Did Sandy Tip Election to Obama?

Did Hurricane Sandy, the October surprise, tip the election to President Obama? Perhaps. The disaster did give the president the opportunity to display leadership, a trait that Mitt Romney claimed the president lacked. If Sandy gets the blame for Romney's loss, it is in part due to it exposing a dubious claim at the heart of the Romney campaign. Call it nature's way of fact-checking a politician.

In any case, Hurricane Sandy was just the last of a long string of reasons, most of them self-inflicted wounds, that contributed to Romney's loss. After the jump, the rundown.

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A longer list of reasons why Romney lost:

• Bain Capital
  
• outsourcing
  
• his Swiss bank account
  
• his Cayman Islands business dealings
  
• his unreleased tax returns
  
• running away from Romneycare
  
• the "Etch-a-Sketch" candidate
  
• "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt"
  
• his pick of Paul Ryan
  
• his plan to replace Medicare with VoucherCare
  
• his plan to slash Medicaid
  
• his call for "self-deportation"
  
• his call to send FEMA to the states
  
• and everything in that leaked "47%" video
  

Notice that there's nothing in this list that mentions President Obama. Mitt Romney lost this election more than Barack Obama won it. Romney won't get any love from the GOP because of it. But the GOP needs to take a careful look at that list. Many of the items on it, including the most damning to the Romney candidacy, are not peculiar to Romney himself, but are shared by his party. The GOP is unlikely to change its fortunes by changing its candidate unless it also changes its philosophy.