Thoughts on the Debate

I actually came away from the debate thinking President Obama did just fine.  But the chatter about it - Democratic and Republican - is probably much more important that the debate itself, and that chatter leads me to wonder if the debate might be for Obama what the "There you go again, Mr President" debate was for Jimmy Carter, the last Democratic incumbent President to seek reelection in the face of an stagnant economy and an international mess.

The thought of a "President Romney" distresses me.  I have no idea what he believes or what he will try to do.  The man is a shape shifter.  There is no position or statement or promise or record that cannot be changed, disavowed or "etch-a-sketched" away.  But I have come at last to the conclusion that perhaps what seems to be duplicity is actually hyper-pragmatism: he'll say and do whatever it takes to get where he wants to go.  In this malleability, Romney reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton, who also was something of a shape shifter.  And if I am right about that, there are worse things than could happen than having Mitt Romney become President.

But I confess that, if Romney does win, I will feel bad for Barack Obama.  He is a pragmatist as well, but he had one thing above all else that he wanted to achieve, and he did what it took to accomplish that.  He staked his entire presidency on a single minded effort to do something about what is by far  biggest domestic problem we face.  To get that, he gave up a lot to the ideologues of his own party, including a "stimulus" package that was a travesty.  I regret that, but I understand what motivated it.  As Bismark famously said, "Politics is the art of the possible."  The guy was a newbie.  When we needed someone with the experience and contacts of an LBJ, what we got was a very smart community organizer with virtually no political experience at any level.  For all that, though, he has done a creditable job given the hand he was dealt and the irrational, visceral hatred he faced from the opposition.  He deserves more than the two years he actually had to make his mark.  And the Republican Party deserves way more than 4 years in purgatory for the mess they created.

So, I don't think a Romney Presidency will be a catastrophe.  The fact is that we have no idea WHAT it will be.  But from his Massachusetts governorship and his Salt Lake City  intervention, I take the message that he does what works.  The really scary thing is whether he can control his own ideologues.  Romeny doesn't really scare.  But Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertston, Grover Norquist, et al truly do.