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Anyone wanna make book on Cole breaking down and doing a last-minute bolt to his family’s Xmas celebration in North Carolina?
The Holiday For the Rest Of Us
Happy Festivus, everyone:
I almost forgot, as gridiron realities and the Steelers sixteen weeks of sustained suck had me preoccupied.
Sunday Evening Open Thread
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Who’s stuck working tomorrow, or Tuesday?
Anything we should be discussing this evening?
Willard Mitt Romney, Easy Target
Via a number of alert commentors, the Boston Globe invites all us ‘you people’ serfs to take one last kick at the corpse of the Romney campaign:
… To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.
They console each other with claims that the election was much closer than realized, saying that Romney would be president if roughly 370,000 people in swing states had voted differently. Romney himself blamed demographic shifts and Obama’s “gifts”: federal largesse targeted to Democratic constituencies.
But a reconstruction by the Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.
One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people…
And the Globe posts an illustration from the MoJo “47%… believe they are entitled” video, in case you wonder how those voters may have come by that idea.
Rich Beeson, the Romney political director who coauthored the now-discredited Ohio memo, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match…
Leveraging people instead of money? Th’ heck did those wiley Dems come up with such a weird, non-MBA-approved theory?
Seriously, though, this article is a good wrap-up summary of the very basic ways in which the Romney campaign went so wrong… and the Obama campaign worked so well. Not to mention, full of snarkalicious schadenfreude…
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Better Watch Out
(Keith Knight via GoComics.com — click link for full-size image)
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And for something completely different, a sweet story from the NYTimes‘ Frank Bruni:
… But at some point Dad, like America, changed. I don’t mean he grew weepy, huggy. I mean he traveled from what seemed to me a pained acquiescence to a different, happier, better place. He found peace enough with who I am to insist on introducing my partner, Tom, to his friends at the golf club. Peace enough to compliment me on articles of mine that use the same three-letter word that once chased him off. Peace enough to sit down with me over lunch last week and chart his journey, which I’d never summoned the courage to ask him about before.
It’s been an extraordinary year, probably the most extraordinary yet in this country’s expanding, deepening embrace of gays and lesbians as citizens of equal stature, equal worth. For the first time, an American president still in office stated his belief that two men or two women should be able to marry. For the first time, voters themselves — not lawmakers, not courts — made same-sex marriage legal. This happened on Election Day in three states all at once: Maine, Maryland and Washington. A corner was turned.
And over the quarter-century leading up to it, at a succession of newspapers in a succession of cities, I interviewed scores of people about the progress we were making and why. But until last week, I couldn’t bring myself to examine that subject with the person whose progress has meant the most to me: my dad…
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Merry Festivus to all, and may your Airing of Grievances be both inventive and brief!
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Better Watch OutPost + Comments (43)
Silly Love Songs
Saturday Evening Open Thread: The Season’s Upon Us
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Which events/excursions/loved ones will be putting the ‘fun’ in ‘dysfunctional’ for you this year?
Saturday Evening Open Thread: The Season’s Upon UsPost + Comments (75)