I’m having way too much fun checking out the right-wing bloggers who so confidently believed in the coming Romney wave. I take it I’m not the only one.
One of the biggest losers yesterday was Karl Rove. He didn’t just lose an election; he lost his aura as the guy who could manipulate American politics to his will. He controlled about $300 million dollars; his groups were the largest single outside group trying to swing this election. Big-money donors trusted Karl to give them the outcome they wanted. Karl was the inside guy who could pull the right levers and drive the right wedges and stampede voters to vote for Republicans.
He did not deliver. He didn’t even come close to delivering. All that “smart” money was pissed away.
Karl’s meltdown on Fox News last night wasn’t really about Ohio, or Mitt Romney. It was Karl being stripped naked and shown to be a fraud, and a fool. He obviously was not expecting to lose Ohio. He is not the all-knowing guru of politics after all.
I’ve long thought Karl was overrated. If you look closely at his background, you see that he made his reputation in politics by managing campaigns that picked off Democratic incumbents in southern states by relentlessly smearing them. It was cheap and dirty politics. He became a bogyman to liberals while working for the Bush Administration, yes, but to a large extent he was riding a wave of right-wing ascendency. But that’s over, and so is Rove.