“Romney’s plan to steal the election.” That’s my headline. The phrase
in the underlying article is a little more … visceral. Here’s their
headline:
Romney’s plan to ‘cut the nuts off’ an Obama second term
Not to put too fine a point on it. The Romney plan would be to do
either — take the election away from Obama, or failing that, set up an
illegitimacy perception that lays other groundwork. Not good either way.
One nightmare election-stealing scenario
Some explanation. There are several nightmare scenarios in which
Republican aggressiveness could be used to trump Democratic timidity (or
collegiality, or complicity; your choice on the phrasing).
One of them is what happens if Obama wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote.
First the strategy, then the logic. The strategy involves repugicans pumping up the popular vote in states Romney will win —
Texas, Kansas, Tennessee, Kentucky,
as well as the obvious Utah (click for an electoral map). At the same
time, they count on Obama to pull his resources out of states he’s
clearly winning. Hello, California, where the
Sacramento Bee notes “both presidential candidates [are] devoting little time or resources in California.”
Changing the margin of victory has two effects. First is the one
we’re going to talk about, the nut-cutting strategy. The second has to
do with down-ticket races. I’ve been hearing substantial talk since 2010
that Obama does little to benefit down-ticket races, and this seems to
be borne out in California, where the same
Sacramento Bee article states:
No matter what happens nationally, the presidential race
is all but decided in California, with President Barack Obama
maintaining a double-digit lead in the polls. Yet how well the rivals
perform could tip the scales in the state’s most competitive
congressional and legislative races. The narrower Obama’s win in the state, the better for repugican candidates on the rest of the ballot.
Dan Lundgren, one of the
worst of the CA repugican representatives, gets his name mentioned as a potential beneficiary of this Dem strategy.
The logic of this move is obvious, yes? Maximize power. What else are
modern repugicans about. Couple that with the obvious tendency of
Democrats to surrender power and you have another perfect storm, for us.
They’ve tried to steal elections before
But back to nut-cutting. The strategy requires a full-on frontal
assault, something repugicans are very used to doing. Perhaps Florida
in 2000 comes to your mind. But there are many more instances.
Recall that in 2004, repugican candidate for
governor in Washington state Dino Rossi,
running against Christine Gregoire, narrowly won the initial popular
vote count, lost in the second (manual) recount, and then took the case
to court alleging massive vote fraud — where he finally lost. If I
recall correctly, that was the last 2004 outcome to be determined, and
it seemed to take forever. Rossi was apparently never going to give up.
Al Franken’s election in 2008
went the same way. Norm Coleman and his team of repugican lawyers kept
Franken out of the Senate for eight months, tying him up in court. As
the linked article points out, Coleman’s goal wasn’t to win, but to
delay, to take one for the repugican team in the Senate:
It became obvious to Coleman, a few weeks after the
election, that he would lose the court battle, because Franken would win
despite any court rulings about how the ballots were recounted. So
Coleman’s post-election strategy was to delay, while Franken’s
post-election strategy was to win. Coleman benefited from delaying
because the Senate was down one Democratic vote as long as Franken was not seated. In other words, Coleman extended the court battle as long as possible to perform his final duty for the repugican cabal.
This is the “never surrender, never retreat” approach that repugicans often and easily resort to. Why would they not do it now? I
know I would if I were conscienceless and power-mad.
They planned to steal the election in 2000 as well
Now let’s look at 2000 for a minute. The shrub ultimately won the
electoral vote thanks to partisans on the Supreme Court, who took the
almost unprecedented step of interfering in a presidential election to
select their favorite over the people’s. (Another application of “never
surrender.”)
But what if
the shrub had won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College? Well, they apparently had a plan for that as well:
The shrub Set To Fight An Electoral College Loss
They’re not only thinking the unthinkable, they’re planning for it.
Quietly, some of the shrub’s advisers are preparing for the
ultimate “what if” scenario: What happens if the shrub wins the popular vote
for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore’s won the
majority of electoral votes? … “The one thing we don’t do is roll over,” says a shrub aide. “We fight.”
How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the shrubbry themselves, of course. In league with the campaign – which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College’s essential unfairness – a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. “We’d have ads, too,” says a shrub aide, “and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted.”
Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team shrub will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. “You think ‘Democrats for Democracy’ would be a catchy term for them?” asks a shrub adviser.
The article mentions two things that don’t pertain here, in my
opinion. One, that the shrub’s target would be the Electoral College itself,
to encourage
faithless electors.
Romney’s target, should he pursue such a strategy, would be broader; it
would set up the delegitimization of the entire Obama second term.
The second pointless point in the article is the notion that Gore
would also pursue such as strategy. Foolish thought; Gore wouldn’t even
stand up for himself in the Senate when that time came, much less
throughout the nation.
What does a 2012 election-stealing strategy look like?
Now the
Romney article again.
First, on the source of the information that this is one of Romney’s
actual plans. Note that there are two repugican insiders mentioned
here, a
donor and a
fundraiser. They should not be
confused for each other. It read to me like the fundraiser is the
source, and the donor passed the fundraiser’s information to the article
writer, Cliff Weathers:
A New York repugican fundraiser told a past Romney
campaign donor in a phone call that “Mitt has a plan should he not win
the electoral vote,” according to the donor. “We think we can make a compelling case to the American people,” she reportedly said. The fundraiser then said “we’ll throw everything we can in the way” of a second term for President Barack Obama.
The donor asked if this was the strategy of the Romney campaign, the fundraiser replied that she “got it directly”
from people working for the former Massachusetts governor. NYaltnews
will not reveal the name of the past donor or the fundraiser, according
to the donor’s wishes.
The donor works as an officer at a Wall Street private equity firm,
and has donated to repugican, Independence, and Democratic Party
candidates for New York City Mayor, and New York Governor, State Senate,
Assembly, and Congressional races in the past. … The phone call was
reportedly made for a banking-industry PAC that is supportive of Romney,
not the Romney campaign. The donor who contacted NYaltnews says the
fundraiser had previously contacted him on behalf of the Romney
campaign, as well as the campaigns of two New York repugican members of
Congress in the past year.
Your guess is as good as mine on the veracity or value of the source.
Given the way the power-mad repugican mind works — and past
performance — I would personally be shocked if this weren’t at least
being planned out. In fact, I call it megalomaniac-incompetence if the r’s forgot this time to game this scenario.
Is this actually happening? The article notes the following:
Curiously, Romney has began airing commercials and ramped up campaigning in states not considered battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania
and Oregon. Some political observers say this is being done to gather
stray undecided voters in these states and increase the chance and
margin of a popular-vote victory.
Not evidence, but certainly suggestive. Again, this works especially
well in combo with an Obama strategy that ignores the popular vote.
Romney may be preparing a set of talking points that the
Electoral College is essentially unfair and back this argument with a
massive Faux News and talk-radio blitz that would fuel doubt in the
legitimacy of an Obama win. The goal is to turn public sentiment
against President Obama with a message that the President’s campaign
thwarted the majority of the people. It is has also been speculated on the Democratic-leaning blog, DailyKos, that Romney might be the first presidential-race loser to refuse to concede the election.
There’s more
in the article;
you really should click over. The strategy, if pursued, would include
all of the pieces of the reported 2000 shrub strategy — Faux News; talk
radio; dueling pundits (pundit-on-pundit violence); business “leader”
and CEO-influence on employees; “non-partisan” preachers
who suddenly love “democracy” — plus whatever else the phrase “full-on
attack” implies these days. Why go at all if you don’t go all-out?
A test, of course, is it see if Romney concedes or pursues a Dino
Rossi–Norm Coleman strategy as described above. A slow concession would
be a huge tell in my book.
By the way, that colorful phrase about man-parts isn’t the writer’s;
it’s that Republican donor’s, the one who passed along the story:
[S]aid the donor … “I don’t think they want to steal the
election by saying ‘the popular vote should be counted instead of the
electoral vote,’ I think they want to cut the nuts off a second term for
Obama.”
Bottom line
Let’s see how this plays out. If it plays out at all, I’ll look down
the road at what actual delegitimization looks like. Remember, its uses
have advanced since Clinton days. They could be sneaking up on rebellion
this time, though none would call it that.
If this strategy dies for lack of water — or a sufficiently fertile
opportunity — it dies and we move on. If it lives however, I’ll try to
work out the options. In my cynical mind, this may be worse than you
might suspect. Stay tuned.
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