Corporate personhood fail and the Occupy effect

What a waste.

What an unmitigated, unprecedented waste!

After the Citizens United ruling of 2010 declared corporations are people, President Obama's reelection prospects were written off by many as a casualty. One could have expected the Republicans to dominate American politics until unicorns could fly.

Think how much money Republicans spent in this cycle to install Mitt Romney as dictator for life.

But there's been an equally strong force to mitigate this trend just over the past year. It's called Occupy. Occupy does not endorse candidates, but make no mistake: The Occupy coalition affected this election deeply.

By the summer of 2011, the press corpse wanted to talk about nothing but austerity - which is shorthand for making the 99% pay for the mistakes of the 1%. But after Occupy appeared, nobody wanted to hear that shit anymore.

Romney personified the failures of the 1%. Did Americans still want to elect a skipper of corporate excess after Occupy exposed the yawning wealth gap?

Whether Occupy wants to take credit or not, the Occupy effect was good for shaving perhaps a couple of percentage points off of Romney's national vote total. It may have been just enough to cost him the election. If anybody doubts this, I've already noticed that Republican vote totals have faltered in places with the strongest Occupy organization. (Occupy activities generally don't gravitate towards the cornfields and deserts.)

As a result, the seemingly bottomless Republican money machine saw its own efforts go to waste. They must have spent billions - only to come up short.

The most costly campaign in history yielded nothing. Poor things, those Republicans.