American Crossroads spent big, lost big, and is desperate to deflect the blame

Just a couple of the people American Crossroads is blaming for its poor return on investment. Continuing the schadenfreudeliciousness of the week, Karl Rove's American Crossroads is trying to insist that donors aren't super pissed about Rove's failure in this election. (The donors are, in fact, super pissed.) According to Jonathan Collegio, an American Crossroads spokesman:

"On the Senate side, we did'and I'll be the first person to admit'have some pretty big problems on the candidate-recruitment side," he said. "I would argue that over the last two election cycles, Republicans have probably lost at least six Senate seats'not because of any bad messaging coming from our party, but because we had some candidates that were outraised and that frankly were not ready for the platform that's a Republican Senate candidate, where there's an enormous amount of scrutiny."

Oh, the candidate recruitment. Otherwise known as "terrible candidates like Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Christine O'Donnell, and Sharron Angle keep winning Republican primaries." Those are the candidates your party's voters are choosing, dude. It's true that American Crossroads is not directly casting those votes, but that's the Republican Party in which it's a driving force.

"So instead of talking about our message of cutting the debt and taxes, we ended up on a lot of tangential issues that should never have been debated, because we had some very, very weak candidates."

Tangential issues like absolute opposition to abortion under any circumstances, which is in the 2012 Republican platform? Or attempts to redefine rape to only count if it's "forcible," which House Republicans, including your party's vice-presidential nominee, keep trying to vote into law? But of course the issue isn't that Akin and Mourdock hold the positions they do, it's that they admitted it. Less weak candidates, in the American Crossroads worldview, would have the same position on rape and abortion as Akin and Mourdock, they just wouldn't say say so where voters might notice.

So Karl Rove's failures are in part the fault of Republican primary voters who picked candidates who espoused Republican policies even on issues that would offend general election voters. Also, too, it's Mitt Romney's fault for running such a lousy campaign, according to Collegio:

"The critical thing that gets lost with all of this analysis, is the president did a very, very good job raising a lot of money; he outspent Mitt Romney on television by $154 million over the campaign," he said. "And even that is understated by the fact that Mitt Romney was buying all of his ad time late, which meant that he was paying higher prices. The Crossroads groups and a lot of the outside groups that were spending money were really balancing out a really good and well-executed campaign by the president, but one where the Democrats had a really big financial advantage. Not only at the presidential level, but at the Senate level."

Looks like it's the Romney campaign's turn to point the finger back at American Crossroads, while the billionaire donors continue to be furious and disgusted with both Romney and Rove.