Thoughts on the 2012 Presidential Campaign

Now that the cheering has died down some, I'd like to share some impressions I've gotten related to the Obama re-election.

First I want to say that the entire contest had an element of otherworldliness about it for me, from the cartoonish Republican primaries, all the way through the Romney concession speech. More about that speech later.

Why "otherwordliness"? Because there seemed to be entirely foreign sets of rules of ethics, common sense and equanimity operating throughout. The primary "process" produced, for the Republicans, one Willard Mitt Romney as their champion.

For their candidate, they ended up offering someone who was universally disliked and disrespected by the other primary candidates. The primary "process" consisted of a war of attrition fought on raw, bitter terms of engagement. Romney proved early that he was willing to fight as dirty and spend as much money as it took to reach his much coveted goal.

So, this was Obama's opponent. But what did that mean? Did it mean that he was opposed to Obama in some starkly drawn ideological terms? No, because by the time the campaign against Obama was over, Romney had hedged, flipped and fudged his way back through every rightwingnut stance he had hedged, fudged and flipped his way into to become the GOP nominee.

By the time of the third debate, it was impossible to tell what Romney believed about any major issue - so morphed and mutilated were his views. He partially or totally agreed with the president about just about everything having to do with foreign policy, and all but totally disavowed all the hardline ideas about domestic policy he had ridden to the top of the GOP (What? ME cut taxes on the rich? Never!).

And this is not even to mention how craven the man was at every turn when he had a chance to take any principled stance. When supporters uttered some vile birther drivel, he hmmed and hawwed. When major rightwing media figures or even government officials said vile, shameful and false things about specific women or women in general, he looked the other way.

He and his running-mate were caught blatantly lying throughout their whole compaign - most recently with the wretched fear-mongering ads about automobile jobs being taken away to China. But there has never been any indication that Mitt Romney ever saw any of this as anything but a simple means toward an end. They would not be dictated to by fact-checkers, and they would not be burdened by common decency.

I am left with the overall impression that a morally compromised, ambition-consumed caricature of a man still commanded half the popular vote in a contest with a principled, goal-oriented and decent President. It would have shaken me to my soul if he had won, but I am still shaken by the fact that this kind of man could garner such a following. It shakes my faith in my fellow human. It strengthens suspicions I have about what is truly in the hearts of those who have been most blessed with privilege in this country.

I'm sorry because it is an unsalvageably partisan and biased thing to say, but...
Anyone who can look at Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and struggle in forming opinions about what they are made of and what they might do in the Oval office, I say they are blind.

They are the same people who would crow from the highest mountains if someone other than Barack Obama had accomplished the landslide of legislative achivements he eked out in the face of unprecedented obstructionism.

Now, about that concession speech. Romney got big kudos for being gracious for the couple of minutes time it took to concede defeat. I say that a few minutes of saying generous things doesn't even begin to be in the vicinity of balancing out two full years of lying, race-baiting, pandering, equivocating politics. And I say good riddance and thank God that the country dodged the poison bullet his mysterious agenda would have brought us.

Four more years! God bless our president, and God bless our country.