Republicans begin to grapple with losing

This weekend marks a turning point in this Presidential election. The media narrative that the race is tied is finally giving way to the fact that President Obama is winning.

You want to know how clear that is? Even the Republicans are admitting it.

“Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult.

The thing is - that's actually their positive spin. Take a look at this electoral map and tell me which blue state Romney is going to turn red. Even with five states still in the toss-up category, once you add Ohio to the rest of the states that are pretty solid for President Obama, he's at 275.

So the reality is - its pretty much time to cue the fat lady to start singing.

Most rational people know this. And so we're beginning to see some Republicans grapple with that. I think its extremely important what narrative develops out of this loss because it is likely to dictate the future of the Republican Party. We all know that they had a choice after 2008 and instead of re-thinking their failed policies they doubled down on teh crazy. So where will they go this time?

As I looked around some conservative sites today, you can see them beginning to struggle with that narrative. But so far, its not encouraging.

Erick Erickson at Red State is still in denial, as are the Breitbarts.

As is is tendency, Bill Kristol blames Romney.

Not surprisingly, Andrew McCarthy at NRO thinks the candidates aren't conservative enough.

But I found John Hinderaker's analysis at Powerline to be the most telling in terms of the current political divide.

On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy...

I am afraid the problem in this year’s race is economic self-interest: we are perilously close to the point where 50% of our population cares more about the money it gets (or expects to get) from government than about the well-being of the nation as a whole.

Mr. Hinderaker is so deeply embedded in his philosophy of greed and selfishness that he is projecting it onto those of us who support things like a social safety net and pubic employee unions. He literally can't comprehend the idea of collective responsibility via citizenship that was the hallmark of President Obama's speech at the convention last week. In the grips of total Randianism, all Hinderaker sees is self-interest.

That, my friends, is why President Obama's speech was so important. It tackled, in a very fundamental way, exactly what this divide is all about.

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.