I’m fascinated by stories like this one, in the Wall Street Journal, with the headline  “Top Ohio Republicans Ask Why Party Lost.” Here are some of their theories — and from my reading, none of these theories seem restricted to just Ohio:

• A “failed voter-turnout operation”
• “An unforeseen surge in African-American voters”
• “An unexpectedly weak GOP ground game, particularly in the final days.”
• “Infighting within the state party that they say crippled the campaign’s organization.”
• “…the Obama administration’s auto-industry bailout, combined with a summer ad barrage, left a decisive imprint that Mr. Romney never shook off.”

There are more of these — my favorite being Karl Rove’s claim that the Obama campaign “suppressed the vote” by, well, running the sort of negative campaigns that Mr. Rove usually likes to fund himself. But I have an alternative theory, one that I don’t see the GOP spending a lot of time thinking about:  When the majority of voters got a good hard look at their candidate, and his policies, they decided they liked the other guy more.

Sometimes, things really are as simple as they seem.

If you’re surprised by this, you are not alone.

Four vast ironies that occurred to me today when thinking about yesterday’s elections.

1. In 2010, California voters passed an Open Primary initiative that means that the top two finishers in any primary, regardless of party, go into the general election. The intention of backers was that more moderates would run and be elected. Both the Republican and Democratic parties here fought it, but it became the law. One of the proponents was then-Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado, a Republican sometimes on the outs with his own party. Net result in yesterday’s election:  Instead of a more balanced Legislature, Democrats picked up seats, leading to a 2/3 majority in both the state Senate and Assembly. That 2/3 majority gives Democrats enormous power and renders Republicans completely superfluous. And Maldonado, who was running for Congress, lost. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.
2. Proposition 30, which raises taxes to help balance the state budget, was put on the ballot by Governor Jerry Brown expressly because Republicans won’t vote for any tax increase, and passing a tax increase requires a 2/3 majority. Democrats now have that majority, ironically, which the lack thereof necessitated the proposition. Also, the proposition, which was positioned largely as “save our schools,” returns little money to schools — it just eliminates further cuts.
3. On a national level, the one thing we were all led to believe about Mitt Romney was that he was a dispassionate numbers guy — a guy who could read the data and make sound decisions. That was his story at Bain, and at the Olympics, and in Massachusetts. Here’s what we found out today:  That his internal polling — and his internal polling alone; nothing objective — consistently showed him ahead, that he and his campaign team absolutely believed that all the polling to the contrary was undercounting Republicans, and that he was 100% going to win. (Indeed, today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Romney never wrote a concession speech because he never believed he’d need one.) In other words:  He completely misread the data, and was operating from bad data clouded by emotions. So… he wasn’t even good at the one thing he was theoretically really good at.
4. On a similar note, Karl Rove and the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and all their money couldn’t buy any love. Much as Meg Whitman found out when she ran for governor in California, you can buy ad space, but you can’t always buy votes. But that’s not the surprise. The surprise is how thoroughly revealed Rove is as someone completely out of touch with the electorate. The svengali behind the Bush near-win in 2000 and the Bush probably-won in 2004 does not understand 2012 at all. In advance, he is sure that young people are going to stay home, that Obama supporters are disenchanted, and that Romney is going to thread together an electoral victory out of key battleground states in some complicated 3-4-2 formula (or whatever it was) that he talks about a lot on air and in print. Instead: young people turn out in large numbers (numbers consistent with 2008, showing that that year wasn’t a fluke), Obama voters are charged up (by the prospect of Romney/Ryan), and Romney takes all of… one of those battleground states. (North Carolina, the only state to switch sides from 2008.) Which means that Rove was wrong, wrong, wrong, and some of us don’t have to worry about his “genius” any more.

Like everyone else, I’m glad it’s over, and like about half of us, I’m delighted with the outcome. If you’re among the other half and you’re not so delighted:  I understand. Believe me. I have been over there many times, and it doesn’t feel good. I will say that I was glad to hear the president say he’d like to meet with Mitt Romney to discuss ways to bring people together, I was glad to hear Romney’s gracious concession, and I was also glad that John Boehner has, in words at least, offered to work  with Democrats to avoid the fiscal cliff. There are all sorts of budget cuts I’d like to see put in place, as well as tax loopholes closed and tax changes made, so I’m hopeful a deal can be made — because I’d rather this work were done with a scalpel than with a chainsaw. And I’m reminded that surgery is performed by a team of professionals working together.

They just called Vermont for Obama. With zero percent of the vote counted. MAN, it couldn’t get any closer!

This Saturday night is Moving Arts’ 20th anniversary party. When are we going to have another 20th anniversary party? Never. It’s a one-time event.

That’s just one reason I’m hoping that if you’re in Los Angeles tomorrow night, you’ll join us. (Click here to get tickets, or more information.)

Here are some other reasons:

• There’s great food and drink and entertainment
• It’s going to be a lot of fun
• It’s incredibly reasonable! (Just 25 bucks.)
• I would love to see you there
• What Moving Arts does is really important

Since our founding in 1992, we’ve produced hundreds of new plays. We’ve launched a lot of new plays (and a lot of new playwrights) in that time, racking up awards and a significant body of work. We were the first to produce many of these playwrights, many of whom have gone on to illustrious careers. And we started doing that at a time when practically no one was doing strictly new plays.

Moving Arts is more than a theatre, or a theatre company: It’s a mission. It’s a mission that says that stories from our times must be supported and produced. Not just workshopped, or read, or developed. Produced.

As founding artistic director, I’m incredibly proud of our work, and of the talented people running the theatre and the talented people doing good work that moves audiences to laugh and to cry. Please come out and join me in hoisting a glass to all of that – and to what promises to be our best season ever.

I hope to see you on Saturday night.

p.s. Can’t be there in person? Join us in spirit! Click here to make a donation. Thank you.

As I noted two posts ago, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of my theatre company, Moving Arts. (And hey — you should join us this Saturday night for our awesome big celebration! Come say hi.) What’s even scarier?

Today is my 25th wedding anniversary. Yes, my wife and I got married on Halloween. In costume. With a couple hundred party guests, also in costume. Guests were invited to “A masquerade ball (plus wedding).” My wife told me she knows where the photos are — hey, it was a pre-digital photo era — so if she does indeed find them, I’ll post some here.

As with the theatre company, where every year hasn’t been easy but hey, we’re still here, it’s been similar with the marriage. The highs have been very high and the lows, well, we got through them. We’ve got a pretty good life right now; I love her a lot, but more importantly, I enjoy her company. (Most of the time.) If you can find somebody you still think is clever and funny 30 years on, you must’ve done something right. We’ve also got three children I enjoy, even when they don’t adequately rinse off those dishes, and a wide circle of friends and family willing to come over and entertain us on occasion. The roof doesn’t leak, the bills get paid, there’s always food on the table, everybody’s health is mostly pretty good, our shelves are stuffed with books read and waiting to be read and with games waiting to be played again and again. It’s a good life.

It was 20 years ago tonight that we opened Moving Arts. Not all of those 20 years have been easy — it’s never easy keeping any theatre open, let alone one devoted entirely to new plays — and in fact, some of them have been pretty hard. But still, I’m not surprised we’ve hit 20. We’ve got good people running the place; in fact, we’ve always had good people running the place.

Moving Arts began in 1990, on paper, as Acme Performance Group, Inc. Originally, it was going to be a production company called Acme Arts Co., under a different artistic director than me. The concept of the proto artistic director had been that with the name Acme Arts Co., we could do “anything” — we wouldn’t be limited to theatre. Now I know better: that in most cases, it’s better precisely to be limited to just one or two things. Unless your corporate name is Virgin. But it turned out that Acme Arts Co. was a name already registered in the state of California, so the name became Acme Performance Group, Inc. In other words, the name went from bad to worse. But after waiting a seeming eternity for that artistic director to do something, I decided to drive around, find a space we could afford, and call him up and tell him about it, and as politely as I could, to also tell him that I thought I should take the title of artistic director. “I think you should,” he said.

The space I found, 1822 Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, had been a police substation. It was about large enough for two police and maybe their donuts. When the landlord, Bud Plochere, showed it to me and asked me what I wanted to do with it, I said, “I want to turn it into a theatre.” He stood inside and looked around and said, “You can’t open a theatre in here.” But we did. And we’ve been doing theatre there — and elsewhere — for 20 years now.

Over those 20 years, many hundreds of people have contributed their time and energy to Moving Arts and its productions. I do want to name just a relative fraction of them.

The founding board of Acme Performance Group, Inc. was: Eve Kathleen Baker, Julie Briggs, Gary Guidinger, Joe Stafford and myself. We never would’ve started the non-profit without Eve, who much like Johnny Appleseed sowed seeds wherever she went, but her seeds were non-profits; she started a lot of them, including ours. Eve died about five years ago (more, now?) and I still think about her frequently. And a special two-decade tip of the hat to my good friend Joe Stafford, who wrangled all the paperwork down at City Hall in 1992 while I was on the East Coast dealing with the death of my father; Joe made a friend in the bureaucratic maze and somehow navigated us through the other side.

The theatre was opened with $7,500. (!) Those founding funders were: Julie Briggs, her parents, Paul Crist, Joe Stafford, my mother, my wife and I, my brother Michael, and my wife’s grandfather, Frank Senn. Seven of them gave $1,000 each (that was the ask), and one gave $500. I remain grateful to them all.

There were many people who built the theatre, but the primary work crew was Marcy Ross, Tom Boyle, Rodger Gibson, David Krebs (now deceased), Julie, and myself. Rodger was an electrician and wired us throughout; Marcy was an ace carpenter; and Tom, as always, seemed to know how to do everything. I spent a lot of time scraping fake popcorn off the ceiling and inhaling lots of lung sealant in the process.

When it came time for a name for the place (I was damned if it was going to be Acme something), we compiled a sheet with three dozen or more alternatives. I no longer know where that sheet is (and I wish I did), but I do remember two names off it: Theatre X (which I came up with, and liked, but which got vetoed), and Moving Arts, courtesy of Steve Freedman. Nobody vetoed Moving Arts, and the more it stayed on the list, the more it grew on people. Thanks, Steve.

We’ve always had many talented, resourceful people in charge, but here are the true forces to be reckoned with, as I recall them.

Managing Directors: Julie Briggs, Rebecca Rasmussen, Lisa Payne Marschall, Michael Shutt, and especially, especially, our current hard-working (and long-suffering?) managing director Steve Lozier.

Artistic Directors: Julie Briggs again (about five years in, we adjusted titles and made her an equal artistic director with me; essentially, we’d already been producing partners since the founding), Kim Glann, and Paul Stein. (I was the founding artistic director, and I’m currently serving as artistic director again, on an interim basis, but really it’s in title only.)

Our Literary Director of many, many years, Trey Nichols.

Our incredible producer-director people, including Cece Tio, Sara Wagner, Terence Anthony, Mary McGuire, and Jane Sunderland.

And the many board members who’ve truly made a difference: Dan Beck, Jeannine Fairchild, Michael Curry, Mark Kinsey Stephenson, Kevin Scott, J. Hobart, Joe Stafford, Brian Newkirk, Marlene Coleman and Cris D’Annunzio among them.

And, finally, all the talented (and sometimes semi-talented) actors and designers and board ops and directors and playwrights who gave of their time and their energy. Thank you. Enormously.

Originally, my co-founder, Julie Briggs, just wanted to direct a play, one of mine. But I needed a place to work, and I hadn’t had a great time at the other place I’d tried to work. (The now long-closed Burbage Theatre.) And I didn’t like what I was seeing of other small theatres were run at the time. So I drove around and found the place we could afford to open. It was too small, and we had no money, and it was just the two of us. I figured you could do theatre anywhere, so the size wouldn’t stop us, and I knew even then that you can always get more money. But Julie wanted to know how just the two of us were going to do this. “We’ll get other people,” I told her, and that’s precisely what happened. One of the quips I share all the time is attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.” But from day one, Moving Arts was built by other people. We thought we were building a theatre, but really we built a community.

Who “won” the presidential debates is open to conjecture (and what really matters is who wins on November 6th).

But it won’t be spin that determines who wins the Presidential Face Off — that’s up to you.

First round voting is open until October 26.

Yesteday I took my daughter to the Apple Store to get her long-promised iPhone. (The “$99” iPhone, by the way, costs $99, plus a protection plan you’d better get whether or not the user is a 14-year-old girl who keeps the phone in a back pocket, plus the state sales tax that is charged on the “value” of the phone — $648 — and not the sale price, which means that the “$99” iPhone costs $248 plus a 2-year plan that adds $30 to my phone bill, for a grand total of $968. Happy birthday.)

After we were done depositing more fortunes into the Jobs family trust, my two kids got excited. “Look, Dad!” said my son, pointing to a store a few doors down, “A bookstore!”

The two of them were so excited because they hadn’t seen a bookstore in a mall — in fact, a bookstore anywhere — in so long. It was like spotting a unicorn.

“Where?” I said.

“Over there!”

I looked closely at the sign above the distant store. “That says Brookstone. They sell electronic gadgets.”

“Oh,” they both said. Then they went back to playing with their electronics as we walked to the car.

I just asked someone, “What time is it?”

She responded, “Now?”

“No,” I said, “12 minutes ago.” Who would want to know what time it isn’t? (I could guess what time it isn’t, and always be right.) Of course you want to know what time it is now. So why do people so frequently respond with, “Now”?