Did GOP perform an autopsy...on itself?

This bothered me last night when I saw its referral on the Newshour, and again when it was repeated by ABC News: The GOP call their post-2012 elections self-review an autopsy.

An autopsy, really?

I know that there has been some hand-wringing over the losses of the 2012 election, but is the GOP dead?  Hardly!  They've launched numerous filibusters and blocked movement on replacing the sequester cuts, so it's hardly appropriate to say that they're dead, right?

As far as I can tell, they screwed up the nomenclature frequently used throughout the high tech industry, and whose popularity has been growing beyond the confines of high tech: postmortem reviews.

A postmortem, at a minimum, is a review following the completion of a project, to determine what worked and what didn't, concluding with possible solutions to improve the process and outcome for the next project.

This is exactly what I did, two days after the election, when reviewing why GOP pundits got their election predictions all wrong.  Except of course if you compare and contrast, their analysis was focused on changing tactical operations, while mine was focused on how they got the issues wrong:

• It was always about more than just the current state of the economy.
• It was about women's rights.  Mitt Romney paid lip service to the Lilly Ledbetter Act, insisting that a resurgent economy was the only meaningful concern for women.  Throw in the odd rape comments from other male Republican politicians, and you could see that many women were completely offended.
• It was about gay rights.  This was not a decade ago and the rise of the Defense of Marriage push.  2012 marked widespread support for gay marriage, just as President Obama became the first sitting president to express support for the cause.  It seemed incredulous that a sitting president could express this view, without being punished at the polls, and yet if anything, he helped push Americans into accepting this as a civil rights issue.
• It was about minorities.  In no small part because of the changing demographics, many older and working-age white Americans engaged in a counter-revolution, known as the Tea Party movement.  Their charge was to take America back to the whiter version of itself; they spoke openly of disdain and with disrespect for the authenticity of Obama's birth in America.  When Mitt told folks in Michigan that everyone knew where he was born, that was a coded reference to the legitimacy of Obama's heritage.
• It was about integrity and the big American moderate pie.  Many people just simply could not trust Mitt Romney.  A lot of people thought Mitt was moderate, but in the last several years it seemed that he had embraced the far right.  Some people decided to cross their fingers and hope that he would not do what he said he'd do; most people refused to accept that risk.  Once they heard him embrace the far right, they stopped trusting him and his message.

And hey, I think most of these are absolutely still valid.  Look at what they discussed at CPAC: gay marriage, minorities and Rick Perry questioning Mitt Romney's conservative credentials.

Regardless of autopsy or postmortem, 100 pages and they think it boils down to operational issues: fewer debates and earlier primaries to pick a candidate.

We're still far apart on the causes of their failure at the ballot box, but that's okay, because if they want to continue to chase the wrong narrative, I'm perfectly fine with having to do an autopsy in 2016.