Matt Taibbi has it right. As usual.
Is This the Most Boring Election Ever?
by: Matt Taibbi
I was channel-surfing the other day, looking for something genuinely interesting on television, like maybe a repeat of the Big Ten Network’s Diamond Report or video of a wrecked Nazi tugboat, when my fingers got stuck on a news channel. There, lighting up an NBC broadcast with her smile, was New Hampshire’s Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte, talking about her Vice Presidential qualifications …
Who? That was my first question, but then my second obstacle was the sudden recollection that we were in an election year. I’d actually forgotten this was the case. Four years ago at this time, that would never have happened – we were in the middle of one of the most witheringly nasty primary fights ever, with people very nearly coming to blows depending on where you stood in the Hillary-Barack battle.
Back then there was great nervousness in the country even beyond the Democratic Party’s intramural mess, as the specter of the first black presidency was hanging over everything: People as diverse as Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright were dragged into racial controversies, while whispers about Obama’s birthplace and “Muslim” heritage spread across the country like wildfire.
This year? It’s been eerily quiet. The apathy factor in American presidential politics has seemingly never been higher.
As if to combat this, we’re getting stories now about how this election is closer than you’d think, how Obama is in for a “tight race” or a “fierce fight” with Romney, and how the Republican challenger is “closing in” to a “statistical dead heat.”
They’re going to say this, and they may even have numbers to back it up, like this week’s Gallup poll showing Obama with just a two-point lead. But I think it’s a mirage.
The people who work for the wire services and the news networks are physically incapable of writing sentences like, “This election is even more over than the Knicks-Heat series.” They are required, if not by law then by neurological reflex, to describe every presidential campaign as “fierce” and “drawn-out” and “hotly-contested.”
But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It’s just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. Even the news reporters who are paid to drum up dramatic undertones are having a hard time selling Romney as half of a titanic title bout.
—snip—
No more need be said.
The political junkies on both sides of the table will continue going back to Taibbi’s Bangkok bathhouse for more increasingly numbed-out wanking, but the story is already over.
Need more proof?
Sure Read on.
Anyone who wants to claim that Romney has a chance in this election needs only to watch candidate Romney’s attempt to connect with black voters via his rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” to be disabused of his illusions:
This year, it’s not like that. Obviously Republican voters do hate Obama and genuinely believe he’s created a brutally repressive socialist paradigm with his health care law, among other things. But Romney was a pioneer of health care laws, and there will be dampened enthusiasm on the Republican side for putting him in office.
Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush.
In other words, Obama versus Bush actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. George Bush’s reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama’s first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it.
—snip—
Add to this sad shit Mitt Romney’s bald-faced lying and spinning about his so-called “positions.” Like this:
Mitt Romney: ‘I’ll Take A Lot Of Credit’ For Auto Industry Recovery
Despite his 2008 call to “let Detroit go bankrupt,” presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Monday that he would “take a lot of credit” for his impact on the U.S. automobile industry’s comeback.
During an interview with WEWS-TV in Cleveland following a campaign stop, Romney said his views helped save the industry.
“I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy,” Romney said. “And finally, when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.”
Both General Motors and Chrysler ended up taking the massive federal loans supported by both President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush. The bailout included managed bankruptcy filings for both companies. According to the federal judge who presided over Chrysler’s bankruptcy in 2009, the company would not have survived without the bailout. Ford survived without taking a government loan.
Romney’s stance on the bailouts and his infamous 2008 New York Times op-ed “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” have come up throughout the campaign, especially ahead of February’s primary in Michigan. In that editorial, Romney argued that a government bailout for ailing auto giants Chrysler and General Motors would do more harm than good.
“If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye,” Romney wrote. “In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.”
—snip—
And then top it off with a good dose of Ratpub base apathy/antipathy.
Former presidential hopeful Rick Santorum urged his supporters to back fellow Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign Monday in a late-night email that ignored that Santorum once calling Romney the “worst Republican in the country” during their bitter contest.
Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania and a newly minted celebrity among conservatives, said that the one-time rivals would unite to deny President Barack Obama’s re-election. But in a nod that the wounds had not yet healed, he reminded his supporters of the deep differences between the two and that misgivings had not yet abated.
Now heap on a goodly helping of sheer, stubborn, ideologically-driven, effectively intelligent and tactically quite successful opposition from the Ron Paul-led Libertarians.
Ron Paul supporters eye upcoming conventions in delegate-grabbing quest
Published May 08, 2012-Associated Press
Don’t tell Ron Paul the Republican primary is over. He’s too busy mucking up Mitt Romney’s efforts to accumulate enough convention delegates to officially claim the GOP nomination for president.
Paul’s supporters won control of state GOP conventions in Maine and Nevada last weekend, stripping Romney of delegates in Maine but graciously letting him keep the ones he won in Nevada’s February caucuses. Next up: Republican state conventions in Minnesota, Missouri, Louisiana and Iowa.
—snip—
Plus the ongoing problems of Fox News’s parent company, Murder, Inc.…err, ahh, I mean Murdoch, Inc…and you have a blowout in the making.
In my most recent previous post here (Is The Preznidential Fix Working Too Well?, which was welcomed with the combination of apathy, denial and panic of dedicated junkies everywhere when confronted with evidence of the futility of their jones …e.g., “WTF? You’re sounding crazier by the minute.”-Booman), I pointed out the incredible lopsidedness of this match-in-the-making and wondered if the matchmaker/fixers had perhaps gotten too sure of themselves.
Could be. But not as long as the networks and other media can keep the (s)election junkies on the nod with hourly “BREAKING!!!” news about the breathless pace of the process.
Whadda buncha maroons!!!
(And I don’t mean the controllers.)
Later…
AG
