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Thursday, January 19, 2012

I Would Rather Fight Romney

I understand why Democrats rub their hands together in glee contemplating a Gingrich or Santorum nomination. Like the imbecile Cain, the secessionist Perry, the dot-eyed loon Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum are so damaged, so inadequate to the Presidency, so utterly divisive the prospect of a race between any of them and Obama inspires visions of a Goldwater style landslide victory with the kind of coattails that can deliver the House and Senate and give Democrats another bite at the apple of enacting the policies the Obama mandate already afforded but which the unprecedented obstructionism of incompetent, deceptive, traitorous, bigoted, bought and paid for Republicans has restrained.

The thing is, apart from his Mount Rushmore of a head, it is hard for me to see why anybody thinks the universally disliked, awkward, flip-flopping, liberal Massachusetts, serial political failure, richy rich vulture financier, Mormon, creator of the healthcare reform on which was modeled the healthcare reform detestation of which defines Republican hostility above all else is by any available measure a better or stronger candidate than any of the other killer clowns on offer this time around.

I personally prefer Romney as the candidate with whom Obama competes for the Presidency, simply because Romney is so conspicuously the candidate representing the 1% that his nomination best ensures Obama runs more explicitly as he should as the candidate representing the 99%. This means that the 2012 Presidential Campaign can actually provide a tutorial on the utter failure of the neoliberal paradigm and an opening for a renewal of the social democratic impulse imperfectly discerned in the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society.

The other candidates with whom Obama might otherwise spar all provide juicy target-rich environments of bigotry, know-nothingism, extremism, and volatility that might dilute the message that the conspicuous contrast of Mr. One Percent Romney versus President Obama of the People Who Work for a Living makes well-nigh inevitable.

Obama will still win as surely as he would with Santorum or Perry, indeed, we may still be granted our righteous empowering landslide. But above all a battle with Romney continues the lesson begun in Wisconsin through Occupy Summer, and that is a lesson America needs to learn if we are ever to take up in earnest the necessary national task of collaborating with the rest of the world in the building of a sustainable, equitable, diverse, democratic planetary civilization.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> I understand why Democrats rub their hands together in glee
> contemplating a Gingrich or Santorum nomination. . .

Well, if the headlines in the _Times_ this morning are any indication,
Gingrich has now been, uh, screwed (if you'll pardon the expression)
by his ex-wife.

Look, it's pretty clear that Romney is going to get the Republican
nomination. And it's also pretty clear that Democrats have plenty
of reason to rub their hands together in glee over that, too.

;->