Sprint to the Finish: The Last 15 meters

November 3, 2012.  Even the indefatigable Gail Collins sounds tired, in her last column before Nov 6. 
My swimming coach used to say races are won in the last 15 meters, when you are really burning out, arms like lead, legs dead, and there's that finish wall ahead, can you hold your breath and burn your last few molecules of sugar and ATP?

It has all come down to who is more motivated, Democrats or Republicans. Who is willing to wait on line. That is all democracy demands of its citizens in this nation. And for some, even that inconvenience will be too much to ask. They will stay home and watch it on TV. They will have excuses for why they did not need to vote or did not want to vote.

The choice can be crystallized into a simple proposition: Do you believe in the possibility of good government or do you believe in no government? 

Or, if you are one of those who votes on "the man" rather than the issues:  Do you believe in President Obama or Mr. Romney?  

Mad dog admits to a certain color blindness on this one:  Mr. Romney is the ultimate con man--look up "con man" in the dictionary and they'll have a picture of Mitt Romney right there. He is a complexity of hating government regulation, except when he doesn't, banking in off shore accounts and accusing Mr. Obama of apologizing to the world for America (as if an offshore account is an endorsement of America), of bragging about Romneycare until it became Obamacare, when it became an anathema.  The list goes on... and on. The fact is, this guy is not even a Republican. He's a fast-talking, slick used car salesman, selling not cars, because he insists American car companies are shipping jobs to China. No, he is selling fantasies, or, put less delicately, lies.

If I were a Republican, a Republican who had voted for Ronald Reagan, for George H.W. Bush, for Gerald Ford, for Eisenhower, I would still be unable to bear the stench emanating from Mr. Romney. Couldn't do it. 

But for Mad Dog, the basic proposition is are you more afraid of Big government or of Bad government. You surely will get Bad government from the Republicans, by design. Even if you get Big government from the Democrats, well, maybe, sometimes, that's not so bad. Like when you have a really big problem, which covers the entire Atlantic seaboard.

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

Republicans: Thugs R Us

Mitch McConnell, Republican, Kentucky 

Here's what passes for punditry now a days.  David Brooks, deep thinker that he is, the man who has power lunches with all the movers and shakers in Washington, the man with inside information closes the door to his study and thinks about how he can get to the conclusion Mitt Romney ought to be elected.

Brooks has to get past certain, ahem, problems, with Mr. Romney: Namely, that he has no character, if you define character as what you do when you think nobody is looking. The only thing that matters to Mr. Romney is who is looking: So he says government regulation is all that is standing between America and prosperity when he is speaking to the Republican right, but when he is speaking to a mixed crowd, he is the new champion of government regulation--can't live without it he says.  The man is the definition of an empty suit: No conviction, no courage, just a con man doing the soft shoe trying to sell you a used car he knows is a lemon but he figures he'll be gone by the time you figure it out.  This truth about Mr. Romney poses certain, not disqualifying issues for Mr. Brooks. 

So, here's how Brooks comes to his grand insight.  Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate states, baldly and honestly that he has never and will never vote for any bill which might improve the U.S. economy because that might improve the chances Mr. Obama will be re-elected. He says so on national T.V., and it runs on The News Hour. In one sense, this is not surprising: It is exactly what the entire Republican House of Representatives has been acting like. It is clearly the strategy Republicans have reached in their caucus, behind closed doors. It is the ultimate scorched earth policy.  

So, Brooks reasons: Well, the Republicans are die hard partisans. They don't care if they burn down the whole building, as long as they take Mr. Obama down with them. His destruction is their only goal. Given that mind set, the only way to govern this country is to elect Romney and then the Republicans in the House and Senate will behave in the interests of the country and they'll undo the gridlock, and we'll have a functioning government again.

So, the question Mad Dog wishes to put before his thoughtful readers is this: Do you see anything wrong with this picture?



P.S.:  Unrelated but wonderful cartoon

Matt Davies, Tribune Media Services

FEMA: Big Government's Got Your Back

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Mitt Romney said the Federal  Emergency Management Agency ought to be dismantled and it's work given to the states, or better yet, to private industry.

All the Tea Party folks cheered. 

The private sector is always better, more efficient Mr. Romney says.

Keep your government hands off my Medicare Joe Sixpack roars.

We don't need government. We need to shrink government until it's small enough to drown it in my bathtub. That's the Republican line. 

Don't want no govment. Until we need it.

Like when the Coast Guard (federal government) picks you up out of your floundering yacht.  The billionaires get that service for free. No, wait, their taxes pay for it, or their taxes would pay for it if they paid taxes--but their money is in the Cayman Islands, untaxed.

Romney: Sending Those Jobs to China

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

GM spokesman,  Greg Martin, said,  "We've clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days and no amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country," 
--Huffington Post

Ah, it's Karl Rove time.  The tactic is to attack the opposition at its strength. So President Obama saved General Motors and Vice President Biden pricked Mr. Romney with the quip, "General Motors is alive and Osma Bin Laden is dead."  So Rove and his Republicans simply say, well, "GM being alive is not such a good thing for America--they are sending work to China."

Of course, it doesn't have to be true, you just say it, and you've got autoworkers calling up their union to ask whether or not it's true.

You can say President Obama was born in Bagdad, and his father was Sadam Hussein, and all that stands between America and prosperity is government regulations and women who are legitimately raped will not get pregnant and anything you want and Rush Limbaugh will believe it and broadcast it to 15 million willing believers.  

I prefer the Republican, Lincoln, who shares only the name with the current bunch of reprobates going by that name:  You can fool all the people some of the time; and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Amen, Mr. President.

The Calm: No Drama Obama

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Ryan Lizza, writing in The New Yorker explains why the strategy of the Obama team was high risk from the outset, and why Romney's "surge" is in a way, predictable.

What they did was to "front load" the campaign, with a ton of $ spent on attack ads in September to discredit Mitt Romney (not difficult), knowing there would be fewer dollars left at the end.  The same thing was done by Karl Rove to John Kerry, effectively.  The risk is that when Romney appears to be capable of rubbing two neurons together in the first debate, and when the Koch brothers start spending massively in October, the advantage will erode, and this may be the reason the advantage Obama had in the polls existed in the first place, and predictably would erode as Nov 6 approached.

So, it may not be the turning point was one poor performance in the first debate, but the tide was due to come in eventually.

That's grand strategy. 

The ground game is the worm's eye view and I'll be out there again, stepping around downed branches, this weekend.

Republican Response to Sandy: Give to Charity

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

When George W. Bush was asked what Americans could do to help, after Katrina swept through, he said, "Contribute to the Red Cross."  

This is, of course, the Republican response. Government is BAD. Don't even think about using the government. Use the private sector.  This notion was articulated by Ronald Reagan's famous quip, "The nine scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." 

So what we rely on are the churches and charity. That way we owe nothing to our fellow citizens. What is required of us is nothing. What we give is only what we want to give. Painless charity.

Mr. Romney today is organizing a charity relief for victims of Sandy. This shows how big hearted he is.  Heaven forbid he should mention the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the job, helping, restoring, responding.  We Republicans don't believe in government. We believe in charity.

At least, that's what today's Mitt is saying.

Wind swept New Hampshire

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 10.24.12

Yeah, I know, two posts in one day. This man must have too much time on his hands, or he is really gone around the bend.

A little of both.
They sent us home from work. The governor of New Hampshire told everyone to get off  the roads by 3 PM. Apparently not even health workers were exempt--word came down from the hospital, get out.

There's a big storm blowing up the East Coast and into the heartland Midwest. It's howling and it's threatening.  My father called that kind of thing, "Pathetic fallacy" which is what the storm in King Lear is,  when it reflects the storm in the king's mind. 

And now we have the end of this election approaching and there is a big storm blowing.  It's shaking the windows and rattling the walls,  as the new bard (Dylan) would say. 

And it all seems pretty appropriate somehow. Obama came in to office and just before he could be sworn in the storm hit.  He took office as 2 1/2 million jobs were lost in a year, the stock market collapsed, and along with it the prospects for retirement for many; a tsunami of  foreclosures swept over the land ; evictions exploded; General Motors and Chrysler careened toward the financial brink; banks went up in flames, even the venerable  Lehman Brothers; a Great Depression loomed like a brick wall toward which the entire country was hurtling and Obama had to steer this boat which could not be turned on dime. And that was just the home front: In Iraq things were going from bad to worse, and we still hadn't found Osma Bin Laden, and Afghanistan, which had once been conquered, was now fighting us like the Viet Cong, from behind rocks and crevices. Pakistan was no help, and in fact, turned out to be hiding Bin Laden.

As the editors of the New Yorker (from which the above paragraph is drawn) noted, the Onion 's headline was "Black Man Given Nation's Worse Job."

Or, as Maud would remind us, the best description was that Mr. Obama had been handed a "shit sandwich."

And it all raged and raged and the captain lashed himself to the mast and did not abandon ship.  He guided us through that storm. And today's storm somehow reminds me, not of Katrina, with the What Me Worry boy himself saying "Great Job, Brownie," but of the storm which swept the nation at the beginning of Mr. Obama's term, and now as we come full cycle, another storm. 

Let us hope, in Lincoln's words, "This, too, shall pass." 
And let us hope the captain will be  given his due.