Romney's Fantasy-Based Campaign

The Romney campaign falsely believed that The Drudge Report and the late Andrew Breitbart's media empire was going to replacement mainstream media. Anyone who saw Karl Rove's meltdown on Fox News knows that is not going to happen. You can only bullshit people for so long before reality comes crashing down. Lenny Alcivar, spokesman for the Romney campaign thought otherwise.

When this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans receive their news. Never before –in a way that has taken Democrats off stride –have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a new political reality. We no longer allow the mainstream media to define the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the conservative movement. If I talk to Breitbart about an issue, thousands more will hear our message than if we give a quote to one of the hill rags.

Alcivar's interview with Breitbart News reminds me of an infamous encounter journalist Ron Suskind had with a President Bush staffer. That staffer is believed to be Rove.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he define d as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment priniples and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Just like the Bush administration, the Romney campaign wanted to create their own reality. That is why they believed in skewed polls and bogus political consultants. The result was Obama winning a second term. Living a in fantasyland is what people do when they don't have empirical evidence on their side.