When Disaster Strikes

How weird is this?  A major hurricane plows into New Jersey and New York a week before the election, bringing a halt to Presidential campaigning, at least for a couple of days.  Everyone's focus is turned to the drama of the unfolding disaster.  And President Obama has a major job to do, as the national disaster 'coordinator-in-chief', while Mitt Romney has almost nothing he can do, except speak at a relief fund raiser in Ohio.

Who knows what the political consequences of this will be?  It looks like it could possibly help the President, but it's impossible to know.

What IS clear, however, is that aside from the news anchors and the various storm reporters in their raingear standing beside the rising water, virtually everyone else in sight is a governmental leader or employee.  When disaster strikes, it's the government that takes over and handles things.

It's Gov. Christie of New Jersey, Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, Gov. Cuomo of New York, and President Obama of the Federal Government who are the key actors, the go-to folks.  It's the first responders, the firefighters, the police, the public shelter operators and workers, the transportation officials, the city engineers, etc., etc., etc.

Where are the CEOs of the corporations, the Hedge Fund billionaires, the Wall Street tycoons, the Donald Trumps of the world?  Who knows, and who really cares?  My guess is that a lot of them flew away in their private jets before the storm hit to some hideaway in the Caribbean, so as to leave any suffering that has to take place to the 99%. 

My point is not that the 'job creators' aren't important.  It's just that they're not important NOW.  Everything has a time and a place, including the government.  Which is why the extreme anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric of the Right--especially the libertarian Right--is so Wrong.

Why can't we get it through our heads?  Nobody likes to pay taxes.  I know I don't.  But as has been wisely said many times, taxes are simply the price we pay for civilization.  And civilization is exactly what we want, both in the good times and the bad times.  A modern 'civil society' requires efficient, knowledgeable, effective, competent, responsive government--and at every level: local, state, and national.

And you can't have it if you 'privatize' everything, which seems to be the libertarian, Rightwing utopian litany.  Ron Paul and Ayn Rand simply have nothing relevant to say to us today.

Government is public, non-profit, oriented to the 100%.  It responds not to 'customers' but to 'citizens'.  It looks out for the rich AND the poor, and everyone in between.  It is directly responsive to the public good, the ENTIRE public, EVERYONE.

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the FEMA's cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?"

"Including disaster relief, though?" debate moderator John King asked Romney.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," Romney replied.

Really, Gov.?  Just think what would be going on right now in the New Jersey/New York area if there weren't adequate governmental resources working 24 hours a day to get things repaired and going again.  Just think about those kids now, Gov. 

Sometimes I think the Right, in all its rhetorical glory and grand simplicity, is just smoking something....

A Primal Rant As We Approach the Election

This morning I just want to rant.  This election does not feel right to me at all.  It could be just a case of SAD on my part, but it could also be that I'm sensing this thing slipping away from Obama.  Nate Silver has him with odds of winning around 75%, but it sure doesn't seem that high to me in my gut.  It seems like it could go either way.

Mitt Romney's campaign message has basically degenerated into a series of false accusations and misleading statements about Obama's record.  The American economy seems to be turning around quite nicely (though a tad late here in this election season), in contrast to most of the rest of the world which is slipping into recession, but Romney continues to paint Obama's economic policies as complete failures.  He portrays the awful statistics of the economic crash that Obama inherited as if they were his fault, rather than the junk that he inherited from his predecessors and that he had to clean up before he could do anything else.  And he has come a long way in doing just that, but doesn't seem to be getting much credit for it at all.

In the area of foreign policy, Romney has for almost two years now accused Obama of being weak, vacillating, an appeaser and apologizer, all of which has no basis in fact.  Then, in the third debate, Romney essentially agreed with every Obama policy, almost without exception.  Huh?  What's that all about?  Romney was so much as admitting that everything he had said about Obama's conduct of foreign policy had been false.

Yet none of this duplicity seems to be registering with the Independents and Undecideds who are supposedly the ones who will decide this election.  They are breaking toward Romney, it seems, probably under the blizzard of pro-Romney ads blanketing the airways in the last couple of weeks.

I want to give Mitt Romney his due.  As a candidate, he comes across to me as tireless, unwavering, tenacious, relentless, and clever, all of which are normally good traits (and indeed are valuable in many endeavors). Except in this case, he also comes across as a snake-oil salesman, trying to sell a defective product that will either do no real good or may do real long-term harm to this country of ours.

Who knows what Mitt Romney really believes or what his true convictions are, other than his ambition to be President? Having once been a moderate (ie liberal) Republican from Massachusetts, he swung to the hard right for the primary season and some of the general campaign, but in just the last few weeks, has etch-a-sketched back to the middle, on foreign and domestic policy. He's been all over the map ideologically and has flipped and flopped without the slightest expression of shame or hesitation. His eye is on the prize, and he clearly will not let such minor considerations as principles and convictions--or even basic honesty--get in the way of winning that prize.

This is what I feel sure about with Mitt Romney. One, he desperately wants to be President of the United States. Two, he is a devout Mormon, with the values and worldview that Mormonism brings. And three, he has few core political convictions, except that he wants to protect his own wealth and that of his other rich friends, which means that he will espouse a fairly hardcore laissez-faire economic philosophy, with its assorted social and political consequences.

Other than these three core 'values', Romney will probably feel comfortable turning over the rest of the governing to the (mostly) men that he will appoint to the crucial positions around him in the White House. So a lot depends on who those people are, and if Romney is elected, we'll know a lot more about the future when we see who he puts forward to be his inner circle of advisors.

If Mitt Romney wins the Presidency, I really don't believe he will 'wear well' with the American people (how he has made himself 'likeable' in the last month of two is a big mystery to me). I think within a few months, some Americans at least will wake up and realize that they made a terrible mistake, electing as President a person with no experience or feel for conducting foreign or military policy, and whose primary objective will be to protect the wealthy elite from the grasping predation of the takers and moochers of society (just as he said in that secret '47%' tape, which I think expressed his true beliefs). The 1% (or even 10%) of this country with most of the wealth will of course be pleased, knowing that their financial patrimony is secure. As for the other 99%, well, not so happy....

Furthermore, they will find out that they rejected a very good man and President in Barack Obama, who had done a very credible job leading this country in a very difficult time in our history. Surprise, surprise, he really was not the radical, Kenyan, lazy and stupid socialist that the Right was painting him to be! But then it will be too late, because power will be back in the hands of the Right, and I don't think they will not give it up easily again.

On the other hand, if Obama wins the election and gets a second term, I frankly fear for his life. There are forces in this country who will not take no for an answer when it comes to ousting him and what he represents from office (including his race). Obama has always compared himself with Abraham Lincoln, and it could be that he is more like Lincoln than we would like to think. In my view, there are primal forces engaged in a titanic struggle (cold civil war?) here, which perhaps accounts for the Right's recent manichean outlook. And who knows, perhaps it also accounts for all the strange movies these days, about superhuman heroes and villains, vampires and zombies, and alien invaders from space.

So, in a way, it seems that I am somewhat pessimistic either way this election turns out. I don't like that, but that's the way it is.

Or maybe I just didn't sleep well last night, and I'm taking it out on you, dear reader!

The Choice Before Us: Foreign Policy

Remember when George W. Bush said in his 2000 debate with Al Gore that he didn't think the United States should be about the business of 'nation building'? Three years later, we were invading Iraq, where we wasted something like 700 billion dollars and many thousands of American lives (not to speak of the countless Iraqi dead) doing exactly what Bush said he was against.



Watching the successful raid on Osama bin Laden

The point being that you can't always believe what a candidate says in a debate. It's better to look at their actions.

Mitt Romney has spent most of two years now slamming President Obama for being 'weak', 'an appeaser', 'naive', 'incapable', 'over his head', and 'unsuccessful' in his foreign policy. Yet in their third and final debate on foreign policy, Romney ended up agreeing with most everything that Obama has done when asked about the specifics. It was widely speculated that he wanted to sound like the 'peacemaker', in order to win over more of the women's vote in the next two weeks before the election.

What position hasn't Romney changed in the course of the last 10 years?  He becomes whatever he needs to in order to win an election.  Who knows what he will actually do in foreign policy when he gets to the Oval Office?  He has absolutely no experience in the field, so we have nothing by which to judge him.

This one is not even close.  President Obama has proven himself over his first term in office to be a cautious and pragmatic statesman and commander-in-chief.  He has pursued America's national interests all over the world in ways that have kept America safe.  He ended the Iraq War and will do the same in Afghanistan.  He is a centrist and sensible 'realist' in his foreign policy who has utilized the best talent he could find in either political party (Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State).  He seems to follow the judicious advice of Theodore Roosevelt, who recommended that the President "speak softly but carry a big stick."

We know what President Obama will do in foreign policy because we've had a chance to watch him in action for four years.  We have absolutely no idea what Mitt Romney will do.  (On the other hand, with foreign policy advisors like the fire-breathing John Bolton and other Bush people surrounding him, I have a sneaking suspicion about what he might do.)

The choice here is obvious: Barack Obama for Commander-in-Chief and America's Chief Diplomat.

The Choice Before Us: Obama or Romney?

We need to begin summing up the arguments for and against the two Presidential candidates in this election of 2012, since early voting has already begun and the election is literally just around the corner.  And thank God for that, because this campaign has gone on far too long!

Make no mistake about it, I'm voting for Barack Obama, just as I did in 2008.  But I do this not because I agree with everything he has done, because in fact I don't.  And I do this not because he's been a perfect President, because in my opinion he hasn't been.  (No such thing exists actually.) 

I'm voting for Barack Obama because he is the best choice this year, just as he was the best choice four years ago.

Now, if you are one of those who have been convinced somehow that Barack Obama is an illegitimate President because he was actually born in Kenya, then you don't even need to read any further.  There isn't anything I'll be saying that will be able to convince you otherwise, and you'll have to vote for the (in the 'birther' universe) only legally eligible candidates in the race, Mitt Romney (Republican) or Gary Johnson (Libertarian).

Likewise, if the mind-warping propaganda from the paranoid Far Right has convinced you that President Obama is a radical socialist or a secret Muslim, who is just bidding his time to destroy this country, then you will be voting for someone other than the President (as the lesser evil if nothing else) and you really don't need to waste your time reading any of these more mundane considerations.

I'm talking here to those of you who live in the real world and who ponder real issues, like economic and domestic policy, social issues, and international affairs, and are honestly trying to decide which of the two candidates will best serve the interests and needs of the American people and nation.

If that is where you are, then let us proceed.

I begin by positing that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have some real strengths and positive aspects as candidates for President.  Both have received some of the best education that America has to offer, as graduates of elite private academies, fine universities (Columbia and BYU) and law schools (Harvard).  Both men are very intelligent, although there have been troglodytes on the Republican side who have insinuated that Obama was somehow stupid (Gov. Sununu).  Both men are family men, who have beautiful wives and children, to whom they are clearly devoted and faithful.   And in this day and age, these character traits are not something we should necessarily take for granted (e.g. Sarah Palin).

Both Obama and Romney have, at some point in their lives, been seen as political moderates and centrists.  For Romney, this was particularly so in his four years as governor of Massachusetts, where he passed one of the first state universal health care plans in the country.  Since becoming a Presidential candidate, however, Romney has acquired the disease of 'Romnesia' (as diagnosed by President Obama recently!), and has forgotten all his moderate policy positions in favor of much more conservative ones.  How much of this change is real and how much is just for political purposes of getting elected, it's somewhat hard to say at this point.  If he is elected President, I guess we'll find out then.  Otherwise, it will be just a speculative matter for pundits and scholars to mull over for decades to come.

President Obama on the other hand came into office four years ago with a certain patina as the most liberal Presidential candidate in quite a while.  Some were calling him the new FDR and hoping that his administration would bring about a 'New New Deal'.  That didn't happen of course, and Obama turned out to be a moderate neo-liberal in the mold of Bill Clinton (without the folksy charm, of course!).  Now, for those of you who find this description as far fetched, then you clearly are hallucinating, having been bewitched by the Right who, in their efforts to defeat Obama and prevent him from serving a second term, have done everything they can to make him unacceptable to the average American.

So, the bottom line for me (as I wrote last June here) is that both Obama and Romney fall within the acceptable and normal limits of recent American party politics and neither represents an imminent danger to the Republic, in the way that a Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin would have (in my opinion).

So, having laid out what the candidates have in common, let me now turn to how they differ and why that matters, in my next post.

Game On

In the second Presidential debate at Hofstra University, Barack Obama came out of his corner ready to fight, and for the entire 90 minutes, he was on the offensive against an increasingly frustrated and rattled Mitt Romney.

The only way I can understand Obama's performance in these two debates is to think in terms of basketball (his favorite sport).  In the first debate, Obama came out like a national championship team that didn't respect its opponent and therefore was flat in its play and overall demeanor, and as a result unexpectedly lost the game.  In the second, he came out ready to play, and therefore won the game (though not necessarily the series).

Blogger Andrew Sullivan was very happy with the results:

To my mind, Obama dominated Romney tonight in every single way: in substance, manner, style, and personal appeal. He came back like a lethal, but restrained predator. He was able to defend his own record, think swiftly on his feet, and his Benghazi answer was superb. He behaved like a president. He owned the presidency. And Romney? Well, he has no answers on the math question and was exposed. He was vulnerable on every social issue, especially immigration. And he had no real answer to the question of how he'd be different than George W Bush. I'm excitable - but sometimes politics is about emotion as well as reason. And my view is that Obama halted Romney's momentum in its tracks

If Obama had not performed to this level, the election would have been effectively over.  Now, it's game on.

Our Peculiar President

I've been writing for years now about the reported tendency of Barack Obama to wall himself off from and refuse to reach out to people in Washington.  It hasn't been talked about alot, but I've seen it enough times and in enough places that it has concerned me.  How can a President be effective in his job if he acts this way?

Ordinary people like you and me couldn't have known before Obama's election in 2008 about this characteristic of his.  However there were clues hidden in his past.  For example, in the Washington Post piece linked above, there is this little tidbit:

On the first page of his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama describes himself as a 21-year-old loner who was "prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions" and to avoid excessive social contact in his New York neighborhood.

"If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself," Obama wrote in the 1995 memoir. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew."

It looks like that character trait carried over in a major way into his Presidency.  As Elizabeth Drew wrote back in 2010, after Obama's first two years:

Barack Obama’s personality has been much mulled over in the past two years, but it seems inescapable that his high self-esteem often slides over the thin line to arrogance, which trickles down (with some exceptions) to much of his staff, some of whom are downright rude to all but a chosen few. Obama has seemed uninterested in anyone but his immediate group, and three of the four members of his immediate circle—Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod—had had no experience in governing. The fourth, Rahm Emanuel, expressed himself with such flippancy, arrogance, and overuse of the F-word that he offended not just members of Congress but also would-be allies of the President.

And now, columnist Joe Klein, whose judgments are impeccably honest, writes in this week's Time:

When I asked several close Obama associates about the President's reluctance to sell his policies, they admitted their frustration. They said he hates doing things that he considers transparently political. He hates the idea of inviting a bunch of pols over to the White House for a drink or a movie, because they'd see it as an obvious bribe. He'd have to fake small talk; they'd try to Holbrooke him. He hates press conferences because the gotcha questions are calibrated to generate heat rather than light. He hates the notion of launching precooked zingers in debates. He hates debates, period, with their false air of portent and stage-managed aggression. These are inconvenient prejudices if you want to be re-elected. Such ceremonies are the price of admission if you want to be a politician.

You know, WTF!  Obama, if you want to be our President, for God's sake be the President!  It's the top political office in a democracy, not the King of England!  You're not the Pope, all alone in prayer in the Vatican, for crying out loud!  What are you doing?!

As Joe Klein ended his column, I'll end this one:  "Barack Obama is going to have to come clean, descend from the mountaintop and make his best case for keeping the job."  

If he doesn't, then it will go to someone who clearly WANTS to be President and is willing to do almost anything to get it.  And then there's going to be a LOT of people VERY upset with Barack Obama, for a very long time.

A Bit of the Blarney, You Say?

Vice President Joe Biden, barring some kind of catastrophe, will never be President. He is too rude, too crude, and has a little too much of the Irish blarney. But he did well enough in last night's debate to staunch the bleeding from the wound inflicted by President Obama on himself last week. He was strong, articulate at times, and took it to the Republicans.

Paul Ryan, on the other hand, was nearly the opposite of Joe Biden in nearly every way. He was smooth, polite, young, and nearly unflappable. And given his youth and relative inexperience, his was a good debate performance. Far from hurting his political career by blowing the debate, he definitely helped himself, win or lose this year.

What I think most Democrats wanted to see last night was a strong defense of the Obama administration and a strong offensive attack on the Republican ticket. And they got both of these things from Joe Biden. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't always pretty--it was in fact a bit boisterous--but we didn't care. It was America incarnate.

It's quite strange, really.  In these debates, the style of the debaters is counting for far more than the substance of what they say.  Obama was passive and detached, while Romney was assertive and confidant.  Biden was aggressive and argumentative (mostly in a good way), while Ryan was calm and almost wonky.  Who cares what they actually said on the issues, as long as it wasn't an 80 proof gaffe!

Style counts for more because those who actually care about issues have already long decided who they're voting for.  The 'undecideds', on the other hand, are people who don't really know squat about the issues but are far more affected by the atmospherics of the debate (at least that's my theory this morning!).  They are the ones that these debates are meant for (and again, avoiding outright gaffes and horrible mistatements).

So while this debate was a tie, it probably helped the Democrats more than the Republicans right now.  So I guess that actually means that it was a win for the Irishman.

Slapdown

If Barack Obama is not going through a period of substantive self-assessment right now, then he's a fool.

The American people have delivered to him a big time slapdown in the form of an historic drop in his national polling, after his pathetic debate performance the other night. The message? "Don't take us for granted, Mr. President. You seem to have gotten a swollen head--which is a vocational hazard in the Oval Office--and we don't like it at all. If you think this reelection is a 'gimme'--then think again!!"

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is like a long-distance runner: maintaining his pace, hydrating himself, keeping his mind right, ignoring those around him while looking at the finish line just over the horizen. Very impressive, this political runner, and now he's taken the lead, at least in terms of momentum, if not polls.

Of course, I also called Romney a con artist yesterday, and a frenetic debater, willing to say just about anything the day before that. BUT, to some extent, all politicians do that, adjust their message to the audience they're addressing and the circumstances. Perhaps he just does it a little more than normal, or perhaps it just seems that way to us Democrats right now. In any case, you've got to admire his chutzpah! He's smart, he's cunning, he's ambitious, he's energetic. And all those things are characteristics of winners, and Romney's been a winner in his personal life, his business life, his charitable work, and at least once, his political life.

So, President Obama has his work cut out for him, if he's going to win a second term.  This will be no cakewalk for him, despite the good polling he's gotten since the conventions.

In hindsight (in a month, or a year, or a decade), we'll know more about what was going on right now behind the scenes and behind the stoic faces of the contestants, but right now, we can only guess or speculate.  My guess is that Obama got himself into a state of mind that was not particularly healthy, where he developed this sense of inevitability, of an almost narcissistic sense of entitlement; this sense that he is the political master of his age, and that it is his destiny to be a transformational President. And that he could do it HIS way, which is to plan it all out in his head, give directions to a few key people, and then let the whole thing just work out without a lot of fuss, effort, or interpersonal interaction on his part. (He doesn't like that kind of thing, apparently.)

This has been Obama's abiding weakness, I think. It began to become clear to outsiders a few years ago, or at least, I began to see it more clearly then.  Take for example this article by the veteran liberal political observer Elizabeth Drew, back in December of 2010 after the political defeat in the midterm election:

Once they got to the White House, Obama and his campaign team (virtually all of his top assistants) seemed to live in a hermetically sealed box—cut off from and not interested in what was going on outside, or what experienced people who tried to help them had to say. No one could dispute the fact that Obama was a good family man who dined with his wife and children each night and then turned to his briefing papers. To the extent that the Obamas went out in Washington, it was on their “date night,” or, so far as is known, to the Georgetown apartment of their close friend Valerie Jarrett, who also works at the White House. True, the Beltway isn’t the country, but there are people here who could have helped the Obama team navigate its shark-filled waters.

Of course Obama should have gotten out of Washington more and listened to people, not just talked at them; and, as Walter Mondale said recently, he should have gotten rid of “those idiot boards”—the TelePrompters on which the great orator has been strangely dependent and which divide him from his audiences. Last year, a friend of mine was invited to a Hanukkah party that the Obamas gave for prominent Jews (a group with whom there had been tensions), and after the Obamas descended the grand stairway, they stood in the foyer briefly, the President made a few remarks and shook a few hands, and back up the stairs they went. No mingling.

In their first two years, the Obamas have seemed a bit tone-deaf: there were too many vacations while people were hurting, especially Michelle’s extravagant trip to Spain. (I’m as interested in Michelle’s clothes as the next woman but at the same time think she and her staff are too focused on her looking smashing, which she does. Her wardrobe seems quite extensive for these troubled times.)

Barack Obama’s personality has been much mulled over in the past two years, but it seems inescapable that his high self-esteem often slides over the thin line to arrogance, which trickles down (with some exceptions) to much of his staff, some of whom are downright rude to all but a chosen few. Obama has seemed uninterested in anyone but his immediate group, and three of the four members of his immediate circle—Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod—had had no experience in governing. The fourth, Rahm Emanuel, expressed himself with such flippancy, arrogance, and overuse of the F-word that he offended not just members of Congress but also would-be allies of the President.

Vice President Joe Biden, who is liked on Capitol Hill, was virtually shut out of the dealings with people in Congress in the first two years—”I can handle them,” Obama told Biden—but Biden is now expected to be given a larger role as part of the White House’s new determination to “reach out.” (A few months ago highly placed members of the staff also swore they would “reach out,” but that seemed to last for just a few days.) One of the oddest aspects of Obama’s persona is that someone who seems so confident has insisted thus far in having people around him with whom he is said to be “comfortable.”

For example, Tom Donilon, his recently appointed national security adviser (a promotion from his role as deputy), is by all accounts a capable man but is no one’s idea of a serious strategic thinker. The explanation I was given for Donilon’s being given his new position was that “the President is comfortable with him.” Just as Obama is described as pleased with himself, he has been treated with hero worship by much of his staff. After all, he had taken on the formidable Clintons, and, against the expectation of almost all the pundits and the experts, he had beaten them. Why should he listen to those who had doubted him? A common complaint about the Obama White House in the first two years has been that there were no “grown-ups” around, people who knew more about governing and who would tell Obama that he was wrong. When people tried to suggest someone who should be brought in, that person was rejected as “not one of ours.” Joe Biden is said to argue with Obama on issues, such as Afghanistan, but not to get into the management of the White House.

Frankly, this was very concerning to me when I first read it, and it remains so now. How can a President expect to be successful if he cuts himself off from people in this way?  It's very troubling.

I've been defending Obama against the rightwing attack machine, which likes to accuse him of being a Muslim, a radical socialist, and in general, an unAmerican Outsider.  All of this stuff is nonsense, it seems to me, the fruit of conspiratorial, paranoic minds.

But the extremely introverted, isolated, tone-deaf, not-listening Obama?  That really concerns me.

Andrew Sullivan, a long time Obama supporter and influential blogger, has been scathing toward him since the first debate, in what many Obama supporters think of as over-the-top and hysterical.  And perhaps some of it is.  Yet in my heart I find myself agreeing with Sullivan.  And there was one comment from a reader that came in and Sullivan published that really seemed on target to me (or, at least I fear it is):

What I failed to realize back then [early in Obama's presidency] was the fatal inwardness of the man. His self-obsession makes him a good memoirist but otherwise undoes him even as a writer, since his isn't a failure to "tell a story" but rather to connect. What we saw in Denver was the Obama that was there to be seen all along: disengaged, self-interested, lecturing, not all that likable and a poor communicator. Where he's failed as president, those qualities have all come into play. In the minds of swing voters, those connections can now be made, and there's no Etch-a-Sketching away that revelation.

"...disengaged, self-interested, lecturing, not all that likable and a poor communicator."

 My God, if this is true, then this election may well be Romney's to win now, and, worst of all for an Obama supporter and liberal Democrat like myself, we may have to admit that we may actually be better off that way, since this may well be a "fatal" flaw that the nation cannot tolerate too long.

The Con Artist

Did you ever come across someone who will just say anything....even if it's not true....even if it directly contradicts what they've already said....just to make you like them or, worse, to make you buy something from them?  What do you call someone like that? 

A con artist, that's what.

Con artists make money through deception. They lie, cheat and fool people into thinking they've happened onto a great deal or some easy money, when ­they're the ones who'll be making money. If that doesn't work, they'll take advantage of our weaknesses -- loneliness, insecurity, poor health or simple ignorance. The only thing more important to a con artist than perfecting a con is perfecting a total lack of conscience.

What does the average con artist look like? Despite what you may think, he isn't always a shady-looking character. A con artist is an expert at looking however he needs to look. If the con involves banking or investments, the con artist will wear a snappy suit. If it involves home improvement scams, he'll show up wearing well-worn work clothes. Even the basic assumption that the con is a "he" is incorrect: there are plenty of con women too.

­You might think you can spot a con artist because he's someone you instinctively "don't trust." But the term con artist is short for confidence artist -- they gain your confidence just long enough to get their hands on your money. They can be very charming and persuasive. A good con artist can even make you believe he is really an old friend you haven't seen in years.

Con artists do share certain characteristics, however. Even the best con can only go on for so long before people start getting suspicious. For that reason, con artists tend to move frequently. They may have a job that allows this, or they might claim to have such a job. Railroad worker, carnival worker and traveling salesman are all parts con artists play to cover up their constant relocations.

Here are just a few of the 'cons' that candidate Romney has used so far: 20% tax cut, 47%/100%, gun control, abortion, Planned Parenthood, global warming, education, health care, "pre-existing conditions", Medicare, immigration, Iraq, Libya, a Palestinian state, and the list goes on. Positions that Romney has taken and then reversed himself over the last ten years or over the last six months or since yesterday. It's one of the reasons that Romney is...um...so well liked by his Republicans peers....

Most right-wingers of course don't really seem to have a problem with this. Why? Because they have this irrational hatred and/or fear of Barack Obama to the point that anyone saying anything is preferable, as long as they can beat Obama. Because they're used to doing the ole' 'bait and switch' themselves whenever they have to run for office. Because when your moral code is 'whatever is good for me' (the new Randian code of ethics), it's easy to lie and steal and con in order to get the power and stuff you want.

Is it a surprise that such a political con artist can come on television--deliver his con with verve and a smile--and end up making the sale? In the good old U.S.A? Not at all. WE LOVE CON ARTISTS HERE!

Depressed and In Shock

I like political critics who just tell it like it is, who don't pull their punches even if it's their own candidates they're talking about.  Michael Tomasky and Andrew Sullivan, both Daily Beach columnists, are two of these. 

Speaking of Obama's pathetic debate performance,  Tomasky wrote this a couple of days ago:

It’s now been three nationally televised public performances in a row—the convention speech, the 60 Minutes interview, and the debate—where he was pretty terrible; withdrawn and distant and just not there. Someone needs to ask the cut-to-the-chase question: is he enthusiastic about keeping this job, or he is just maybe tired of being president?

Andrew Sullivan, one of the most vociferous Obama supporters since way back in 2007, wrote this yesterday on his blog:

That we are having this discussion at all reflects the enormity of Obama's implosion. This race is now Romney's to lose. Not just because Romney is shameless liar and opportunist. But because Obama just essentially forfeited the election. In the first match-up between the two candidates, one was a potential president; the other a dithering wonk. I'm still reeling. I'm sorry if these are not things an Obama supporter should say at this point. But the demoralization is profound.

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That's a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama's performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That's terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion.

Look: I'm trying to rally some morale, but I've never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week - throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney's convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

Obama's supporters and admirers (include me in on that category), if they know what is happening, are simply in shock.  They can't believe what has happened, and they can't believe that Obama has done this to himself. Sullivan again:

A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I'm trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it's hard to see how a president and his party recover. I'm not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We're back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme.

Those of us who support President Obama, who have been making the case for him, are devastated by his incredibly shoddy and crummy debate performance. Perhaps we could excuse it in another setting, when there wasn't so much on the line. But as the polls are showing, this was simply the worst possible time to blow it. Perhaps he'll come back and pull it out in the next two debates. We shall see. But in the meantime, we are miserable and pissed.