The Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show 11/8/12

“Portly”? Dean Chambers (“the Meat Loaf of polling” is absolutely brilliant, Chez) got annoyed about being called “portly”? Good dog in Himmel, he is portly, and using that supposed grave insult as an excuse to call Nate Silver names is the weirdest case of displaced aggression I’ve ever heard of.

On the one hand, the Moneyball strategy can overcome the brute force of unlimited money and so is a good thing. On the other hand, further subdividing the population makes it possible to miss opportunities to pick up voters in unlikely places—which the 50-state strategy does—and so is a bad thing. And on the third hand, in four years the country will be lousy with campaign consultants, each of which will employ a batallion of laptop-wielding junior accountants and each of which will claim particular expertise in implementing the winning Moneyball strategy, which will be both hilarious and tragic.

Karl Rove fell for his own line of patter and gulled himself. I never had much respect for Rove, but I thought he was a good enough con man to avoid such a simple blunder. (I would pay good money to know what was being screamed into Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier’s earpieces while Rove was having his little on-air episode. Maybe the two of them are bright enough to get the focus off Rove on their own, maybe not. Don’t know, don’t care. It made for good entertainment either way.)

My money says the Rs won’t bother with introspection or self-doubt. It’s not the sort of thing they do. What they will do is become even more intransigent and ever more dependent on Lindsey Graham’s angry white men. (Oh, for crying out.… Get your mind out of the gutter, that’s not what I meant and you know it!)

Bob, you have it exactly right: in order to appeal to a larger percentage of the population, the Rs will have to abandon some—or many—policies and positions that have defined the party. I don’t think that’ll happen now. If the Rs lose big in 2014, maybe; more likely if they get shellacked in ’16. And even if they were to change, it would take several years for any of the targeted groups (women, Latinos, gays, non-Christians, blacks, et bleedin’ cetera) to trust the Republicans.

Marco Rubio wouldn’t change the dynamic for the Rs one little bit. Latinos are as diverse as any other group in the US, but by and large Latinos are far to the Left of Rubio (for that matter, so is the whole country—center-right nation, my eye).

“All Boehner’s interested in is keeping his job.” True, but if John Boehner moves—or tries to move the party—even the slightest bit away from the far Right, his caucus will eat him alive (and that may well not be a metaphor). He may personally be willing to concede that reality is, well, reality, but the rest of the House Rs, not so much. Boehner is also a canny enough politician to know that Eric Cantor would cheerfully stick a knife in his back and twist, and Cantor will charge full-tilt off the cliff with the herd. Sometimes I feel a little bit sorry for John Boehner, but I get over it quickly enough.

As the (mythical) Chinese proverb says, may you live in interesting times.

–alopecia