But I don’t think it would have mattered. Olderandwheezier said it — we might have won with a cool candidate. The people who voted for the One were coming out of the voting booth saying they knew Romney would do a better job with the economy — but they still voted for the O.

Our candidate was square, a businessman, a technocrat, old-fashioned, a hard worker. Their candidate was hip, edgy, laid back, never worked a day in his life, cooool.

What we’re going to have to face is not that our ideas are bad, or that we don’t appeal to a broad enough ethnic mix. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that, for a large segment of the population, appearance is all. Yes, their brain matter has been vacuumed out and pumped full of dreck. Yes, they think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are actually newscasters. Yes, they know nothing about anything. Yes, they think “values” are something you get at a storewide sale.

Too bad. If we want to win a presidential election again, we have to appeal to them. We have to have a cooooool candidate. It’s the ultimate triumph of Marshal McLuhan.

P.S. But don’t despair. I thought we were done after Goldwater, and eventually we got Reagan. I thought we were done after Clinton and along came George W. It will get better. We know what they did, and how they did it. Now we have to give it back to them, with both barrels.

I was wondering whether the turnout among certain groups was down because some people who admired Sarah Palin did not like the way the Romney campaign was treating her.

Her voice was effectively silenced by the Romney team and, for all you or I know, that mattered in the election.

And I don’t mind her playing near the edge. I mind that over the past several years she has insisted on being on record and close to or over the edge concerning trifles that a more sensible public figure would have considered beneath her.

Your objections to Palin are based upon the merits of her actions. Therefore, I have zero problem with your objections.

The Palin bashers whom I have a problem with … are those who bash her b/c of their own pretensions.

I plead guilty to having a crush on Palin: how many women are in their early 50s and have as much energy, life-force, and personality? Palin shares a characteristic with the pretend character Flo: they both genuinely like men. Palin does not pretend to like men, and does not merely tolerate men. Rather, she is genuinely fond of manly characteristics and traits. This is rare enough to comprise a legitimate basis for a man to have a crush on her.

However, I object to your assumption that I am blind to Palin’s faults. I find many women to be attractive, yet foolish. Sarah Palin is not in that group. She has a good (or great) feel for human nature, and for government and politics. She rose from nowhere, and she received zero help along the way. You do not do that unless you have massive talent.

She works close to the edge, and sometimes she falls over it — similar to a comic who works close to the edge, and some of the jokes fail. Similar, also, maybe, to Ann Coulter, who works close to the edge and sometimes crosses it and says foolish things. But thats okay. Palin does more good, via working close to the edge, than she would if she were just another careful and circumspect McConnell or Boehner.

1 Samuel = nice analogy.

“When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

This remind of what Sergey points to: the only thing which will stop the death spiral is hitting bottom. There will be nothing to save us.

“Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us….”

Yes. We want socialism to lead us. Then we will be like all the other nations, like Spain and Greece…

Romney wrote Palin out of the Republican Party. He excluded her from the convention. When she finally endorsed him, a day before the election, no one really noticed.

If Palin had been at the convention and had been campaigning for Romney, things might have been different.

I think it’s a sign of Romney’s deficiency as a politician and his failure to provide political leadership.

As Newt said many times, Romney is a manager, not a leader.

I think that the treatment of Palin was a primary symptom of that failure.