On Obama's win 2012, Romney's downfall, and GOP set adrift...

The presidential election is over now (finally), and the people spoke their mind.

For months, the GOP talking heads, Romney campaign, and their strategists, have been hiding their heads in the sand, insisting that all is well, ignoring people's wishes and needs, and their candidate (Romney) will win.  Looking back, it just goes to show how silly they have been, all along.

I'm a voter and, for all intent and purposes, more a spectator, except during the final voting hours.  Although I live in a state that is quite heavily Dem leaning, I'd say there are really more Independents than diehard Dem these days.  Such is the case when the Senate has changed hands between the parties unexpectedly, as it should be.  Most people find that to be surprising, but it's not surprising to me at all.  At the heart of it, diehard anything, regardless of far left or far right, is suffocating, preventing true conversations of real issues at hard, never mind any attempt in finding solutions.

Perhaps one could look back on the 2012 election from two angles: How Obama has won the election, and how Romney (and GOP at large) have lost it.

Romney has had so many chance to show he can be presidential (or at least the appearance of it); but with perhaps the only exception of the first presidential debate, he  and his campaign had failed time and again to seize the moment or conversation, and when they did, they did it too soon (hence, rendering them as rash).  He stepped on toes on foreign allies by criticizing London's handling of the Olympics which turned out to be hugely successful and earned himself rebuff and jeers from the Brits.  He criticized the handling of the attacks in Benghazi during the initial hours without knowing all the facts.  He kept talking down on the economic recovery (albeit painfully slow) while everyone knows it's on the mend, property prices on the rise again (finally) and unemployment rate inching down.  He shouted down any criticism of his business hedge funds credentials at Bain Capital as jealousy of capitalism at its best, without realizing how out of touch his wealth and low tax rate are when compared to common folks' daily problems to just finding a job - any job - or to put food on the table, arguing that his low tax rate is legal (while never addressing whether it's ethical or not), which is exactly what Warren Buffet has pointed out.  Romney repeated the standard party line of the hardline stance against (illegal) immigration, proposing self-deportation.  Above all, Romney claims to have a plan - his so-called five-point plan - to fix the economy, yet it's nothing but slogan and no meat.  The list goes on and on, one inept move after another.  It's quite pathetic, really.

To be sure, Obama's campaign is effective but it's nowhere near what it used to be in the 2008 campaign when everyone seemed to ride the wave to his Hope and Change message, which again was just slogan and no meat.  (I never did believe in it.)  As an incumbent this time around, Obama has to campaign on his 4-year record in office.  He backpedaled early on with some campaign promises, but the left leaning interest groups seemed to have forgiven him and moved on.  (Afterall, Obama is the lesser of two evils, should a GOP president be elected.)  Obama did double down on deficit spending and more bailouts that George W Bush had started, to prop up the economy, which is nothing short of any hope to change.  The war might still be winding down, but the books are not closed.  Granted, the economy is indeed on the mend; his push for ObamaCare (which is not ideal but it's one step closer to universal coverage, American style) has come to fruition; his executive order to bypass a highly partisan Congress to go ahead with Dream Act; most notably, the killing of Osama bin Laden.  And so, for anyone to call this president lazy, as the GOP surrogate Sununu has done, is downright wrong.  In fact, this president looks to have worked harder than Bush did, with much less vacation to his ranch as Bush did back in his days.

And so, it's only fair that the country is split almost 50/50, but conservative and far right arguing on non-issue like abortion and women's rights which, to most (me included, especially), should have been issues long settled, have utterly missed the point.  The only effect of such divisive conversation only serves to alienate women's voters at the closing hours of the election.  The condescending tone from these religious and far right GOP groups and supporters have pissed me off so much that I've decided to vote the current GOP Senator in my state out of office (which he did).  I've decided to ensure GOP does not get the majority say.

To be sure, even though sore losers in the GOP camp complain about negative ad attacking Romney's Bain record, there are hardly any real personal attacks in this campaign from either side.  At the very least, Obama's campaign never brought up the issue of Romney being a Mormon (which was an issue early on in the GOP primaries); yet there are still the GOP idiots like Donald Trump who still believes that Obama is not born on US soil, or that he's Muslim, or that he's not patriotic, all of which personal attacks have proven endless times that they are untrue.  All these white noise only goes to show how ignorant a majority in the GOP camp are.

No doubt the loss of 2012 will be more painful than 2008.  At least there's such unrealistic expectation of Obama the candidate, to the point of Messiah's second coming, that it's almost impossible for an old hand like McCain to overcome.  GOP has hoped against hopes that 2012 would bring Obama down to earth, and Romney is the guy to beat him.  As it turns out, Obama's record hasn't been all that shabby, and Romney's record hasn't been all that great.

It's funny how far right and the noisy GOP Tea Partiers have initially rejected Romney as their standard bearer, and turned around to embrace to the guy with the best chance to beat Obama.  That embrace has never been heartfelt, true, or long lasting.

The decisive win of Obama in 2012 serves to remind GOP that much change in 2008 has become permanent, in particular, the demographic shifts and the rise of minority (including women's voters, hispanic voters, and young voters).  There'll surely be much soul searching among the GOP strategists for years to come, since their vaulted hope to get elected on the backs of rural white voters and conservative religious voters alone.  The continuous shifts in the demographics will tar the GOP.

My bets are, the GOP will never embrace the blacks.  With the hispanics voters generally more religious in nature, and this voter bloc is on the rise, GOP will modify their stand in immigration to embrace them.  But if GOP keeps putting out idiotic, combative female candidate like Christine O'Donnell or Michelle Bachmann or Salin Palin, they'll never get any real traction with women's voters.

The bottomline is, can the GOP party machine keep the Tea Party and far right in check, and move to the middle.  The fight over the fiscal cliff is going to be a test case for this, to see if they really want to move toward the center, rather than just being a party of 'No' and be obstructionist.  But if GOP cannot move forward from the old guards like Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove, they'll never be able to reinvent themselves.