Quote if the Day: Maureen Dowd on Mitt Romney's White America

The postmortems on last Tuesday's election results continue and range from the rants of the Christofascists who act as if the world is coming to an end to the joy and glee of the coalition that defeated the Romney/Ryan ticket as well as various GOP Senate  candidates.  In between are the shocked reactions among the out of touch Republicans who just cannot grasp that we are not living in the 1950's any longer.  Maureen Dowd looks at this later crowd in a New York Times column and, as is always the case, provides wonderful snarkiness while providing accurate commentary.  Here are some highlights:

 IT makes sense that Mitt Romney and his advisers are still gobsmacked by the fact that they’re not commandeering the West Wing. .   .   .   .  Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.  Mitt Romney is the president of white male America. 

In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard core, so redolent of country clubs and Cadillacs, it made little effort not to alienate women. The election had the largest gender gap in the history of the Gallup poll, with Obama winning the vote of single women by 36 percentage points.  

Some Republicans conceded they were “a ‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ world” .  .  .  . 

But the truth is, Romney was an unpalatable candidate. And shocking as it may seem, his strategists weren’t blowing smoke when they said they were going to win; they were just clueless.

Until now, Republicans and Fox News have excelled at conjuring alternate realities. But this time, they made the mistake of believing their fake world actually existed.

Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.

Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told wives how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time to cook dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands not to vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party was helping to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception. 

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change. He has not led the Obama army to leverage power, so now the army is leading Obama. 

The voters anointed a lesbian senator, and three new gay congressmen will make a total of five in January. Plus, three states voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, told The Washington Post’s Ned Martel that gays, whose donations helped offset the Republican “super PACs,” wanted to see an openly gay cabinet secretary and an openly gay ambassador to a G-20 nation.  Bill O’Reilly said Obama’s voters wanted “stuff.” He was right. They want Barry to stop bogarting the change.