How President Obama Won a Second Term

Political strategist James Carville breaks down where the Republicans went wrong – and what it means for the future

by: Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Two weeks after Barack Obama won a second term, political analysts are just beginning to assess the surprising scope of his victory. By routing Mitt Romney by 332 to 206 in the Electoral College, Obama joins FDR, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan as the only presidents of the past century to twice win more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

To unpack the significance of Obama's big win, Rolling Stone turned to one of the shrewdest observers of American politics: James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton's election in 1992. Over the course of an hourlong interview, Carville traced the roots of Romney's collapse to the reactionary posturing required by the GOP primaries, and underscored the strategic blunders that sealed Romney's fate – including the Clint Eastwood debacle. "You can't control what happens in a debate," Carville says. "But you do get to control your convention – and they didn't control that."

Carville marvels that Romney, a businessman whose core sales pitch was competent management, entrusted his campaign to second-rate crony consultants who were so divorced from reality that they had him convinced to the bitter end that victory was all but assured. And looking to the future, Carville predicts that America could face a surprising role reversal in 2016: Democratic voters are likely to behave like the GOP base and fall into line behind a pre-anointed candidate, while Republicans will be forced to embrace a centrist agent of change – a Republican version of Carville's former boss.

In the primaries, Republican voters did their best to avoid picking Romney. Why were they so reluctant to gravitate toward him?

They didn't gravitate to him in 2008, so why would they now?

(More here.)