GOP imploding, do not resuscitate

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President Barack Obama has been easily re-elected, winning 332 electoral votes. In my column last Tuesday, I predicted that Mitt Romney would win with 279 electoral votes and that the president would lose with 259. Readers of this space are owed an explanation and an apology.

Let's start by going back a year and a half to one of my columns published in the Asheville Citizen-Times in which I stated, "I thought I might as well go ahead and predict the 2012 election. President Obama will be re-elected, and in the Electoral College it won't be close. He may not win a few of the states that he carried in 2008 like North Carolina and Indiana, but he will win about 325 electoral votes.

"How can this be? After all, the economy is fragile at best. Food and energy prices continue to escalate. Half the country wants no part of Obama's health legislation. The answer hides in plain sight — the spectacular disintegration of the Republican Party."

If I had the outcome of the presidential election nailed 18 months ago, how in the world did I miss it so badly in my column published five days ago? Here's how I blew it.

In fact, last weekend I wrote two Election Day columns. The first of the two was written by The Shadow. Its bottom line stated, "President Obama cobbles together just enough votes in the battleground states to win a second term. To win the election, Romney must win Ohio. He won't. The final electoral count will be Obama 290 and Romney 248."

The second column was written by LeRoy. It called for Romney to win Ohio and to win the election with 279 electoral votes. Holy Toledo!

My error, for which I apologize, was to submit LeRoy's column and not The Shadow's column for publication last week. The painful lesson is that one messes with The Shadow at one's own peril.

The unmistakable takeaway from last Tuesday's election is that the Republican Party is imploding. The abundant and compelling evidence of its self-inflicted self-destruction is starkly clear.

Readers of this space know well that my heaviest artillery is reserved for the wingnuts of both the right and the left. Both political parties are loaded with wingnuts. But there is an important difference. The left wingnuts do not control or dominate the Democratic Party.

But the right wingnuts have taken control of the Republican Party dating to their ascendancy in 2010 when 87 members of the tea party were elected to the House of Representatives. Over the past two years, they have embarked upon a scorched earth policy with but a single purpose — the defeat of President Obama. Obviously that policy has failed.

In the process, the tea party has turned House Speaker John Boehner into its puppet, refused to compromise on major legislation, and now shows every intention of continuing its take-no-prisoners approach.

These folks live in a delusional world that presumes most Americans can or will come to share their beliefs. Such a presumption is preposterous, and the election results last Tuesday prove it.

The face of the American electorate is changing — rapidly. The Democrats win nationally not because their ideas and policies are so appealing — think Obamacare and stimulus — but because the Democrats understand the essentiality of reaching out to the increasingly diverse society that America has become, especially including Latinos.

The Republicans mindlessly wrote off the nation's African-Americans decades ago and got away with it. Now they are writing off the nation's Latinos, and it's a guaranteed death wish. In 2004, President George W. Bush won re-election with 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2008, John McCain lost with 31 percent. Romney only got a pathetic 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.

It is the explosive growth of America's Hispanic community that has turned states like California, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia from red to blue or purple. Coming along right behind them are North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and Texas.

The Republican Party is no longer competitive from Maine to North Carolina. It can't win in the Rust Belt from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River. And it can't compete in California or the Pacific Northwest.

In fact, the GOP only holds sway in a shrinking number states in the Great Plains and the South that, unlike the rest of the nation, are homogeneously white.

Romney foolishly attempted to placate the dominant, extremists forces that call the shots in the GOP in order to get the nomination. They agreed to a marriage of convenience, but the American people annulled that marriage last Tuesday.

Now the GOP must decide to change or to die. While the answer to that question is abundantly clear to most of us, don't think for a moment that the outcome of the internal debate within the GOP is obvious.

You can be assured that most of the tea party folks will look at last week's election and conclude the problem was that the Republicans nominated a moderate rather than a true believer. Thus they will conclude that the party must move further to the right.

If they win the civil war that's about to begin in the party, it's not all bad because that will hasten the extinction of a brain-dead elephant.

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