Yup. That’s right. A landslide for Romney approaching the magnitude of Obama’s against McCain. That’s my prediction.
On Sunday, we changed our clocks. On Tuesday, we’ll change our president.
Romney will win the states McCain carried in 2008, plus: Florida, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
In the popular vote, Romney will win by more than 5 points.
The Obama campaign made the following key mistakes:
• It bet the farm on negative ads in swing states. It didn’t realize that Mitt’s convention speech and the three debates would give him the chance to live down the charges and demonstrate — through facts and his demeanor — that they were baseless.
• Obama had no Plan B if the negatives didn’t work. He never really laid in a convincing defense of his record, except to recall the mess that he inherited and to try to make people believe things were better. He had no vision for his second term, except more of same. He never moved to the center — the shift that reelected Bill Clinton.
• Obama drew his list of swing states too narrowly. He did not contemplate that he would be forced to defend Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan or Minnesota and squandered his money contesting unwinnable states like North Carolina. When Romney bypassed Obama’s “firewall” states (like the Germans did the French Maginot Line in World War II), the president had not laid in the necessary prophylactic irradiation of negative ads, and three of the states embraced Romney.
• By focusing on the negative, Obama sacrificed first his personal popularity and then his dignity and presidentiality. No longer was he the hope and the change. He became nothing more than a nasty partisan, throwing epithets at his rival. A president does not let himself be quoted as saying that his opponent is a “bullsh–ter” or that voting is the best “revenge.” Even his dress was wrong. Instead of appearing in a dark suit, he dressed in an open-neck white shirt, trying to be everyman but succeeding only in not looking like a president.
