There's been a lot of chatter today about the upcoming book by the Washington Post's Dan Balz about the 2012 campaign and the new Mitt Romney revelations contained in said book, including that he really, really didn't want to run after all. (That statement contains more horseshit than Rafalca could produce in his entire lifetime.) But perhaps lost in the derision over the notion that Mitt, who pretty much started running for the Presidency the day after he was elected governor of MA in 2002, had to be forced into running is the revelation that on Election Night, Mitt was even more deluded than we imagined.
Want some indication of how deluded? Here's a nice roundup. First, he really truly believed he had it in the bag on Election Night. So much so that, as we suspected, he did not write a concessions speech? Why?
Confidence was so high heading into election day that Romney had not taken the precaution of writing a concession speech in advance. He had made a few stabs at it, but it would not come together. "I can't write it," he told someone close to him. "It doesn't seem right."
You know, this is why you have speechwriters on staff, moron. If you're blocked because you're deluded into belief in sure-fire victory despite all evidence to the contrary, can't you just hand the duties off to one of them? I'm sure they could fire off something more impressive than
something so short it seemed like it was scribbled on a cocktail napkin.
But if you think Mitt was deluded, that was nothing compared to how completely out of it his running mate was.
Paul Ryan was, if anything, more confident. As he was preparing to fly to Boston in the late afternoon of election day, he was openly talking about resigning his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee immediately after the election and was already thinking of possible replacements to head the committee during the budget fight coming in the lame-duck session
Again, if Ayn Rand's little groupie is considered one of the leading intellectual lights of the GOP, it really doesn't say much for their collective brain power.
Needless to say, little Paulie didn't take it very well when mean old Mr. Reality came crashing into his fantasies.
Ryan was distressed at the projection showing Obama as the winner. One person remembers him saying, "This is wrong. This is bad for the country. This is really, really bad."
Awwww, poor little Paulie doesn't get to implement his budget after all.
There's a lot of other gems from Balz, particularly on the clusterfuck that was the GOP convention.
The Republican National Convention, Balz reports, was chaotic. Christie threatened to drop an F-bomb during his primetime speech if organizers cut down his introduction video by three minutes (they were nervous about getting everything done by 11 p.m.). Organizers relented. Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood's primetime address to an empty chair caught Romney's team completely off guard -- which one Romney adviser confirmed to The Huffington Post.
"He did just what he said he did," said the aide, "came up with the whole thing just as he went on stage. Utterly unimaginable."
Funny, seems like "caught completely off guard" describes Mitt perfectly. Especially since he also
was completely clueless as to why his infamous "47%" comments so badly damaged him.
In fact, that can be the summation of Mitt's campaign: Completely Clueless. In every single facet.
I'll be looking forward to seeing the rest of Balz's book when it comes out next month.