Thoughts on Rove's performance
I think it's wrong to characterize Rove's fit on Fox last night as a meltdown. I think it was calculated.
KKKarl Rove is a smart guy - evil as hell, but smart. He knows how projections work and he knew it was over. But that doesn't mean his job was done. He needs to prep the credulous for the next round of lies, and to do that he needs to cast every kind of doubt imaginable on the outcome. His base needs to feel betrayed, not defeated.
So his freakout was a great performance. He lets that slip a little when he said something to the effect that calling Ohio when they did looked strange - how can you call a state when the vote difference is under 1000 and almost a quarter of the ballots are not yet counted? He knows the answer, but his audience doesn't. (Heck, a lot of people much smarter than his audience don't understand how Nate Silver is right time and time again... to quote the infamous talking Barbie, "Math is hard!"
What the typical Fox viewer, dwelling in that shadow world between fantasy and reality, will take away is that even at Fox those untrustworthy brainiacs who run the numbers were all to eager to throw it to Obama, and that there was a real controversy over the call. "OK, so it held up, but who knew then Obama would really win? Whose side are those shadowy forecasters on anyway? Look how worked up Rove is - there's probably something fishy happening." The whole performance meant more time asking whether they lost and less on why. And this spread through the media - because Rove was so over-the-top the "Rove freaks out" story stole attention from the outcome itself.
The most important thing for them is to have the base retain belief in their extreme views, and blame anything else but their rejection by the American electorate for their defeat. It's all about keeping the herd to the right, and Rove's barking may have been just what they needed to accomplish that.
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