Mother Jones: How the Tea Party Killed Mitt Romney
Of all Romney’s primary-season decisions, the most damaging was his choice to repel the challenges from Perry and Gingrich by attacking them from the right—and using immigration as his cudgel. That process led Romney to embrace a succession of edgy, conservative positions anathema to many Hispanics, including denouncing Texas for providing in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants; praising Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law; and, above all, promising to make life so difficult for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants that they would “self-deport.”
Romney’s inability to dent Obama’s support among Hispanics (or other minorities) means the GOP nominee probably can’t win without attracting at least 61 percent of white voters. Yet a second early decision has greatly compounded that challenge. Through the primaries, Romney embraced an unreservedly conservative social agenda (such as defunding Planned Parenthood and allowing employers to deny contraception coverage in health insurance plans), especially after Santorum emerged as his principal rival. That positioning helps explain why polls consistently show Obama drawing a majority of college-educated white women—not only the most socially liberal sector of the white electorate but also the fastest-growing. If Obama can hold a majority of those women and match his 80 percent with all minorities in 2008, Romney would have to carry two-thirds of all other whites to win—as much as Ronald Reagan won among those remaining voters in his 1984 landslide.
Sure. This is just another way of saying that the Tea Party has been Romney's downfall. They forced Romney too far to the right and didn't give him the room (or the trust) to move back toward the center during the general election.
In other words, the fundamentals predicted a fairly close election, which means that the candidate and the campaign really mattered this year. All that horserace stuff played a real role. But the tea party made it impossible to play that role smartly. They've moved so far outside the mainstream that they make demands on politicians that doom them in a general election.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/how-tea-party-killed-mitt-romney
Not exactly a news-flash but a well written article on the impact of the tea party on romney's candidacy.
= new reply since forum marked as read
analysis! 
As the radio program “This American Life” reminded its audience on Tuesday, there is an argument to be made that the term self-deportation was invented in 1994 by two Mexican-American satirists, Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul. That year, “sickened” by a ballot initiative known as Proposition 187, which aimed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state-run hospitals and schools in California, the comedians began posing as conservative activists who backed the measure.
The two men started a satirical media campaign to support the initiative, faxing radio and television stations a fake news release that touted the benefits of “self-deportation centers” and invited reporters seeking more information to call a Latino Republican and “militant self-deportationist” named Daniel D. Portado. Eventually the men founded “Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover,” or Halto, and produced a mock radio ad, in which Portado claimed to support “California Gov. Pete Wilson’s self-deportation message.”
Apparently unaware that Portado was a fictional character, in November 1994 the Spanish-language channel Telemundo invited him to appear on television defending the proposed ballot initiative just days before voters went to the polls. The comedians accepted the invitation, and Mr. Alcaraz showed up, pretending to be Portado, with Mr. Zul at his side, playing the part of the conservative activist’s bodyguard. In an e-mail to The Lede on Tuesday, Mr. Alcaraz recalled, “I was in character at the Telemundo show, and neither the participants nor the producers were aware of our true identity.” Two years after the event, Mr. Zul told The Chicago Reader, “It was the longest half-hour of my life.”
Mr. Alcaraz, who is now an award-winning editorial cartoonist and the editor of the Chicano humor site Pocho.com, is convinced that California’s governor at the time only started using the phrase self-deportation after it was injected into the body politic by the satirical news releases.
Leave it to the Repugs to not understand "irony".
makes it so.
Alcaraz & Zul pulled one off that belongs in the history of these times.
is Ann really that stupid and whorish?
Or did someone tell her that her fan club recommends that she boost, excuse me 
, Romney's sex appeal, because her female Tea Party base has a chronic "wandering eye"?
- It's gonna get real ugly after November 6th. Excuse me, uglier......The mad haters ..er, hatters want the whole gop down the rabbit hole.
Horsey!
that disgusting party are frightened of them, so much so that they won't push back.
Which, hey, is all good, as far as I'm concerned. 
Okay, I like that term in this case as there are election watchers that really do act like they are members of a cult full of non truths.
They are the ones who go into history and make predictions based on prior elections and come up with all of these weird and inaccurate models and pat each other on the back for their wisdom while ignoring the fact that the game is different. It's mostly composed of white males who talk to other white males and minorities are considered to be an outlier in their minds and women are lumped in with those minorities.
Even by their own standards their assumptions don't fit. I did an animated gif years ago based on modern election trends from 1960 to 2004. It's a little crude and could use a do over but it gives you an idea of how much this country has refused to go along with their whole "it's always been a close race decided by a few swing states" lie.
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