For
every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be
trampled. Hunter S. Thompson said that. Unknowingly to him, Thompson summed up
perfectly politics in the New American Century. And if he could be brought back
from the dead to see the political crater we’ve landed ourselves in today, he’d
probably kill himself all over again.
Every
day we inch closer to that impossibly dark day in November known as Election
Day. To say this election season has been lackluster would be a terrific
understatement. Nobody in the GOP rose to take on Obama, even though he was
freefalling for quite awhile. I’m not saying any two-bit chump could have
beaten the incumbent, but certainly a real candidate could have made some
serious waves. But instead we’re stuck with the impossibly boring Mitt Romney pretending
he wasn’t the inspiration behind Obamacare and telling us his dog likes road
trips on the roof of the car.
In
2008, we thought we were witnesses to a brand new kind of president, a
modern-day JFK, FDR and Lincoln all rolled into one. He was that moment of
triumph, the instance of beauty; his election was supposed to be the single
greatest accomplishment our generation ever achieved. But for all his promises,
well wishes and good intentions, we were the souls that had to be trampled. It wasn’t that Obama betrayed us and it wasn’t
that he changed into some kind of monster. We just eventually realized that our
perceptions of him had been wrong from the start. Through no fault of his own he
couldn’t be JFK or FDR or Lincoln. And we hated him for that so we shot down
everything he tried to do, blamed him for every bad thing that happened and put
him under a microscope that no other sitting president has had to experience. In
the end, we trampled him back.
So
this is the dilemma we’ve put ourselves in. The battle for the White House has
come down to a pathological liar in Mitt Romney and the Great Compromiser in
Barack Obama. There is no poll accurate enough to tell who is going to win,
simply because the polls are from biased sources. Fox News polls will tell you
Romney has a double digit lead in every state plus Puerto Rico and D.C., while
MSNBC will say Obama has already secured his third and fourth terms. You can’t
trust anyone these days.
Instinct
tells me Obama will win, but not by a landslide. It is enormously difficult to
unseat an incumbent president, especially in war time. And when the platform of
the GOP is “Anybody but Obama,” the GOP is bound to fail (that tactic didn’t
work well for the Democrats in 2004, and it won’t work now). The trouble with Romney
is that he isn’t your typical Republican. He’s a Mormon, which may alienate
many on the religious right. He was governor of Massachusetts who created
Romneycare which may push away many Southern voters. There are no guaranteed
states for Romney this elections season, but Obama doesn’t seem set either. As
a black Democrat, his chances of winning big in the South look bad already. Texas
and Florida could well go to Romney just by default.
Still,
I can’t help but feel ultimately uninterested in this election. It was boring
from the start and will conclude with a yawn. The American public will most
likely go to bed early on that night in November, not because of a landslide
win, but simply because we’ve been bored to sleep.
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