The Race: Obama won, get over it and here’s how he did it

The polls were right: Too close to call. But it went the president’s way in the end.

Two weeks ago, the polls clearly showed clear and continuing momentum for Mitt Romney and I thought the president was bound to lose. Obviously he didn’t. What changed in the last two weeks?

First and by far most important, the president’s background as a community organizer bailed him out at the end. Republicans repeatedly sneered at this professional background, endlessly contrasting it with Romney ability to build Bain Capital into a $65 billion financial colossus from scratch.

But Romney built Bain by engineering along series of hostile leveraged takeovers which saddled the targeted companies with mountainous debts that meant scores of thousands of people were fired to pay them off. Far from creating new jobs and new businesses, Romney was an expert at destroying them.

By contrast, Obama’s much-despised training as a community organizer gave him a mastery of grassroots political organization from the ground up. He had no new ideas and no new vision of hope this time round as he did four years ago: But he played the political version of the ground game in NFL football – His organizers, activists and teams ground out the vote in the key battleground states around the country – and it worked.

The second last minute break that worked for Obama was the federal emergency services response to Hurricane Sandy, the much dreaded Frankenstorm. It caused $50 billion of damage, but the death toll was mercifully low, only around 100.

This contrasted dramatically with the thousands who died after the levees protecting the city of New Orleans collapsed in the face of Hurricane Katrina back in August 2005. President George W. Bush and Michael Brown, Bush’s ludicrous pick as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) performed appallingly then. The contrast with the cool, prompt and efficient FEMA response under its current boss Craig Fugate, an Obama pick, couldn’t have been greater.

Before the Frankenstorm hit, I posed the question in these columns: “Will Frankenstorm vote Republican?” The storm answered me in no uncertain manner – It voted for Barack Obama.

By forcing a cessation of campaigning, the storm first stopped Romney’s last lap momentum flat dead in its tracks. And it presented to the national public the president as being commanding, effective and reassuring. Pollsters claimed there was no pickup for the president. But as I’ve pointed out before, exceptionally close elections in the past have been swayed by vital last minute movements that came too late for the pollsters to pick up.

Even before the final results are in: Some longer-term results from this race are already clear:

One – The power of the Tea Party choices proved disastrous. They toppled at least three incumbent moderate GOP senators in primaries only to see their beloved choices blow winnable Senate races. They cost the GOP any hope of the Senate.

Two – Sexist know-nothings are electoral strychnine for the GOP. Claire McCaskill swamped Todd Akin in Missouri, Joe Donnelly squeezed in ahead of Richard Mourdock in Indiana. The appallingly ignorant and bigoted statements by Akin and Mourdock did them in.

Three – Money doesn’t always win Senate races. Just ask WWE wrestling magnate Linda McMahon in Connecticut, the bumbling Akin in Missouri or George “Know Nothing” Allen in Virginia.

Four – Rep. Paul Ryan is a busted flush. He couldn’t even carry his home state of Wisconsin on his coattails. Romney and Ryan were both rejected by their home states. This is far from unprecedented, but it’s always humiliating when it happens.

Five – Shifting to the right and playing to the most extreme version of its base has become a bankrupt policy for the Republican Party. It has now lost four out of the past six presidential elections. Given the extremely weak economy recovery of the past four years, the failure to capitalize on that is truly pathetic. Romney was running as a self-made billionaire and economic expert against a president with the worst unemployment figures in almost 75 years since the Great Depression, and he still managed to lose.

Six – While smaller, less bureaucratic government is almost always better government is essential and not always evil. The sooner the Republican Right wakes up from its 18^th century pipe dream and regression into infantile simplicity, and faces up to this simple reality, the sooner it will become fit to govern again, as it really hasn’t been for 20 years since the grossly underestimated George Herbert Walker Bush left office.

Seven – Romney could have won. And he made his three most fatal mistakes long before the Republican Convention.

First his catastrophic “47 percent of American” “comments last year were devastating to his standing when they leaked out: Not all the frantic Republican spins in the world could rescue him from that.

Second, Romney picked farcical Stuart Stevens as his Karl Rove: The result of this was the bungled GOP convention that put the president decisively ahead, when it should have given Romney a commanding lead.

And third, there was the Paul Ryan pick. Ryan is an Ayn Rand worshipper and serial liar in public who was quite simply torn apart by Vice President Joe Biden in the vice presidential debate. At age 41, he has never held a job in the Real World. He has been a Washington Insider all his life, and if he ever believed in the Tea Party’s beloved term limits, he would have stepped down after 10 years in the House of Representatives: Instead he’s been there for 14 years – seven full terms. And he’s going back inside the Beltway for his eighth.

Ryan couldn’t even pull in Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes for Romney. As I repeatedly argued, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida or Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico would have been vastly better running mates for the GOP candidate. So would Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. Ohio proved decisive and Romney lost it by a whisker. Portman’s coattails very likely would have pulled him over the top.

Also, Ryan’s obsessive commitment to gutting Medicare and Medicaid outraged the formidable AARP lobby, and it is especially strong in southern Florida. A Rubio pick could have put Romney over the top decisively in Florida. Again, he had only himself to blame.

Fourth, Romney and Ryan threw away their most precious resource – their credibility on dealing with the looming fiscal mega-crisis. Their numbers were slick, simplistic and false. They never added up. Neither of them ever had the honesty, the courage, the simple human decency to proclaim or embrace any truly realistic plan for fiscal survival, and they are out there. Ryan put the death dagger into the Bowles-Simpson Plan in Congress, and then he falsely accused Obama of doing so.

Having said that, the next four years will be far from idyllic:

Obama is heading rapidly for lame duck status. At the beginning of his first term he needlessly and disastrously threw his power to shape legislation away to the Democratic congressional barons led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and they proved pathetically unable to rise to the challenge of national selflessness and responsibility.

This time round, the president faces a Republican majority in the House that will be as hostile as ever — and the Dems in both chambers owe Obama nothing. He never even pretended to turn out in support for any of their crucial campaigns.

How will Obama cut spending and generate jobs at the same time when he didn’t offer a single fresh new initiative or idea on how to do so during the long campaign? All the Democrats know is the simplified cliché of “spend, spend, spend,” regardless of the risks of hyperinflation and fiscal ruin.

Finally, who are the potential rising stars of the next political generation? Look to Sen. Rubio of Florida, Gov. Martinez of New Mexico, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey as the socially moderate (IE – sane), tolerant inclusive potential leaders of the next generation for the Republicans.

And look to Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tim Kaine of Virginia and newbie Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and to Govs. Steve Beshear of Kentucky, Jay Nixon of Missouri, Martin O’Malley of Maryland and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma to emerge as strong champions for the Dems.

It really ought to be a whole new ballgame. The policies the George W. Bush Republicans have reverenced for the past two decades have now been rejected twice in a row: Ronald Reagan left the White House 24 years ago and he’s dead, you know? When will the GOP finally wake up and grow up? On their current track record – never.