We always knew Romney was rich. He was branded as a flip-flopper coming into the race. It wasn't hard to figure out he was entitled.
This country has elected rich, even entitled men as president before. Maybe not as rich or as entitled as Romney, but this country has always given a candidate a chance to transcend labeling. Good speeches, ability to stay on message, someone you can identify with, ads that move you, positions that strike a chord and make sense: a competent campaign operation can craft the candidate, his image, how voters perceive him or her.
When Lawrence O'Donnell's guest, Charles Blow, used the "L word" tonight and O'Donnell treated it as something new, I smiled. Unless you read Markos' occasional diaries, the sentiment might be new to you as well.
But take a look and see how all of O'Donnell's guests miss the next logical conclusion.
It's not just that Romney is incompetent (though that's the clearest reason for his current poll numbers). It's that everything you suspect ABOUT Romney, all the seeds Romney and his campaign have planted: the entitled rich guy meme, the "he only cares about rich folks" label, the "out of touch" troupe, the disdain, the reactionary, the unsureness, the bathed-in-hand-sanitizer aspect of the man allows us all to take a great measure of satisfaction in the fact that Romney is, indeed, a Loser.
The real problem is that the incompetent Romney campaign allowed us to dislike the man and now allows us to feel good about our judgment.
And that's something south of incompetence, something worse than bad, and something from which a campaign cannot recover.
Here's the full segment on MSNBC's Last Word.