Just saw former GOP governor and professional chin artist Haley Barbour on MSNBC, arguing that Obama and the Chicago boys can't run on their record, so they vilified Mitt Romney and ran a negative campaign.

My head ordinarily would have exploded - metaphorically, of course - at such inanity, especially on a Very Important Election Day. Fortunately, I'd taken the antidote last night, in the form of The Rachel Maddow Show's A-block.  Despite conventional wisdom, Obama had an amazing record, one that many of his predecessors (George Bush, anyone) would envy, and that history will smile upon.

I yield my time to the

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" target="_blank">gentlewoman from the Berkshires:

Listening to NPR while chugging along on the treadmill this morning, I heard Kokie Roberts and Mara Liasson opine that, since blowing McCain out of the water in '08, Obama's lost significant ground with white male working class voters - an exploitable flaw in his already weakened armor.

Flipping the argument around, host Steve Inskeep asked about the minority vote. Both Liasson and Roberts sang it almost in stereo: Obama has locked up the minority vote, and hopes to run up huge margins that could offset the lion's share of the white vote Romney is expected to win.

Then, there's this, from my old mates at Politico, declaring that the era of Post Racial Politics is officially over. Also, Southern Strategy.

That got me thinking about this, from the summer, and comparing it to what I was hearing on NPR.

It seems to me that pointing out how Obama doesn't have blue collar whites on his side -- and that those votes "still matter" is a whistling-past-the-graveyard scenario on the part of pundits and party strategist, and misses a big point on how this elections, and future ones, will be vastly different.

First of all, no one's talking at all about how Romney has barely lifted a finger to court the black and brown electorate, and seems to have gone out of his way to offend African American voters.  Since that disastrous speech (or ingenious, depending on perspective), Romney hasn't done a single event with a high-profile African American leader.  And he's had little to say on immigration since his technicolor appearance in a Univision interview a few months back.

To get zero percent of the African American community -- just a few years after Bush racked up 11 percent -- and show up orange in a national TV interview, you almost have to be trying.

Secondly, no one disputes the fact that, within a few decades, whites will be the nation's largest minority, surpassed by Latinos but still ahead of African Americans. On its face, irritating a voting bloc you'll soon have to court seems like a losing strategy.

Unless you consider Citizens United and the Republican lockstep strategy of suppressing the minority vote.  The conservative tilt to the Supreme Court all but ensured that the wealthy will have a powerful voice in elections of the future, and the voting suppression -- ranging from strict voter ID laws to menacing billboards and mailings -- are aimed largely at communities of color.

Coincidence?

If you don't have the numbers, you change the rules, and it seems to be working so far - how else could a candidate as flawed, feckless and without gravitas as Mitt Romney come even close to a historic record many of his predecessors would envy?

But Rachel Maddow poses the real question for the GOP -- and the nation: is this really a long-term strategy?

Benghazi dispatch

This is probably the best analysis I've seen so far of the Benghazi bloodshed.

What's missing from a lot of the on-air commentary -- and Mitt Romney's bellicose attack on President Obama for sending "mixed messages" that he believes spurred the attack -- is the fact that the world, and the Middle East, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, is a "complicated and, at times, confounding."

In-depth reporting by, among others, Rachel Maddow makes it plain that there may be a lot of factors behind the devastating attack besides an obscure, really bad, blasphemous film: Islamic extremists, frustrated, angry youth idled by the slack post-revolutionary economy, and general instability in a nation that's trying to figure out its own future.

For my money, this paragraph gets to the heart of it:

No specific group claimed responsibility for the attack, which was well orchestrated and involved heavy weapons. It is thought to be the work of the same Salafi, ultra-religious groups who have perpetrated similar assaults in Benghazi. They are religious, authoritarian groups who justify their actions through very selective, corrupt, and ultimately self-serving interpretations of Islam. Under Qaddafi, they kept quiet. In the early days of the revolution some of them claimed that fighting Qaddafi was un-Islamic and conveniently issued a fatwa demanding full obedience to the ruler. This is Libya’s extreme right. And, while much is still uncertain, Tuesday’s attack appears to have been their attempt to escalate a strategy they have employed ever since the Libyan revolution overthrew Colonel Qaddafi’s dictatorship. They see in these days, in which the new Libya and its young institutions are still fragile, an opportunity to grab power. They want to exploit the impatient resentments of young people in particular in order to disrupt progress and the development of democratic institutions
.

After a day of leaving Mitt Rimney twisting in the wind over his hamfisted, callus and bellicose statements on the deaths of the US ambassador to Libya, it seems as though the GOP is taking reluctant, belated steps in bucking up their nominee.

As unrest in Tripoli and Cairo, Egypt, continues today -- and reporters sifted through evidence the attack was planned and had little to do with an offensive, provocative anti-Islam film -- Sen. John McCain blames the attacks on Obama and the perception of American military weakness.  Ditto Donald Rumsfeld, although why anyone would listen to Rummy on matters of foreigh policy is a mystery to me.

Yet the assault on Romney's assault on the administration continues to be picked apart for fallacies, errors in timing and outright lies.  And the defense of Romney, in addition to being a day late, looks to be more than a dollar short, hewing to Republican talking points issued in the wake of yesterday's debacle.

Gail Collins, the floor is yours.

No.  Just, no.  

That was my initial reaction to Mitt Romney's wooden, tin-eared, desperate statement to the slayings of Chris Stevens, US ambassador to Libya.  It was unbelieveable, and typical of a candidate that carries the whiff of desperation with each passing day. 

It's unfortunate that Romney's blunder has overshadowed the death of a man who by all accounts was a skilled diplomat, one that even Condoleezza "Bin Laden Determined To Attack the U.S." Rice praised as a man worthy of the most difficult diplomatic assignments in the Mideast.  Given his resume and the accolades, I can imagine he was out on the street trying to quell the violence that ultimately took his life, and those of four others at the embassy that night. 

But the knee-jerk reaction by Romney probably did the electorate a favor, an actual, real, 3 a.m. phone call that showed the nation waht he's made of and how he would react in a crisis. 

Which is, in a word, badly. 

Ham-fisted Mitt

Hard to beat a lede like this: 

I’ve been following politics for many years; I’ve written a book on presidential campaigns and I’ve delved quite a bit into the minutiae of the 2012 campaign. And I’m increasingly convinced that Mitt Romney is the worst national politician I’ve ever seen.

The New York Daily News' Michael Cohen articulates here something I've long thought: that Romney is not a natural pol, is not likeable, and doesn't have the skills -- or diversity of experience, or experience with diversity -- it takes to be an effective presidential candidate, let alone president.  To my view, the biggest reason he's contending for the title boils down to two numbers: 14.7 and 8.3. 

The former refers to the amount of money he spent in Florida to put away Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary, eliminating his last effective challenger. The latter, of course, is the current unemployment rate, the political millstone around President Obama's neck. 

During the primary season, I kept wondering if it was just me, or f the GOP presidential nomination field was the weakest I'd seen since I started paying attention to this stuff. And it seemed that Romney thought the same, governing himself as if he could just walk on stage and seize the nomination in a hostile takeover, then bashing Obama with a hard eight until he succumbed.   

And given the fact that omney was the best choice for the party, he struggled mightily to put away the last two men standing, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich - a pair of has-beens whom voters had run off the national stage years ago. Romney brought them to heel only after dropping a few well-placed money bombs and reminding people he looked more like a president than that black guy does. 

Cohen puts his finger on the heart of the problem - that the fault lies not in the political stars, but in the awkward, gaffe-prone, distant, sometimes arrogant Romney himself, particularly after he criticized the Republican-dominated congress for sequester-deal defense cuts his own running mate, Paul Ryan, supported: 

So what we have is a presidential candidate attacking their own party and their own running mate on an issue that is as much as a political liability as it is a political benefit. That’s our Mitt!

Read Cohen's entire story here. 

Speaking of Joes...

This is just ... wrong.