Rove why obama will lose

Andy Kroll. Isabela Dias. Abigail Weinberg and Dan Friedman. Nathalie Baptiste. Fairtrade America. Fernanda Echavarri. Ali Breland. Mayukh Sen. Matt Simon. Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox. The reason is that he faces four serious threats. The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day. Key voter groups have soured on him. He's defending unpopular policies. And he's made bad strategic decisions.

Let's start with the economy. But Karl Rove's insistence that Barack Obama had not carried Ohio -- despite the call by his own network, Fox News, that the president had done just that -- represented something larger.

It captured, for some long and awkward moments, the refusal of some in the media-and-politics game to accept reality. We're not talking here about a bad judgment call by a pundit. Everyone in the commentary business, including yours truly, has made those. If failed predictions were a felony, the jails would be filled with media folks.

Howard Kurtz. Watch: Karl Rove rejects reality on Fox News. Rove, to be sure, is a smart guy. He wasn't called George W. Bush elected twice, but also as co-founder of a powerful super PAC called American Crossroads and its sister nonprofit Crossroads GPS, which together poured hundreds of millions into supporting Romney and other Republicans. Rove co-founded the groups with Gillespie, who advised Romney and last week launched his own U.

Senate bid in Virginia. But it's also possible that the documentary shows the events that night out of order and that the time stamp is misleading. For one thing, the reference to Rove from Romney's campaign aides sounds more like something they would say at the end of the night, not the beginning. Another reason is that Ann Romney appears to be in that shot wearing the dress she wears for Romney's concession speech, whereas during the drafting of the speech that evening, she is wearing a different outfit.

Did Ann Romney change into her red dress, then put on black pants, then put the red dress back on? It's possible but seems unlikely. The next time stamp in the documentary comes at 10 p. An aide on the phone with Rhoades gets instructions not to call Obama yet to concede. One of Romney's sons mentions that Karl Rove doesn't believe it's over yet.

If we lost Ohio," Ann Romney interjects.