With Super Tuesday in the can it appears that the GOP is still not ready to take the bit in its mouth and get behind Mitt Romney. They REALLY don't want to do it but the primary season has revealed a bit more of the craziness than they had anticipated. The establishment GOPers who exist just out of sight kept prodding Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels to ride in and save the day but wisdom prevailed and neither one of those potential #1s wanted to take a chance on the knife throwing in this dustup. I can't say that I blame them. Last go-round the GOP went with John McCain who was formerly known as a moderate Republican with a bit of a maverick streak meaning that occasionally he would shake hands with a Democrat. He only won the nomination after abandoning that maverick thing and proving it by taking on Sarah Palin as his partner and she stole his “maverick” mojo. This time a formerly perfectly reasonable man, Mitt Romney, once again sought the approval of his party but soon determined that perfectly reasonable was not going to cut the cake so he abandoned that tack to become “severely”conservative. The problem is that his record did not reflect that and he has had to perform the unenviable task of running against himself. It is very hard to win a nomination doing that and he should be awarded extra points just for accomplishing that feat of derring-do.
I really don't know who decided that the GOP primary process would open itself up by instituting a series of sponsored debates but my hat is off to them. That took a remarkable sense of confidence that President Obama could be beat with a ham sandwich and a seeming lack of realization of the reactionary nature of the right wing of the Republican Party. One could make the case that people who are that out of touch with their party may not need to occupy the Presidency.
Debates are the perfect format for exposing weaknesses and highlighting strengths and only one of those options was foreseen. Who knew that people who seriously sought to run the most powerful office in the world would resort to such guttersnipe tactics to achieve their personal aspirations. It would have been just as easy to engage in civil, logical debate on issues that our country desperately needs discussed with the good of the people at heart. Well, so much for integrity and the common weal when it comes down to living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These candidates have resorted to some of the nastiest and least relevant stuff I can recall and I remember Richard Nixon. Even Barry Goldwater seems like a shining light of philosophical discourse in comparison. Each candidate has been bankrolled by one or more knights in shining armor made of gold and trimmed in greenbacks. The funding has overcome the sanity and reason of the candidates and allowed them to continue to hamstring their opponents without being forced to fold because of being out of call money. Everyone has had enough money to keep raising and the others keep calling their bluff.
If the nominee of the Grand Old Party actually wants to be President everyone knows that he is going to have to tack back to the middle to actually get the people to vote for him. This inundation of PAC money has artificially allowed the losers to not lose so soon and has kept the apparent nominee from mitigating his positions a bit. Now, the extreme right of the party sees mitigation as a cardinal sin subject to excommunication (the use of theological terminology just seemed appropriate) and just refuses to be driven back into the bushes (no pun intended). The old heads of the Grand Old Party seem to have finally accepted that Romney is their best chance for this go round and have sent the Grand Old Dame of that party, none other than Barbara Bush, out to speak the word out loud. COMPROMISE.
Even after these Super Tuesday results the deed is not yet done and Mitt will still have some heavy slogging to do to get to Tampa but likely he will do so. Then the heavy slogging will be to get back to the middle enough to defeat that charlatan in the White House.
If you have read this column before you know that I love the debate format. It does exactly what it is supposed to do which is examine the candidates evenly and allow each one to make his or her case. The only problem with the debate format this time around has been the flood of lucre that has allowed the least electable candidates to stay in the race while forcing the others to cater to the whims of those who make the most noise. With less reliance on millions of dollars to stay on the stage one could assume that reason would triumph, at least that was Jefferson's surmise. Regardless of what George Will says “welfare for politicians” is what we have now. Get the money out, fund elections publicly.
Just think, we still have eight months to go until this is over. Eight months of millions of dollars of ridiculous advertising designed to make the other guy look bad.
My take? It stinks. Oh yeah, the “charlatan” wins again.
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