Returning to Reality

Back in the days of the Bush Administration, the NY Times reported  on an exchange with a Bush Aide, who dismissed the reporter as a member of the "reality based community" and told him, "we create our own reality."

Yeah, not so much. In this election, Republican pundits were adamant  they were going to win by a landslide.  It wasn't just spin.  They really, really believed it.

One of the more interesting questions of this election is how and why so many Republicans, who are certainly just as capable as Democrats at reading polls, chose to ignore the overwhelming statistical evidence that a Romney win was unlikely. I suppose one could say it is not much of a mystery, and that this mass refusal to accept politically inconvenient facts is of a piece with, say, conservative denial of global warming. And maybe that’s all it is. But I suspect that there was something else at play, too. 

When I was talking to that GOP operative, he repeatedly said that a big reason he was feeling good about his party’s chances was the sense of assurance he was hearing in the voices of Romney campaign aides on the conference calls he was on. “I know when I’m being bullshitted, and they aren’t doing that,” he told me.

They had their own data.  They were making their own reality.

From the Atlantic:

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?" ...

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.    

It ought to be an eye-opening moment.    

We've talked before about the Republican rejection of reality, which we see in evolution deniers, climate change deniers, and the anti-intellectualism that passes for Tea-Party populism.

The big question is, will the sensible Republicans fight to put facts back into their party?  Or will they continue to be distracted by birthers, and conspiracy theories about Muslims?

NY Times:

“We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party,” Mr. Weaver [a Republican strategist who worked on the presidential campaigns of Senator John McCain and Jon M. Huntsman Jr.,] said in an interview. “And to do the latter we have to fix our Hispanic problem as quickly as possible, we’ve got to accept science and start calling out these false equivalencies when they occur within our party about things that are just not true, and not tolerate the intolerant.”

What are the odds?