These are their stories.
She arrived early to take apart the campaign office piece by piece, just as she felt so many other things about her life were being dismantled. Beth Cox wore a Mitt Romney T-shirt, a cross around her neck and fresh eyeliner, even though she had been crying on and off and knew her makeup was likely to run. A day after the election, she tuned the radio to Glenn Beck and began pulling posters and American flags off the wall.I'm sure lots of Conservatives won't bother reading this fairly riveting story, and that's really a shame. It's a well written and symapthetic piece about a Romney supporter who'd (perhaps naively) anticipated a win on election night, only to see the man she'd devoted months supporting get ethered.
Her calendar read “Victory Day!!” and she had planned to celebrate in the office by hosting a dance party and selling Romney souvenirs. But instead she was packing those souvenirs into boxes, which would be donated to a charity that sent clothes to South America. Instead a moving company was en route to close down the office in the next 48 hours, and her friends were calling every few minutes to see how she was doing.
Here in the heart of Red America, Cox and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign.
But now Cox was wondering: Was it?
She had devoted her life to causes she believed were at the heart of her faith and at the core of her Republican Party. She counseled young married families at church, spoke about right to life in area schools and became a stay-at-home mom with two daughters.
Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline.”
“What country would want more years of this?” asked the newly elected alderman.
Cox shrugged back at them. “I don’t know anymore,” she said. “What the heck happened to the country? Who are we becoming?”
Everything in her version of America had confirmed her predictions: the confident anchors on Fox News; the Republican pollsters so sure of their data; the two-hour line outside her voting precinct, where Romney supporters hugged and honked for her handmade signs during a celebration that lasted until the results started coming in after sundown. Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed.
“Virginia went blue? Really?” she said. “Southern-values Virginia?”
“And Colorado? Who the heck is living in Colorado? Do they want drugs, dependency, indulgence? Don’t they remember what this country is about?”
It was a country that she had thought she knew. As a kid, she had seen it from the back of a station wagon, traveling to 40 states in a blur of peanut butter crackers and Holiday Inns with a mother who taught U.S. history.
In a classic example of "burying the lede", however, the Post story sorta glosses over an aspect of last week's election I'd love to see explored more: how Conservative media completely missed the boat by claiming the polls were rigged and that Romney's shot at winning was much better than it actually was. As much as Conservative media loves complaining about mainstream media bias (ad nauseum might I add), they did a grave disservice to their viewers/listeners/readers in the runup to the election. Seriously.
Focusing so pointlessly on a story like the Benghazi raid, making Solyndra a scandal of epic proportions, and completely ignoring Romney's gaffe's (ie: 47%) Conservative media generally painted a rosier picture of Romney's chances than people like Mrs. Cox really deserved. Maybe it was denial, maybe it was homerism, maybe it was simple entertainment disguised as news, but what it wasn't was good journalism. Complain all you want about outlets like The Post and CNN, but they at least painted a more complete picture of the race as a whole, rather than focusing on relatively minor issues (ie: Obama's "revenge" comment) and total non-issues (Trump's Obama challenge, Derek Bell, "The Obama Lost Tapes").
Call me silly, but if I'm about to get my ass kicked, I'd prolly rather know in advance than gettin' stole by some fool out of left field.
We sorta feel you pain, Mrs. Cox. Sorta.
Now, that “What the heck happened to the country? Who are we becoming?” comment on the other hand...
Question: Did the Conservative media do their readers/listeners/viewers a disservice?!?
