Washington, D.C.
Axelrod: Romney ‘12 concession call ‘irritated’ Obama
President Barack Obama was not amused by Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential election concession call, according to a new memoir.
In “Believer: My 40 Years in Politics,” former senior Obama adviser David Axelrod writes that the GOP candidate implied on the call that Obama had won because of his popularity in black communities, according to the New York Daily News, which acquired an advance copy of the book.
Obama was “unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over,” according to Axelrod.
“‘You really did a great job of getting out the vote in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people. That’s what he thinks this was all about,” Obama said after he hung up with Romney.
And that irritated Obama? As the Census Bureau data released the next June proved, it was the truth. In fact, I’m sure Obama had already concluded months before election day that it’s something he and his campaign needed to do. I guess he’s only mad that Romney noticed it. In fact, it was half the equation to explain how Obama eked it out: His campaign did a great job of turning out middle aged and elderly black women (the only two demographics whose 2012 turnout increased over 2008), and the other half was Romney’s inability to run up landslide margins among working/middle class whites in northern swing states. And that happened partially because of the Obama campaign’s anti-Romney FUD, but most of that was Romney’s own doings.
But the big bombshell here, if you’re paying close attention, is that even on election night, Mitt Romney and his campaign already knew half the answer, that it was high (elderly) black (woman) turnout. If Romney knew it, then the RINO establishment knew it. This means that we now know that they knew all along that their peddling of this ZOMG GREAT HISPANIC VOTER TIDAL WAVE LOL~!!!!1 line and “we gotta do amnesty because Mitt lost Hispanics severely” line postmortem was and still is deceitful bullshit. That is, of course, an example of what I concluded my last post with: Power creating its own truth. In the case, the power of the cheap labor open borders lobby.
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I believe I read there was a poll that showed Romney’s warmongering turned off working class white women. Two things I didn’t like were his call for “more legal immigration” – that is not popular; they can’t cook up a poll that the public wants more legal immigration. It was smarmy on Romney’s part, as though he’d found the slick way to shovel in more than the enormous number of immigrants we already take.
The second thing that was very offputting was his touting his personal friendship with “Bibi” Netanyahu. Gosh I hate that groveling to Israeli politicians like we owe Israel something. When has that country ever fought alongside us? And we give them billions and defend them at the UN constantly.
The first part definitely pissed me off, because it, along with my conversation with Kris Kobach, proved that Romney’s short brief relationship with immigration patriotism that spring was all a ruse to win the nomination. However, I don’t think it was a huge factor in the ultimate turnout. It was symptomatic of the real reasons, I think.
The second thing? I think you’re painting the dartboard around the dart.
But there’s an even more fundamental factor at work. Incumbent politicians are as hard as hell to knock off their perches. Presidents, most of all. Barack Obama benefited from his race in that factor.
In retrospect, I should have concluded that Obama had it won when he kept saying over and over that thanks to him, GM was alive and OBL was dead, and that if it was up to Romney, it would have been vice-versa. Of course it and the truth have a very strained relationship. Remember though, power creates its own truth.
In the spring of 2012, when the Republican race was down to four people, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, something occurred to me, more like, it hit me on the head like a ton of bricks: I asked myself: Do any one of these four people really have what it takes to convince enough people and enough of the right kind of people to take the Presidency away from the first black president and give it to him a pasty white guy? Even not counting race, did any one of these four people have the oomph to knock an incumbent president off his perch? My answer to both questions at the time was: I highly doubt it.
Since 1900, here are the occasions where incumbent Presidents were knocked off their perches:
* 1912. Wm Howard Taft out, Woodrow Wilson in. Reason: Teddy Roosevelt third party.
* 1932. Herbert Hoover out, FDR in. Reason: Depression.
* 1952. Truman had the legal right to run again because the Presidential 2 term limit amendment was passed while he was president and therefore did not apply to him. But when he did so badly in the early Democrat primaries, he gave up. So he didn’t quite lose to one specific person as he did to his own unpopularity generally.
* 1980. Jimmy Carter out, Reagan in. Unemployment inflation malaise.
* 1992. George HW Bush out, Bill Clinton in. Sluggish economy, Bush pissed off Republican voters, Perot may have helped split the vote in Clinton’s favor.
Notice in the cases of the incumbent knocked off by a specific person in November, the person who knocked him off went on to win a second term in his own right, and in FDR’s case, a 3rd and a 4th. Plain words, it took someone politically special in his own right to knock off an incumbent. And politically special is not what I thought of when thinking about Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Paul.
The more I have seen out of Mitt Romney since November 2012, the more I’m glad he didn’t win.
Very good analysis. I recall the late Lawrence Auster during the 2012 campaign wrote that swing voters weren’t going to turn out the First Black President.
Great analysis, as always, but a slight correction to your reply– the new taxes did in “No New Taxes” G.H.W. Bush, the economic downturn was much less contributory. Also, don’t forgot the overall disappointment he was following in the footsteps of Reagan, de-energizing the Repo base.
And L.B. Johnson was knocked himself off his perch, so does that count? True, there was Vietnam, but there were also inflation and racial preferences that the white working-class base hated.
LBJ knocked himself out. I’m only counting incumbent Presidents that someone else (or, implicitly in Truman’s case) turned out.
My apologies for the typos.
BTW, how you like my blog’s new tagline, aka the subtitle?