What happened, anyway?

Shortly after 11 p.m. (Eastern) on Election Night—with the polls still open only in Alaska—Mitt Romney aides were pleading with Fox News not to call Ohio for Barack Obama. That delicious detail, buried in a New York magazine article by Gabriel Sherman about Karl Rove’s on-air meltdown, tells you all you need to know about how spin is embedded in the psyches of major political operatives.

Not a single relevant vote was still up for grabs, but Romney insiders believed in their mind-clouding powers to bend reality to fit their preconceptions. The entire episode might be titled: “King Canute Calls Fox News.” That night, of course, Republicans accepted the indisputable nature of Obama’s victory and recognized that the only way they would ever experience a Romney administration would be on a conservative remake of West Wing. That didn’t stop the spin, however, although its purpose dramatically changed. As we wait for detailed post-election analysis by political scientists and reflective reporters, a tentative case can be made that one set of Super PAC ads (maybe the only ones in the entire 2012 cycle) did do the job. The early anti-Bain TV commercials by the pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA Action did help create a persuasive anti-Romney narrative.