Ron Radosh: Why Obama Won — and What Conservatives Must Do
Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
There are no ways to get around the facts. For Republicans and conservatives and independents who wanted a new direction for our country, the victory of President Obama is sad — and for many of us, unexpected. Those conservatives who assured us with statistics, theories, and arguments about Romney winning the White House, even in a landslide, should be eating their hats.
In the past week, conservatives who usually disagree with each other about many things, including Fred Barnes, Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, my PJM colleague Roger Kimball, George F. Will, Karl Rove, and Michael Barone, among others, provided analysis and arguments, all of which led to predictions of an inevitable Romney victory. Instead of the outcome they all looked forward to and assumed would be inevitable given Obama’s failures and the state of the economy, they found that their theories collapsed as the returns poured in. Instead of a long night, by 11:30 p.m. even Fox News had called the election for the president. Yes, Karl Rove thought their statistics desk called it too early, but 15 minutes later he too agreed that Ohio had gone for the president.
So what happened? I had been trying to warn my optimistic friends in recent days that I thought Obama would win, and was regularly greeted with a slew of polls meant to prove I was wrong. So here are some of my thoughts and reactions, written before I can be influenced by the pundits who will be writing in tomorrow morning’s newspapers and appearing on TV talk shows....
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