed never-before-seen acting skills or truly believed he was on the glide path to victory; inside the Fox News bubble, no other outcome seemed possible.
But far more important than any of this, as we look to the future, is that since Romney's loss, we've continued to hear conservatives who do know they are on camera or writing for publications carry right on cementing the impression that they think Obama won only because he was the choice of Moocher Nation: Not only had they failed to "take back America" from the guy Newt Gingrich delighted in calling "the food-stamp president," but non-white America, they inferred, is not really America at all.
All of which explains how, in a tepid economy, Romney managed to lose the election more than Obama won it. And yet, they're still at it, with Ole Miss students contributing some standout visuals to the narrative that the GOP is not minority-friendly.
