Don’t Let The GOP Blame Sandy - Salon [View all]

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Sunday Best: Don’t let the GOP blame Sandy
Top strategists are eager to blame Hurricane Sandy if Romney loses -- why it would be terrible if the media agrees
BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD - Salon
SUNDAY, NOV 4, 2012 10:20 AM PST

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With just two days to go before the election, it seems one side may already be making preparations for a defeat. While many of the pundits on today’s Sunday morning political chat shows insisted the race was too close to call, others agreed that President Obama has the edge. That’s certainly what the math and the tea leaves lead us to believe. And it seems some Republicans are already preparing for defeat by trying to control the story of what went wrong. Essentially: Blame Sandy.

“The hurricane is what broke Romney’s momentum…I don’t think there’s any question about it,” former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, told CNN’s State of the Union. Barbour, a former RNC chairman, is one of his party’s savviest strategists and a key behind-the-scenes player.

Meanwhile, Karl Rove told the Washington Post that the storm turned out to be the real “October surprise.” “If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy. There was a stutter in the campaign. When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his [Romney’s] advantage,” Rove explained. Rove, with his deep-pocketed American Crossroads groups, is one of his party’s savviest strategists and a key behind-the-scenes player (see a pattern here?).

Then there’s Ed Gillespie, another savvy behind-the-scenes GOP strategist, who now work for the Romney campaign. Today, he actually praised the Obama administration’s response to the storm on ABC’s This Week, saying, “We’ve heard from the governors…there’s a good working relationship between the state and the federal government.” He also hinted that Obama may have gained politically from the storm. This is from a campaign that has never praised anything Obama has ever done, and it would not be hard to poke the administration over fuel shortages or other lingering problems in the wake of Sandy. Gillespie could be uneasy about going too negative in the wake of a tragedy, but that certainly didn’t stop the Romney campaign after the attacks in Libya. Or it could be an attempt to build up the storm and the administration’s response.

And we knew this was coming. On Thursday, Politico’s Mike Allen, who, say what you will about him, has stellar access to senior operatives, reported that Republicans are already laying the groundwork for scapegoating the storm. “You’re already hearing Republicans hint that if Mitt Romney loses, that he’ll blame the storm. The people around him will cite that as a cause, that they had momentum, but it stopped cold,” he said on MSNBC.

This effort to define the post-mortem narrative is far more than, as TPM’s Josh Marshall wrote, “CYA,” cover your ass for pundits who predicted a big Romney win and are now preparing to eat crow. Rather, there’s something of greater significance than pundits’ reputations on the line here. If Romney loses, the debate will immediately shift to defining why, and whatever narrative takes hold could set the tone for Obama’s second term, should he win one.

Republicans are trying to make this the thumbnail story of the campaign: Romney was winning heading into the closing stretch until a freak super storm (not at all connected to global warming, of course) the week before the election turned things around for Obama. Basically, Obama got lucky....

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More: http://www.salon.com/2012/11/04/sunday_best_dont_let_the_gop_blame_sandy/