A phyric victory at best

So Obama won reelection.  The recriminations, finger pointing and scapegoating by Republicans begins.  It's not that difficult to understand.  Here's what WSJ has to say about the election:

Mr. Obama’s campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.
He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.
This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign’s turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls. . . . There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn’t one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.

Obama's win will prove to be a phyric victory at best.  Our sour economy will not improve. Al qaeda will not go away. The debt and deficit realities will not improve. He won a popularity contest because  his opponent lacked charisma and charm.  He won because he is a celebrity president in an age when the masses are into being entertained and amused before all else.  He won because colleges are churning out illiterate politically correct products especially about economics and history.  He won because blacks vote based on pigmentation, not character.  He won because single women want government hand outs.  He won because of identity politics. He won because the media is deeply in the tank for any democrat candidate.  He won because government is an industry to democrats and a bare necessity to republicans.  He won because of dubious fund raising from foreign sources.  He won because there are a lot of sheep among the electorate who want a messiah to take care of them.

Here is the view of a successful trial lawyer who manages to cut to the chase with a few well-chosen observations:

As I mentioned in our intermittent club pub conversations on the subject of Moderate Mitt, I never thought he would have any real chance of beating the worst president imaginable. I never thought otherwise at any stage of the campaign.

While I respected your always incredibly informed political acumen, the simple truth for me is that wets never win. Never. Or as I mentioned to Herman Cain in LA a few months back, you never beat a demagogic vision with no vision.

Put another way, if I tried high profile cases using consultants like Stuart Stevens, I would spend boatloads of my clients’ money, and end up lamenting that it seemed impossible to lose because we had such great arguments, and ultimately blame the stupid fact finders and the demographics of the jury and their “baggage.” We’ve both seen our share of big firm litigators in that mode, haven’t we, thankfully usually on the other side.

I only know one way to win these arguments: by putting overwhelming intellectual, moral and affective pressure on the other side until my metaphors imprison and prevail. Get the theory and attack and define relentlessly, albeit of course with charm. 

My almost visceral reaction to a relatively smart and decent guy was his manifest propensity to lose the unlosable.

Demographics? They haven’t changed much since the 2010 shellacking of the Democrats, ditto the so-called tipping point or 47 per cent.

What happened is in my view less complicated.

1) Romney let himself get defined early in the same brutal way we would define a litigation adversary early and often. The definition largely stuck and there was no early response, and no aggressive defining of an opponent who was a walking, talking incredibly rich target.

2) Romney organized a colorless and utterly insipid convention the point of which was to establish that he wasn’t as bad as the other side made him out to be and he really loved and some of his best friends were women.

3) Romney’s campaign then stumbled forward on a benign, six basic metrics referendum on the economy tack, leaving a treasure trove laden rich armory of munitions undeployed. Obamacare, the explosive issue of 2010 ignored. Social issues tied to huge avenues of attack on Obama viewed as too controversial, foreign policy neutered, Dukakis competence thought able to carry the day, all from the conventional Tory playbook, without sharp edges or ideological vision.

4) When he finally showed a pulse in the first debate and acted like he could almost be a decent trial lawyer, he got an immediate bump in the polls, and, immediately, lapsed back into a play it safe, sit on a lead, be nice and bipartisan mode. He couldn’t even do the Benghazi battle.

5) His everybody loves this country, reach across the aisle close was the final insipid wetness.

I hated to be Nate Silver but Mittens never had a chance against a terrible President with the silliest of demagogic campaigns.

Unfortunately the country is the big loser because the Republican candidate, for the second straight time, was not up to taking a failed and horrible president to task.  

Finally, it comes down to this quote from a blog thread :  "you can't let the other side define the debate. You have to set the terms: "I paid for this microphone." But, looking ahead to 2016, even a new Ronald Reagan will have a difficult time punching through the vast sea of simple-minded left-wing indoctrination dispensed in our schools and popular culture—that and the depths of simple ignorance of the voters the Democrats rely upon. How many of Obambi's voters knew about, or cared about, Benghazi, the 'fiscal cliff', Medicare and Social Security bankruptcy, even unemployment numbers?

The conservative wing of the Republican Party had better start thinking in earnest about how to cut through this fog of welfare mentality and abject ignorance. Given the lock the teachers' unions, and the university academics, and the Hollywood celebrities have on the young, is it even feasible to think about teaching the young and foolish about the principles of American Constitutional government, about free enterprise? If not, the game is up. We'll end up a giant Greece. "