Are you one of those people...

...who thinks that Mitt Romney, down deep, is really a classy guy who didn't believe half of the nonsense he spewed in the 2012 presidential campaign? Then get a load of what the former governor of Massachusetts said yesterday on a conference call with supporters, according to an article in the New York Times (my emphasis):

...Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking about big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”

Does that sound a little bitter? There's more:

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

This last line doesn't explain how Romney received two million fewer votes than John McCain did in 2008.

But wait; there's also this from his running mate, Paul Ryan (again, my emphasis):

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin on Monday blamed Democratic turnout in “urban areas” for the loss by the Republican presidential ticket last week, saying he was surprised that he and Mitt Romney did not do better in the nation’s big cities.

“The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview with WISC-TV. “When we watched Virginia and Ohio coming in, and those ones coming in as tight as they were, and looking like we were going to lose them, that’s when it became clear we weren’t going to win.”

That highlighted sentence is meant for scared old white people like my mother, who is addicted to Fox News. For those of you who can't hear the dog whistle, Ryan is saying, "Obama stole this election by having a bunch of black people stuff the ballot boxes in the inner cities."

Ryan goes on to say:

...he did not think that the nation’s voters had rejected his long-standing ideas for how to restructure the nation’s budget and cut spending.

“I don’t think we lost it on those budget issues, especially on Medicare — we clearly didn’t lose it on those issues,” he said.

And this is why I think the GOP will be in the wilderness for quite some time. I expect them to nominate a far-right candidate like Ryan in 2016 and get just crushed. Only then will the Republicans take a good, honest look at their party and make the necessary changes to become credible again.