Pres Obama Says Thank You; Former Gov Romney says Obama Won because of Free Gifts

At the end of the day, you have what it was about from the beginning -- Obama caring about all Americans including the 47% versus Romney caring about the wealthiest and his southern strategy of earlier GOP campaigns to bring out the southern white vote.  Americans were not fooled as the majority of us knew which candidate cared about all Americans -- Barack Obama.  In the end, it wasn't even close with Obama getting 332 electoral votes to Romney's 206 with Obama getting over $3M more popular votes.  
As I watched this video after the election with the President thanking the people in Chicago, I was struck at the diversity of his workers in the main campaign office which is a microcosm of what we saw on the campaign trail -- young, middle age, older, men, women, minorities, and whites all working together to elect Barack Obama.  There is no one specific group who supported the Obama campaign but a lot of different groups who wanted to make sure that he was reelected and had a chance to finish what he started.  They knocked those doors in battleground states with a huge ground game.  Unions have discovered that a campaign needs people more then the money and were part of that ground game.  
Romney tried to buy the election with the big donors and Super PACs while Obama's campaign focused on a huge ground game to Get Out The Vote.  Obama campaign held a lot of fundraisers and brought in a lot of money from big donors along with the Democrat Super PAC but in the end, it was the millions of small donors who bought a piece of his campaign and worked hard to elect him that won the day.
When I got this in email yesterday along with another email to take a comprehensive survey about the campaign, it hit me that the President understands Americans by reaching out to all people of America not just a select few wealthy.  In fact he has very much at home in almost all situations except maybe having to deal with the Party of NO in DC.  Must be refreshing to get outside the beltway and deal with regular Americans not those inside the beltway who have a false sense they are the most important people who the world revolves around.  

As I watched this Thank You, I was reminded of how I felt waking up on the morning the day after the election with a smile on my face knowing I had voted for the right person to be President.  
In 2008, I supported John McCain who I wouldn't support today for dog catcher after his actions last week with his comments on Libya.  He is very bitter and you have to wonder what Romney promised him -- was it Secretary of Defense which he has wanted for years?   The fact is if he took over at DoD, the exit out the doors by senior ranking officers would be huge. 
As Romney made more of a jerk of himself this week with the 'free gifts,' it shouldn't have shocked anyone as he meant that 47% comment.  He is arrogant, pampered, and never wants to be told NO which the American people have done in fairly large numbers.  When you have a southern strategy in today's America to go after the white southern vote, you have a real problem.  Then toss in the Neanderthal thinking of the 50's and your problem becomes huge.  Women, minorities, gays, and anyone who doesn't agree with the hard right is supposed to sit down, shut up, and let them decide things.  News to Romney people -- it doesn't work that way.  Paul Krugman from the NY Times summed up the GOP under Romney/Ryan and today's hard right GOP:

There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.    

Couldn't believe when I read yesterday, the Romney campaign depended on negative ads which they flood the airwaves and mailings to get their support and their money from smaller donors. (sarcasm)  That was a 50's/60's campaign outreach.  I can vouch for the snail mail as some weeks I would get 10-12 pieces of mail from the campaign which ended up in the trash.  I received two snail mails from Obama -- one with my bumper strip and one with a magnet for donating.  
Two campaigns run very differently -- Obama was in 2012 with using the internet to max out his potential base.  His emails asking for small donations was perfect as they asked for donations starting at $8, saved your information, and all you had to do was click on what amount to give.  Started giving $8 or $10 when Romney and/or his surrogates would irritate me with their comments which in many cases were tinged with racism or attacks on women, minorities, veterans, teachers, fire, police, civil service, and other groups.  Romney's campaign was stuck on the 50's/60's mentality of how to run a campaign with mailout letters, etc.  Not even fancy mailouts that local candidates send out but actual snail mail.  I was shocked at their lack of progress running elections.  Almost as dumb as the RNC sending out $1 bills asking for donations -- talk about throwing money away.
The Obama campaign couldn't have had a better campaign to have as an opponent then Romney/Ryan who had problems with the truth as they spouted Fox News/Limbaugh mistruths and outright lies.  They spent almost as much time fundraising in the last month as campaigning.  Ryan was pulled off the trail to go fundraise in the last month which was odd for a campaign spouting they were winning.  What gets me is that they believed the likes of Fox News, Rush, Rove, Morris, and their little group of people who said they were going to win big.  During the last two weeks, I kept wondering why the Romney camp was getting their information as people I knew were saying it was going to Obama and don't believe polls like Gallup.  Kept telling people that national polls mean nothing in the end but the state polls are what counts.  But even then some state polls were far off and missed the fact so many minorities were going to vote and women were turned off by Romney/Ryan.
My favorite outcome of the election was Missouri where Akin went down to defeat big time when polls showed it close right up until the election with McCaskill.  Turns out women didn't want to say outright they wouldn't vote for the Neanderthal but they showed on election day when he lost by over 15 points, they wanted no part of the hard right Akin who the Tea Party supported.
Over the months, I have had friends ask me how I ended up supporting Obama even though they knew I refused to support Romney after 2008 and vowed never to support the arrogant man.  I learned my lesson but many in the GOP did not and their 'he is such a nice man' mantra doesn't fly either when you have seen up close how nasty he can be at Town Halls when asked the wrong question.  
My path to voting for Obama started with my looking at former NM Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, to support until discovering that he was also an Ayn Rand disciple like the Romney VP candidate Paul Ryan. That did it for me as I cannot believe these people  follow the writings of an atheist who writes fiction.  That decision not to support Johnson (couldn't have voted for him as OK GOP made sure he wasn't on the ballot) led me to Republicans for Obama where I found a home with like minded individuals who had decided that the GOP had gone too far hard right.  They had come to the conclusion that Obama was the better candidate then Romney had gone hard right who was 'severely' conservative.  
Many of the people there had supported Obama against McCain in 2008 which I can fully understand.  The people at Republicans for Obama are not hard right which made it even better.  None of the 'my way or no way' crowd was involved except for the occasional poster who posted to irritate people and actually made me laugh with their stupid postings that were right out of Rush and Fox News.
Then after being part of Republicans for Obama, I decided to ask the campaign how I could help in a Red State.  This election travel was out but I could use my blog to get out the facts to help elect Barack Obama for a second term.   Those doubts about supporting Obama at the beginning were quickly washed away as I realized that I had been swallowing the GOP/pundit koolaid about Republican candidates for sometime which when shown the light of day didn't add up.  All of a sudden when I saw the House stall the veterans job bill and the farm bill, I knew that the Democrats were right and the House GOP since 2010 had become the Party of "NO" even when it hurt the American people.  They didn't want good jobs numbers as it would help Obama.  You could say I woke up and frankly don't like what I was seeing out of many of today's Republicans who seem to have the integrity of gnat in Congress putting Party over Country.
Today as I was putting this together I found an article by Paul Krugman which sums up the state of today's Republicans IMO no matter what face they are trying to wear today -- that core of the GOP that is hard right is still driving the bus as I think you will see with the House Republicans in the days ahead.  This part of his article drives home what is wrong with the Republican Party today and their nostalgia for the 1950's:

The Twinkie ManifestoBy PAUL KRUGMANPublished: November 18, 2012 

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.
Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.   

(snip)

Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live,” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat.  

The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters. 

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right? 

Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America. 

Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973. 

Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing. 

There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.    

Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again. 

Excerpt:  Read More from Paul Krugman at the NY Times