The big spin today is on how "shell-shocked" the Romney campaign was when the numbers started to turn on them, how incredibly amazed they were when voters started "crawling out of the woodwork" in places they never expected, and how it all just took them by utter surprise.

CBS News quoted one campaign spokesman as saying "There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't...It was like a sucker punch."

Sucker punches happen when people are stupid, when they listen to each other instead of the facts or their instincts. Still, I have to say honestly that I'm not buying into the theme as an overarching excuse for why the Romney campaign failed on such a huge scale. I'm not willing to buy excuses like this, via Huffington Post:

The GOP was blindsided Tuesday, but also revealed. The Democrats' ground organization was beyond anything they'd imagined, pulling in new voters with stunning effectiveness. It exposed a major weakness in the Republican approach to winning elections, practically and intellectually.

"I don't think anyone on our side understood or comprehended how good their turnout was going to be," said Henry Barbour, a Republican committee man from Mississippi. "The Democrats do voter registration like a factory, like a business, and Republicans tend to leave it to the blue hairs."

This, from a representative of the party that hired Nathan Sproul to register only Republicans in swing states.

The truth is more stark and revealing than anyone seems willing to admit.

Fact: This race should never have even been close. If Barack Obama were a white dude with a normal name who had just served a first term that was as effective as his first one was, it would have been a landslide with absolutely no prospect for any Republican candidate. No one seems to want to talk about racism and the role it played in this election even being "faux close", and I'm not sure why.

The only weapon in the Republicans' arsenal was race, and they played it on a near-daily basis for four years. The backup weapon was gender, and they played that one for the past two years in order to marshall the evangelical conservatives behind an otherwise unelectable candidate.

Think about it. They nominated the guy who actually represented the larger group that drove this economy into the gutter. Imagine Dupont running against FDR in 1936. How do you suppose that would have worked out? Would there have been any doubt about who would have been re-elected?

Would it have felt like a "sucker punch" when FDR won that second term? Not even close.

So now we come to 2012, and a bid by Barack Obama for re-election after four years of daily demonization and "othering" by conservatives in the mainstream and on the fringes. In the process of marginalizing him, conservatives have also taken aim at women, particularly younger single women, and Hispanics. For four years they have honked their horns about jobs and the economy while working to stall all growth whatsoever until they could get someone more favorable to the billionaire's tax goals, at the expense of working people everywhere.

They demonized unions and tried to take voting rights away from anyone they could. This is what they did for four years, and they thought people would simply sit idly by and watch them do it?

I don't think they're stupid. I think they're spinning, because they have a real problem. They cannot reconcile the purity trolls in their party with the pragmatic thinkers, for starters. They've let the John Birchers take over the party's core, which is a near-promise of irrelevance in the short-term.

They were 'surprised' because they relied on racial division to carry them over the finish line. This is why the despicable John Sununu and Donald Trump were permitted to carry the race card and play it at will. They thought they had the numbers because they believe there are enough racist haters in the world to actually win.

Shocking, isn't it?

And here you have Karl Rove spinning madly (see video above) because he's got to have something to tell his billionaires, and they're a little peeved about spending all that money only to lose ground rather than gain any.

In Rove's world, Barack Obama lost voters because people "couldn't stand the guy and couldn't stand voting for him" so he demonized the other guy. There's that personal thing again. Never mind that both parties lost voters and Romney lost more than Obama overall. What could that reason be for people not being able to "stand the guy" personally? Could it be.....scary race-baiting?

Seriously, Republicans. You're not stupid. Not all of you are racist. But racists are also Republicans. Time to step up and start dealing with it.