Obviously, Romney is going to win handily tomorrow. The question is why? More specifically, how did I get it so wrong:

If Republicans lose the independent vote 58% to 42%, they will lose. And that’s not even considering the fact that Mihos in fact took 7% of the vote for himself. I think we could expect similar results if Gingrich goes rogue and runs third party.

So I hope you’re a bit more informed about Mitt Romney’s electability now. Nominating Mitt Romney will, I believe, lead to a massive loss in November. My hope is that is doesn’t have an effect down ticket.

More or less, Obama ran the entirely wrong race in all the wrong ways.

Back in 2004, when Bush beat Kerry, I was in a car with some liberal friends who asked me what I thought of the election. I told them that I thought Howard Dean would have had a better chance of beating Bush, a thought which intrigued them. They asked me to elaborate, which I did. I told them that in an election between someone who believes in something, and someone who believes in nothing or whom at least appears to believe in nothing, the something will win every time. I told them that Bush was a poor President who was very beatable. But Kerry, rightly or wrongly, came across as a guy who believed in nothing. And as a result he was seen as unfit to lead, and so voters stuck with what they knew, despite their reservations about the current President.

Given the poor state of the economy and the generally poor performance of Obama as President, the best he could have hoped for was a scenario similar to 2004, in which the challenger is deemed unacceptable for some reason. In some sense, the Obama camp knew this, which is why they went so negative so early in the campaign. But the way in which they did it was completely idiotic, to put it mildly.

Evidently, the Obama camp lives inside its own echo chamber. Instead of going after Romney as a man who changes his views on a whim, who apparently believes in nothing, an accurate and potent criticism of the man, they decided to try to portray him as a right wing extremist.

Because the Republicans spent the entire primary season wringing their hands over Romney because they were concerned about nominating someone too right wing.

Romney was the quintessential politician who believed in nothing, who ought to have been beaten by anybody who believes in something. Instead he was portrayed by the Obama camp as someone who believed in something, just something different from Obama.

This blunder more or less handed the election to Romney. But that was only the beginning.

It would seem as if the Obama team really spent the election shitting its pants over the Tea Party. In case you were unaware the Tea Party is more or less un by middle aged middle class women. This marks a very dangerous fissure in the Democratic coalition. If middle class women peel away as a reliable source of votes, the Democrats are in trouble. So they spent their entire convention screaming about birth control and abortion. It was absurd and certainly didn’t convince anyone of anything. More importantly, it squandered another opportunity to show how Romney is a guy who believes in nothing.

Finally, for reasons that puzzle me, they failed to go after the Mormon angle in the way I assumed they would, namely by pointing out that Romney proselytized what was then a racist religion for two years. Obama surrogate Andrew Sullivan has only just mow started asking those questions, way too late.

So say hello to President Romney. I don’t hold out much hope that he’ll be any good as president. But he certainly can’t be as bad as Obama has been.

UPDATE: So obviously, I shouldn’t have written this, and should have just stuck with my original prediction. I certainly appears that Obama simply had a better ground game in the battleground states, and got turnout that was at or near 2008 levels, something that I wasn’t considering could seriously take place. Now we all have to brace ourselves, for the implementation of Obamacare and the debasement of the currency. It’s gonna get ugly.

UPDATE 2: Ira Stoll mirrors my thoughts.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the Obama Democrats are run by a bunch of logo designers…

And the latest logo:

(via weekend pundit)

More on why Obama must be ridiculed.

Oh, and apparently ABC is going to hold an infomercial for the Obama Health Care Plan. Now THAT’S objective reporting…

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting editorial today on a piece of legislation that Obama is apparently pushing, the Patriot Employer Act:

Mr. Obama’s proposal would designate certain companies as “patriot employers” and favor them over other, presumably not so patriotic, businesses.

The legislation takes four pages to define “patriotic” companies as those that: “pay at least 60 percent of each employee’s health care premiums”; have a position of “neutrality in employee [union] organizing drives”; “maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time workers outside of the United States”; pay a salary to each employee “not less than an amount equal to the federal poverty level”; and provide a pension plan.

In other words, a patriotic employer is one which fulfills the fondest Big Labor agenda, regardless of the competitive implications. The proposal ignores the marketplace reality that businesses hire a work force they can afford to pay and still make money. Coercing companies into raising wages and benefits above market rates may only lead to fewer workers getting hired in the first place.

Under Mr. Obama’s plan, “patriot employers” qualify for a 1% tax credit on their profits. To finance this tax break, American companies with subsidiaries abroad would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on profits earned abroad, rather than the corporate tax of the host country where they are earned. Since the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while most of the world has a lower rate, this amounts to a big tax increase on earnings owned abroad.

Put another way, U.S. companies would suddenly have to pay a higher tax rate than their Chinese, Japanese and European competitors. According to research by Peter Merrill, an international tax expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, this change would “raise the cost of capital of U.S. multinationals and cause them to lose market share to foreign rivals.” Apparently Mr. Obama believes that by making U.S. companies less profitable and less competitive world-wide, they will somehow be able to create more jobs in America.

This is a horrifically bad idea. One should hope that the Journal is somehow mis-construing what the Act really does. Because if it’s true, then the worst fears about Obama being a die-hard liberal are to be believed.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: I should emphasize that even Charlie Rangel seemed to understand that America’s 35% corporate tax rate is simply too high. If Obama stands to the left of Rangel, then that’s really saying something.

By now you’ve undoubtedly seen the picture of Barack Obama wearing traditional Somali attire, taken on a goodwill type of trip he made there some time ago. The Clinton campaign released the picture, with the excuse that “this is the type of things the Republicans will try to show to discredit Obama in the general election.” This is an attempt to make Hillary appear more vetted or some such thing (even though she refuses to release her tax returns)…

But the real person who should be taking offense here is John McCain. John McCain is the Republican nominee. So this isn’t some random guess at what the Republican nominee may do whomever he may be. Clinton is implying pretty directly that this is the type of tactic that John McCain would engage in in the general election should Obama be the nominee.

John McCain should take deep offense at this, and should issue a public statement to that effect, perhaps going so far as to demand an apology. McCain, you may recall, has adopted a daughter from Bangladesh. In the 2000 election, someone engaged in push polling against McCain, claiming his daughter was the result of an extramarital affair he had with a black woman. So McCain had been the object of these types of racially charged tactics, and can rightly claim the victim status here.

Were John McCain to come out and state that he too has an inter-racial family, that he too has had racial politics used against him, and that he takes enormous offense at it being insinuated that he, of all people, would play racial politics against Obama, he could crush Hillary’s campaign right now, and further rally the Republican base around him. It would be quite a way to steal the moment.

We’ll see if he’s savvy enough to do it, but I doubt it. My guess is his advisors are secretly hoping for Hillary to pull it out so that he’ll have an easier time in the general election. But that tactic is a mistake. Obama is the likely nominee at this point, and McCain ought to take advantage of the opportunity to showcase his family and crush Hillary now, while he has the chance.