David Sirota writes on a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:

The Village freakout continues, this time in the form of Peter Wehner’s op-ed in the Washington Post today. With most Republican candidates explicitly running on a platform promising a revival of Reagan conservatism and berating the supposed “socialism” of Democrats, this former Bush hack writes that “it is a mistake to assume that significant GOP losses, should they occur, are a referendum on conservatism.”

It’s hard to overstate how absurd this is. Let me repeat: In the stretch run of this campaign, the Republican Party has decided to make this an ideological contest between Reagan conservatism and supposed wild-eyed liberalism/socialism – and now, sensing a potentially huge loss, conservatives are now arguing that despite their decision to make this an ideological contest, “an Obama victory would be a partisan, rather than an ideological, win.”

Obviously, the Right understands what’s really going on in America – and is working to reinterpret that reality.

Having doubled-down on Reaganism, they know that a loss under these circumstances would be not just a momentary electoral set back, but a huge repudiation of conservative ideology, and a huge mandate for progressivism. And so conservatives are already trying to revise history to pretend these last few months of the campaign never happened.

All the stories we’ve seen about voter fraud, ACORN, too much influence by Obama’s small dollar contributors, and hoaxes like Ashley Todd serve one purpose: to undermine the validity of Obama’s election and define down the importance of the mandate it will reflect for progressivism.

FiveThirtyEight.com is projecting an Obama win with upwards of 370 electoral votes and over 52% of the popular vote. We will undoubtedly see Obama win more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, with nationwide turnout at record levels. Recall that in 2004, Bush won reelection with 50.7% of the population vote and smallest margin of a winning candidate in history, yet the results were universally declared by Republicans and media figures alike to be a mandate for rule. Bush’s small and questionable margin were, in fact, no real mandate handed over by the voters, but let’s concede that the outcome of the election is a reflection of the extent that the public is giving a mandate to a candidate, that candidate’s party, and the agenda that the candidate ran on. Naturally we can expect voters to deliver a massive mandate for change to Barack Obama next week.

The GOP is now trying to define away the coming election, in advance, by fiat.  We’ll see them continue to step up the pre-buttal of the results and their meaning between now and the 4th. And come November 5th, the GOP will be in full-court press to make the media – and subsequently the public – think that these results don’t mean what we think they mean. It’s hard to envision a more bogus political move than this. As Sirota writes, the GOP is revising history and pretending that the McCain campaign, and really the failed Bush presidency, did not happen.

The simple fact is that for eight years George W. Bush and the Republican Party were given every single thing they asked for in executive and legislative policy (save for privatizing Social Security). Every single thing Bush and the Republicans have done has been a failure. These failures are a reflection of the fundamental failures of conservative’s governing philosophies. They had carte blanche, they used it, and the country is inarguably worse off as a result. Voters see this and are poised to do the expected thing: vote these people out of power and give Democratic policies and politicians an opportunity to turn the country around. Any argument being put forth that suggests otherwise is willfully denying reality and forgetting eight years that most Americans would likely to be glad to forget.

In this final move of the Bush-Cheney Republican edifice, a final defining characteristic manifests itself: the pathological unwillingness for Republicans to take responsibility for their actions. Even when America is poised to hold them accountable for their failures, they seek to deny culpability and ignore the consequences they are suffering as a result of their actions in power. Of course, this is the Republican Party that we know all too well. It’s not a surprise, but this should be yet another nail in the coffin of the GOP as they head towards status as a regional political force with limited impact outside of the South.