Did Mitt Romney Really Win?

            The challenger seemed cool, calm, and collected while the incumbent seemed spent, tired, and bothered. With the blessings of the “moderator,” the incumbent allowed himself to be interrupted time and again by his opponent, often allowing him the last word even when it wasn’t his turn. This was not the Obama we were expecting, nor was it the Romney we were expecting. But my question: did Romney really win the debate, or did Obama just gamble and lose?

            Romney had an answer for everything thrown at him. Or at least it sounded that way. He gave the same tired answers he always gives. He denies Obama’s accusations about his tax cuts without giving numbers to back them up. He spoke about his Medicare program as being eons better, but without having figures to aid his argument. He talked about studies that no one’s ever heard of, just trying to disprove the reliability of surveys in general. He said things like “I could name more” when referring to hospitals where Obama’s plan has failed, but promptly refused to. At the end of the day, Romney didn’t win the debate. He simply fooled America into thinking he did.

            That’s not to say Obama didn’t help Romney’s case. The president seemed unprepared, as if he wasn’t speaking from prewritten prompts like his challenger, but rather as if he was speaking from the heart. He wasn’t the eloquent guy we picked four years ago. Last night we saw a guy didn’t want to lie and say he was the greatest president ever, but who just wanted a fair shot. And that’s not the guy we need.

            All’s fair in love, war, and politics. Obama should have come out swinging from the start and hammered Romney on his 47% comments, on his overseas bank accounts, on some of the things he really did at Bain Capital. But instead, we saw Obama try to take the moral high road. The trouble is, there is no moral high road in politics, especially if you’re running for president. Sure, neither candidate had any good zingers for the other, but Obama needs to press Romney hard and often until he spins out of control and self-destructs.

            Romney is an enigma in presidential history. Never before has someone said less and stood as good a chance at winning than Romney. The fact that he changes his opinion more often than John Kerry should take voters aback. But the most egregious offense committed by Romney is the one he is most heralded for. When he talks about balancing the budget, he says he’s going to go through every government program. He’s going to ask himself “Do we really need this?” If not, he’s going to cut it. This is a man who thinks balancing the national budget is as easy as cleaning up a spreadsheet.

            Romney is like a middle school eighth grader new to Facebook. He’s got a lot of friends, yet he feels starved for attention. So what does he do? He posts a status saying if he doesn’t think you’re necessary to his friend list, he’s going to delete you. That way he can balance his list.

            This is the major problem with Mitt Romney. He has literally stupefied half of America by saying one idiotic thing after another, with each one contradicting the other in order to please some base of the electorate. But in doing so he has somehow brought together a base of people who don’t care what he says, who don’t listen, and who have been fooled into thinking he has them in mind.

            Make no mistake about it. Last night we saw a new Romney, a man determined. But he’s not determined to help anybody, least of all the middle class he so righteously glorified last night. He just wants to win.

Mitt Romney's Ohio Problem

            As goes Ohio, so goes the nations. This is the sentence that Mitt Romney should be repeating over and over until November 6. He should breathe this particular construction of words both day and night, awake and asleep, in moments of triumph and defeat, and through mouths of food. He should do this because no Republican has ever made it to the White House without winning Ohio since Abraham Lincoln. In order to defeat President Obama, Romney absolutely has to win in Ohio. And Romney’s chances of winning Ohio depend completely on who he picks to be his VP.

            As of now, there has been no final decision on who the VP will be. Some say Rubio. Others say Condi. And others still insist on former candidates like Pawlenty. But if Romney realizes that has to win Ohio at all costs, his pick should be Ohio Senator Rob Portman. Portman is a well known politician in Ohio, while being lesser known around the rest of the country. He stays out of the limelight, but has been campaigning with Romney for quite a while now. Romney needs a name that the people of Ohio trust, and a name that the rest of the country can accept.

            Portman could well be the most important person in the 2012 election.

            With the Republican National Convention fast approaching, Romney has a decision to make. He could pick a Sarah Palin type candidate, one who demands more attention than himself. He could pick a candidate like Condi to go after minority votes. He could go for Bachmann to gain Tea Party support. He could literally pick anyone. But if he were smart, he would pick Portman. Portman doesn’t necessarily promise Romney a victory Ohio. But any other candidate will nearly guarantee that Romney will lose the swing state, and thereby lose the election.

            Romney will undoubtedly pour mountains of money into campaigning in Ohio, but that still might not be enough. I’m not sure if Romney has realized yet that there isn’t enough money in the world to buy trust. He will have to barter for it, and he could sacrifice a lot more than a spot on his ticket to a guy from Ohio.

            Just remember, Mitt. As goes Ohio, so goes your legacy. 

The Heavy Burden of LeBron James

            Tonight is the most important night of LeBron James’s life. Up until now he was a magnificent loser, a tragedy of God-given talent meant to wow us but never win us back. Tonight LeBron can become more than a loser, more than a tragedy and even if he can’t win all of us back, he can certainly win most of us.

            People love a winner. Ask Kobe. Ask Kevin Garnett. Ask Ben Roethlisberger. It doesn’t matter what you did or how big of an asshole you really are; people will love you if you win. And tonight, LeBron is as close to that elusive ring as he’s ever been. With one win tonight, he can begin to repair his broken image, and stand just a little taller in the shadow cast by Michael Jordan.

            Tonight LeBron can silence everyone who has been begging him to lose for two years. All it will take is 48 minutes of unrelenting and uncompassionate basketball. He will have to play like he’s never played before. He will have to play more than a perfect game; he will have to be an Olympian waging holy war on Oklahoma City. Tonight he will have to be more than just LeBron James to win. He will have to be Aries, god of war. He will have to make fools out of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook and James Harden. If LeBron truly wants to be remembered as one of the greats, he will have to destroy his opponents in a way never before seen in basketball. For tonight, LeBron has to be the greatest to ever play the game. Anything short of that simply will not do.

            Tonight, LeBron has to play as if he’ll never see the hardwood again, as if he will fade into oblivion once the clock runs out. His legacy will be in his own hands then. If he wants to become more than just a man, he’ll have to play like that. Forget the Super Friends, LeBron. Tonight it is only you on that court. With a decisive victory you stand the most gain. But you also stand the most to lose. It won’t mean the same if you win in Game 6 or Game 7. You have the entire NBA in a stranglehold tonight, LeBron, and you have two choices. Either let them go to fight another day and be seen as weak, or finish them off once and for all, like the titan you so desperately wanted to be.

            Tonight’s the night, LeBron. Go out there and play the game like it’s never been played, or be cast as a failure forever, as someone who couldn’t get it done when the moment was biggest.

            This is the moment you gave up everything for. This is what you were born to do. So go and get it, or else why bother at all? Some players get remembered, LeBron, but legends never die.

John Edwards Goes Free

            Sometimes even scumbags catch a break. Today, federal prosecutors dropped their case against former presidential hopeful John Edwards after the corruption trial against him ended in deadlock. Edwards was acquitted by North Carolina jurors on one count of accepting illegal campaign contributions. The five other felony charges against him ended in deadlock, causing the judge to call for a mistrial. He will not be retried on the five unresolved counts.

            Edwards allegedly used his campaign contributions to finance and cover up an affair he had. It was reported that up to $1 million in secret payments from wealthy donors was being used to hide his pregnant mistress while he ran for president in 2008.

            Edwards is a two-timing hack who cheated on his late cancer-stricken wife and didn’t even feel bad about it. I’m sure at some point Newt Gingrich called Edwards with high praise and well wishes, telling him to hang tough and that this will all blow over soon. People are quick to forget and even quicker to vindicate any degenerate on the grounds that they’ve changed.

            But people like Edwards never change. They smile and pose for pictures with their families by day, but by night they’re always on the prowl. And guys like Edwards have an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Not just when it comes to women, but with anything they know they shouldn’t be doing. They’re greedy and they think they won’t get caught. And worst of all, even if they’re caught red handed hiding a pregnant mistress with campaign contributions while their wife is dying in a hospital bed, they know eventually we’ll forget all about it.

            That’s just how these people work. Understanding a politician’s motives is like understanding the old riddle: Why does a dog lick itself?

            Because he can.

The Most Boring Election in History

            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. 

The Hard Goodbye of Newt Gingrich

            Newt Gingrich, the masquerading musketeer of morals, has called it quits. He announced last week that he would suspend his campaign, and today announced he will endorse Mitt Romney to take on Obama in November. His last electoral victory coming in South Carolina, the only way to describe Gingrich’s decision would be: about damn time.

            Perhaps the worst candidate this season who threw his name into the hat, Gingrich leaves behind nothing more than a bad taste in the mouths of the American public. He wasn’t the dumbest, he wasn’t the angriest, he wasn’t the craziest and he wasn’t the least qualified candidate running; but he was the worst. He wasn’t fun at all. He was offensive. He didn’t make sense. He toed the unfavorable line between reality and fiction (moon colonies, seriously?) and he paid because of it. And worst of all was that he was never genuinely interested in what he was doing. He's just a fat and lazy prick who refused to go quietly into the night, and we'll hate him because of that forever.

            There was that brief moment when we thought he stood a chance, but that came and went faster than dirt in the wind. The monumental defeat that was the Gingrich campaign seemed to drag on forever, bleeding out but never wising up. He waited too long to quit. Had he ended earlier he could have been considered as a running mate. But now the American audience has caught scent of what Gingrich really is: a leech. He latches onto anything he thinks will make him better off, bleeding his host dry before moving onto the next victim.

            I will not miss Newt Gingrich like I miss Santorum or Perry. I will not hold him in contempt like I do Cain or Bachmann. Truthfully, I will forget about Gingrich as soon as he’s gone. That’s the fate he’s sealed for himself. He’s neither a tragic hero nor a graceful loser. At the end of the day, he’s just a nobody. 

The Story of the Midnight Rambler

            Levon Helm, singer and drummer of The Band, died on April 19 after losing a battle with throat cancer. He was 71.

A now mostly-forgotten voice of the South, Helm leaves behind a hole in both Americana and rock and roll that will never be filled again. Sharp in his growl, electrifying in performance and enigmatic in his persona, Helm was honestly an American icon.

            You’ve probably forgotten the names of the songs or how the words go exactly, but as soon as you hear his distinctive, and at times haunting, bark you remember exactly why it was that you loved The Band.

            He was one of a kind, but the world forgot about Levon Helm. Sure, he was still known in music circles and for his local concerts in Woodstock, N.Y. known as Midnight Rambles, but to the wider public he was just another old-timer. Helm was in fact an inspiration for generations of musicians. He was master of his art. He was a riverboat gambler. He was an unforgiving critic. At the end of the day, he can only be described one way: he was Levon.

            I remember the first time I heard “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Music was never the same after that. I judged everything else through a scope measured by that song. It’s an unfair comparison in retrospect, but it seemed right for a long time. That song didn’t just sum up the tensions still simmering from the Civil War. It didn’t just sum up the South. It was an introspective look at the heart and backbone of America itself. It created a triumphant sense of defeat, a colossal collapse of body but not spirit; it was the phoenix rising from the ashes of old hopes and dreams. It changed the way many people looked at America and American music.

            People like Helm come around once in a lifetime. He wasn’t just a drummer in a band. He was the pounding backbeat for the narration of American history. Looking back, it’s impossible to tell where the musician ends and the fable begins. That’s what makes him legendary.

            Figures like Levon Helm don’t really die. They become a part of history, eventually fictionalized to heroic proportions. They become part of folklore. Some people will say if you listen hard enough you can still hear his Appalachian cry in the wind. So goodnight, Levon Helm. Yours will be the story of the Midnight Rambler, claimed by history to be remembered as more of a myth than a man.