How the lost election will be spun (via Democratic Strategist):
QuoteComing after an intensely fought election campaign with a compelling — indeed mediagenic, rock- star cultural conservative like Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, a strong Obama victory would imply:
That most Americans don't actually share cultural conservative's vision of themselves as "the real America," opposed by only a minority of educated elites.That most Americans don't share the view that Obama and Democrats are essentially un-American and unpatriotic.
That most Americans do, in fact, believe that it was eight years of Republican pro-free market policies that created the current economic crisis.
This, conservatives simply cannot accept. As a result, in the last few days, we have seen the beginnings of the new conservative narrative start to emerge from Steve Schmidt's Rovian media operation within the McCain campaign. The key elements of this new narrative are as follows:
1. That Barack Obama is not only actually a secret radical/terrorist sympathizer but that there has been a vast and concerted conspiracy by "the mainstream media filter" to hide this truth from voters.
2. That leading Dems including Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reed are the primary culprits in the current financial crisis
3. That primarily Black "goons and hooligans" are going to steal the election.
Each of these new tropes has been launched by one or more of the major McCain campaign ads in the last few days and each is widely repeated and reinforced by extensive viral e-mail campaigns.
When McCain finally felt obligated to speak up and disagree with these distortions last Friday he was roundly booed by his own supporters – and it will only get worse after the election. If McCain does not rigidly stick to the new conservative script that Steve Schmidt has handed him to read and he loses the election, the conservatives – including Sarah – "et tu, Brutus" - Palin - will turn on him like wild hyenas.
If you think Democrats have been mean to McCain this year, just wait until you hear the conservatives rip him apart after the election. They will call him a "weakling," "a bumbling fool" and a "senile, doddering old man who let an easy victory escape him." "After all," they will add knowingly, "he was never really a true conservative to start with." This "the loss was all McCain's fault" rationalization will actually provide the fourth and final element of the new conservative narrative.
This may seem cruel, but conservatives really have little choice except to explain the election in this way because a key part of their world view is an unrelenting insistence that politics is a simple morality play of good vs. evil — with themselves invariably in the heroes' role. In this storyline Conservatives are always basically right and always essentially pure – they do not make fundamental mistakes or display major moral and ethical failings (if an individual conservative does any of these things, it simply proves that he or she was not actually a "real" conservative to begin with).