Forum:Presidential Election

Since we have a precedent, since the conventions have started, and I guess since Donut poked his head in, I thought I'd start a forum on the US Presidential election of 2012, if anyone feels the need to vent.

Though I traditionally voted Republican when I was younger, and had a reputation as a rightist back in the Better Board days, I find myself staunchly in Obama's camp this time around. Shortly before the Congressional midterm election in 2010 I realized that the GOP had really gone off the rails. I think it went something like this: The unpopularity of second-term Bush combined with the extreme charisma of candidate Obama led so many independent- and loosely aligned Republican voters to jump ship that the GOP was looking like a rump party. Given the somewhat limited sense of political history that so many Americans have, people underestimated the resilience of the two-party system; and, rather than realizing that both parties have, with great historical frequency, come back from terrible landslide defeats many times, public opinion perpetuated a narrative that had the GOP in danger of extinction. The remaining party faithful bought into this, started feeling desperate, and turned to the only other slice of the electorate that had rejected Obama emphatically: certain fringe elements who will never, ever vote Democratic, and who also regularly reject Republicans for being "too liberal," ie insufficiently radical. Eight short years ago their leftist counterparts lamented that Democrats were "too conservative," which of course means the same thing; but there were enough mainstream Democrats to block any designs the radicals may have had on taking over. But now, these fringe elements, seeing how shrunken the GOP had become, saw an opportunity to hijack the party by showing up for caucuses and primaries en masse and drowning out the suddenly small mainstream GOP base--the Tea Baggers.

Meanwhile, Obama's very dubious decision to put all his eggs in the basket of health care reform, rather than something that would have been an easier sell and, frankly, more urgently needed, such as jobs creation, broke the spell that had been set over so many of us. By "the spell" I refer to the main reason I didn't support Obama back then, what I dubbed Obamania: the largely unspoken but certainly widespread vague perception that he had transcended politics and was going to usher in some sort of golden age of utopian leadership (memorably lampooned on Doctor Who a year later during David Tennant's regeneration episode). This Obamania had won him far, far broader electoral support than the traditional Democratic base (which would have been true of anyone, given how tarnished the Republican brand had become) and also far deeper support. Almost all the swing voters swung his way, but in swinging there they thought they were aiding some fundamental transformative moment rather than taking part in usual political trends. But the bruising health care battle saw the President reach the limits of his ability to bystep the usual political process through force of personality. It revealed that Obama was in fact a politician like any other, well-meaning, imperfect, flawed, and able to do only so much. This led to a profound sense of disappointment which in turn led to a backlash in the Congressional election really out of proportion to the magnitude of presidential error in the first half of his term. But since the Tea Baggers had radicalized the GOP, the swing voters voting Republican found themselves supporting agenda that were not at all centrist. The old guard leadership who'd stayed faithful through the lean years of Obamania, people like Mitch McConnell and Bill Kristol, felt a sense of elation that they'd reversed Democratic momentum and completed their comeback so quickly, and convinced themselves they had a mandate to do. . . something. However, they found that they'd made a deal with the Devil to get majorities and now relied on radical elements to govern. (Condoleeza Rice's speech tonight really drove home to me just how far the party has shifted from what it was when Bush was its leader.) This pulled the leadership into a position where they were really uncomfortable, leaving them unable to exercise effective control over their backbenchers and fulfill their constitutional roles responsibly. Anything based on the principle of compromise which the White House is quite responsibly extending was dead on arrival. (And that's the best interpretation I can put on why the GOP congressional leadership is so pathetically lame.) The only "mandate" that every element of the GOP agreed they had was to halt the 2009 accomplishments of the Obamaniacs; so rather than ask for revisions to those policies, like responsible adults, they decided to deadlock the Federal government altogether in ancitipation of the 2012 election and hope that a Republican President would give them some direction.

Then the campaign began late last year, and the candidates stepping forward for the Republicans were just embarrassing, so much so that I was almost insulted as a US citizen by the assumption that I couldn't see through them. Donald Trump? What is this, a joke? I didn't mind Sarah Palin so much in 2008, and certainly felt she was the victim of an undeserved hatchet job; but it wasn't long before she revealed that she was in over her head. Michelle Bachmann looked like she might be a more substantive version of Palin at first glance, but that didn't last long. Herman Cain. . . . He would have broken Hancock's record as the most inexperienced presidential candidate in history, his only claim to fame was running some pizza chain I'd never heard of, he wrote tax policy the way Yoko Ono wrote Beatles songs, and to paraphrase Anastas Mouradian, he put his foot in his mouth as soon as he opened it. It's a pretty frightening idea that none of those things managed to drive away his support base. Instead he was sunk by an extramarital affair--the oldest trap in politics, so much so that watching a serious contender fall into it looked downright quaint.

Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, they were more of the same, and Ron Paul was the worst of all. I really can't imagine how any intelligent person could fall for his bankrupt, incoherent "philosophy." The only one I really liked was John Huntsman, but he never had a chance in a party hijacked by radicals. I hope he tries again at some point in the future when sanity has been restored to the GOP.

And then there's Romney. He was next in line by the conventional wisdom of Republican traditions; I had hoped that his victory in the primaries would be a sign that the mainstream of the party was reasserting itself. And his track record as governor of Massachusetts seemed to suggest centrism and pragmatism were important to him. But looking at his whole career, I think he's not so much centrist and pragmatic as he is inconsistent and easily influenced. He's also hampered by his lukewarm reception among the new GOP base. Most candidates run toward the extreme in the primaries and then switch to the center in the general after they've won their base's support. But he never really won his base's support; he just managed to outlast a bunch of self-defeating challengers. So now he has to continue to curry favor with the Republican base, and as I said, the Republican base has gone mad. I had hoped he'd pull this nutball party back into the mainstream, but instead we see the nutball party pulling him out of it. His selection of a running mate showed just how much in their orbit he really is.

Any possibility of my voting for Romney ended the day he announced Ryan as his choice for the other half of the ticket. Ryan is one of the few Republicans who's managed to build a bridge between the old-line party diehards and the Teabagging radicals. I'm sure he'd be a serious and effective Vice President, and can return the role to the prestige of involved technocrats that peaked with Bush the Elder, immediately evaporated with Quayle, saw a moderate return with Gore, was corrupted by the amoral Cheney, and is now being largely disregarded with the ineffective Biden. Ryan also would give the White House a channel of communication with its allies in the Capitol, something that most administrations of the last generation have lacked as the importance of legislative experience is downplayed in selecting candidates.

However, Ryan is an extremist at heart, even if he's polished enough to coat his extremism with a thick veneer of conventional respectability which can be mistaken for mainstream moderation. I couldn't believe he was able to keep a straight face during his acceptance speech as he went on and on about how committed he is to saving Medicare. The fact that he was able to do so, and the larger truth to which that fact points, makes him dangerous; and since Romney is in some ways actually worse than Kerry when it comes to equivocating his positions on the issues, there's every reason to believe Ryan is going to have influence out of proportion to his office in crafting administration positions. And since his positions are deemed acceptable by the lunatics who are running the asylum in the GOP's House caucus, we get a glimpse at how radical those positions will be. And the opposition party generally dances to the tune called by even the weakest Presidents. The Democratic Congress of '07 and '08 did so for Bush; the Republican Congress in office now is trying to resist the pressure to follow suit, but is finding that the only other option is to do nothing at all. You'd have to go back to Andrew Johnson's term to find an opposition party that was able to use even huge Congressional majorities to set the agenda in the face of presidential resistance. So electing Romney and Ryan could conceivably allow radical fringe moments that in happier times were sidelined by the two-party system to seize control, for a time, over both parties.

On the other hand, rejecting the Republican ticket will hopefully send the message that bad behavior will not be rewarded, that uncompromising obstructionism is completely unacceptable in a party seeking seats in a legislature that is very different from Westminstrian Parliaments, and that the electorate demands a return to responsible political behavior.

I believe that voting Republican this year would be reckless to the point of immorality.

But that's just me. There are, of course, many Americans who feel differently. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:33, August 30, 2012 (UTC)