Top GOP official said Romney would win Michigan because Detroiters were too lazy and drunk to vote

I guess it's not so surprising that a guy who was once the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and is now the chairman of the Republican National Committee's finance committee would tell a tea party group that Mitt Romney was going to win Michigan. But what is surprising'or at least what should be surprising'is the argument Ron Weiser offered when he made his case last August in a video posted over the weekend by the Detroit Free Press:

If you don't have the patience to watch the entire video, Weiser said he was optimistic about Mitt Romney's chances because:

Well, let's look at Wayne County. Two big groups. The first one's Detroit. Population's now shrunk under 700,000. Last presidential election it was probably about 800-850 (thousand). Less voters.

Secondly, no Coleman Young machine. No Kwame Kilpatrick machine. There is no Dave Bing machine. There's no machine to go to the pool halls and the barbershops and put those people on buses and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.

Instead of voting, he said, people in Detroit will just sit around pool halls getting drunk:

And there's no machine to get 'em to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall. And it does make a difference.

And, Weiser said, there's nothing Democrats can do about it because Obama campaign workers would be too afraid to go into the city to get people out to vote:

Obama has hired a lot of people to go help him get that vote out. But if you're not from Detroit, the places where those pool halls and barbershops are, you're not going to be going at 6:30 in November. Not without a side arm.

So, according to Weiser, Wayne County wasn't going to deliver for President Obama because Obama's workers would be too scared to actually enter the city and drive its lazy drunkards to the polls. You can tell this is a guy who probably played Mitt Romney's 47 percent video over and over and thought it was the highlight of the campaign, but there's more to his argument, and it turns out that not only is Weiser an offensive asshole, he's also just plain dumb.

According to Weiser, Obama's problems in Detroit would combine with other challenges in the rest of Wayne County to trim his final margin from the county to a net of somewhere between 270,000 and 290,000 votes, down from what he said would have been 350,000 in years past. Then, if you combine that reduced performance with breaking even in Oakland County, Romney would win the state, because without winning Oakland County and without a huge margin in Wayne County, Obama couldn't surmount Romney's advantage in the rest of the state.

Of course, what actually happened proved Weiser's moron credentials beyond a shadow of a doubt. First, despite Weiser's optimism that Romney would tie Obama in Oakland County, he lost'by 52,488 votes.

Second, despite Weiser's prediction that Wayne County would deliver a net of less than 300,000 votes for Obama, Obama netted 382,032 votes from the county.

Oh, and third, even if what Weiser had predicted about Oakland County and Wayne County had come true, Romney still would have lost. Obama carried Michigan by 449,313 votes. So even if you took away his entire net margin out of Oakland County and knocked off 120,000 votes from his Wayne County totals, he still would have won easily. Heck, Obama would have won without Oakland or Wayne counties at all.

To recap, Weiser said Romney would win Michigan because he would break even in Oakland County with Obama and because Obama's margins out of Wayne County would shrink dramatically because people there are shiftless boozers who can't be bothered to vote without a cattle prod. But not only was we wrong on both of those predictions, even if he had been right, Obama still would have won. So I guess the moral of the story here is that it turns out drunk pool players are pretty good at voting ... or Ron Weiser is a colossal schmuck who can't count.