I'm probably dooming this post to obscurity by giving it a title you should never, ever Google (a process I'm gonna refer to as Santorum-ing myself) but I really can't think of anything else that better explains the phenomenon I'm witnessing.
To be fair, my experience might not be normal- I do live in Missouri, a state whose name gets pronounced differently depending on your political affiliation. But I can't help but think I'm not alone.
We're winning this thing- the press says so, the polls say so, Nate Silver says so, the performances on TV say so, Mitt's lackluster earnings this go-round say so. But I'm not feeling it.
I feel, on the contrary, like a lone speck of blue floating in a frothing sea of red, like I'm floating in water chummed to a frenzy by a bunch of sharks. I feel like we're losing, even though I know it's not so. And I've figured out why- and it's what I'm calling the Asshole Gap.
I, as a general rule, try not to be an asshole. Wheaton's Law and a few other personal rules I govern my life by dictate this of me. But I've realized that other people, because of some assumptions they've made about other people and the world, don't try this.
Partially it's because of the narrative the GOP has been peddling to people about this stuff- I mean, if Barack Obama is a Secret-Muslim-Manchurian-Socialist-Facist-Terrorist-Black-Supremacist, clearly there's no reason to hold back any longer, is there? There's no politeness, or decorum, or respect for the office... I must admit that I, myself, probably said some pretty horrible things about W. when he was in office.
But like Clinton observed, I was never able to hate Bush the way the sort of people who would vote for Bush seem to hate Obama. I thought the man was an idiot, sure, and I definitely thought he was leading the country astray, and I'm not above a few cheap shots at his expense, but I never said the ugly stuff people say about him, and certainly not standing in the middle of a random retail establishment while running errands.
"Tell you what," someone said to me today, "Four more years of that guy in charge of the country and there won't be a country left. I betcha if he wins another term, he won't be in there long before someone takes care of it."
"He's a black supremacist," someone yelled at my girlfriend the other day, "He's said that if he gets another term in office, he's gonna round up all the white people and start killing them off."
Snopes.com: please start selling business cards that just have your URL on it. I'd love to be able to hand these out to people.
Anyway, when someone uses that as their OPENER, there's not really a conversation there, is there? I mean, you can't even counter with a "I think he's trying really hard in difficult circumstances, and he's disappointed me a lot but I still fundamentally disagree with the policies of his opposition, so I'm gonna hold my nose and pull the lever." Such middle-of-the-road, undecided quibbling has no place in the conversation they've started. You can't be undecided about the DEVIL.
So there's the gap- the disconnect between the people who will say the most virulent, racist, hateful, uneducated, ignorant shit imaginable, and normal human beings who weigh their options and decide they're not going to raise their blood pressure twenty points and get into a screaming match in the middle of an Office Depot.
You can't be screamingly, violently, frothingly, stupidly in favor of something. It doesn't work that way. You could try to be against Mitt Romney as emphatically as folks are against Obama, but it's hard to get that angry about a wet bag of Wonder Bread, especially one who is being so gracious as to fail as spectacularly as Mitt is.
So the disconnect between what I'm seeing in my day-to-day life, and what I'm hearing on the news, is the gap between a bunch of assholes with a vein popping out of their foreheads, and a bunch of Obama supporters too polite to tell them that the numbers are out and they've already lost.