Obama Won, But It Was Karl Rove’s Night
Election Night was Karl Rove’s night.
Although Barack Obama was re-elected in historic fashion, winning a second term with a majority of the popular vote and sizable lead in the Electoral College, he was a sideshow in his own victory. Instead, the highlight of the night was Rove, the political strategist behind George W. Bush turned Fox analyst, who spent the better part of an hour sputtering on air that Obama hadn’t really won.
Rove, who runs a pro-Romney PAC, engaged in a running dispute with Fox’s other on-air personalities about whether President Obama had actually won the crucial swing state of Ohio. Although Fox called Ohio for Obama, Rove continued to insist that Romney somehow had a path to victory.
It got to the point that when conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer came on, Fox anchor Bret Baier suggested that Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, might need to examine Rove, who was still sputtering that, if all the uncounted precincts in metro Cincinnati were Republican, it might allow Romney to win.
Although there was continued hemming and hawing about Rove’s numbers in Ohio, it proved increasingly irrelevant as other swing states moved into Obama’s column, even while Rove raged against arithmetic.
But Rove’s tantrum wasn’t just good television. It illustrated a basic issue within a Republican Party that seemed convinced that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president. Rove, like those Republicans who believed the polls were skewed, seemed to have difficulty comprehending that, somehow, voters wanted to reelect Obama this year. This sentiment is not unique to the GOP. After all, many Democrats had issues understanding why anyone would want to vote for George W. Bush in 2004.
The problem now for Republicans is how to accept that they lost and make their peace with a new and diverse electorate. Rove’s meltdown isn’t a good way to help solve the country’s many pressing issues–though it did make great television.
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