November 13, 2012 01:17 AM UTC

Deep Thoughts With Grover Norquist

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Hill:

Influential antitax lobbyist Grover Norquist said Monday that President Obama won reelection by painting GOP nominee Mitt Romney as a “poopy-head” and that Democrats should not interpret his victory as a mandate for higher taxes.

“We just had an election: The House of Representatives was elected, committed to keeping taxes low. The president was elected on the basis that he was not Romney and that Romney was a poopy-head and you should vote against Romney,” Norquist said on CBS’s “This Morning.”

…Norquist, like many Republicans, rejected the idea that the results of the election – which left President Obama in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate – equaled a mandate for the Democratic agenda.

Huffington Post with the followup question:

Host Norah O’Donnell pushed back. “Well, I’m not sure that’s what the president called Mitt Romney, Grover,” she said. “That’s not the debate that was had … he said very clearly throughout the debate that the wealthiest Americans should pay more and he won eight of the nine battleground states and Republicans failed to reclaim the White House or the Senate.”

“What about the exit polls that show a broad support for raising taxes on the wealthiest americans. Are you wrong?” she asked.

Norquist pointed to negative advertising against former GOP nominee Mitt Romney…

And here we see the latest conservative rationalization for last week’s defeat–it wasn’t the conservative agenda Mitt Romney ran on that was rejected, but the person of Mitt Romney, as presented so negatively by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

But this ignores the public polling that overwhelmingly showed support during the 2011 debt ceiling debacle for ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, and exit polls from this election that found six in 10 voters think taxes need to go up–on the rich, if not everyone. This seems to reflect understanding among voters that tax rates in America are at their lowest level in generations, and those historically low tax rates have a direct relationship to the nation’s chronic budget deficits and ballooning debt. If that’s right, voters did make a choice Tuesday.

And folks, it wasn’t which one is a “poopy head.” Why is Grover Norquist so feared again?