Devos is a great guy and would've done us a lot of good as governor, but he never answered the outsourcing to china attack, he never could get away from the bad feelings a lot of folks have about Amway, and he never quite connected to folks.  

When I saw an article in the Oakland Press that they were considering buying a house in the county because he was campaigning so much down there, I knew the gig was up.

Not that I am bashing on our candidate, but once they Democrat checklist to attack him was printed up, they very easily were able to x all the boxes in people's perceptions.

Rich, out of touch, dirty businessman, doesn't care about the American worker, extremist, and so on.

And there were so many arrows being flung that they couldn't all be knocked down.  And to be perfectly frank, there wasn't an attempt to knock most of them down.

And once that took hold, Granholm was inevitably going to win.

And, although the waters from the "tidal wave" were lapping a wee bit closer to my race, and we ended it packing sandbags and standing on chairs and so on, we outperformed the top of the ticket by 10 points. And you look at most of the races that the GOP won, or even lost (that we shouldn't have) and you'll see that they outperformed the governor's race.

In 04 we either ran even with, or slightly outperformed, W.

This article in the Detroit News is part of a recurring phenomena, in which the party that does poorly in an election is said to be "cracking up" or "going extinct."

Now, when it's the GOP, they get positively giddy, since they can pile on and not worry about the biases that they have.

 Then they find some disgruntled folks to get a couple of juicy quotes from to stoke the fire, and bring up a series of random episodes to point out how our party is out of touch and so on.

We are losing because the Democrats are out hustling us.  That's it.  This isn't about RINOs and the Youth vote and abandoning the pro life cause and not being hip, or a lack of twittering and so on.

They took advantage of crappy economic conditions, anxiety over the war, and general malaise with government... and out hustled us.

Novices talk strategy, experts talk logistics.