On the one hand, the GOP is telling us Obama is leading us down the road to "socialism," that he’s "appeasing" our enemies and stiffing our friends, and that he’s basically destroying the country. On the other hand, they haven’t put forth a candidate who has a chance in heck of beating him. The leading candidate for the party’s nomination is a caricature of everything voters are sick and tired of: he’s a phony, a spoiled rich guy, an automaton whose words and actions convey, above all, an almost comical impression of inauthenticity.
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Romney isn’t so much a serious candidate for the presidency as he is a national joke: his record as a "flip-flopper," his inability to project anything remotely resembling sincerity, and his Richie Rich persona have all combined to turn him into a human piñata for both liberals and conservatives to pick apart. Which leads us back to the question I asked at the beginning: is the GOP deliberately throwing this election?
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If voters are in the mood to punish the Democrats somehow, and if they can’t in good conscience do it on the presidential level, then isn’t it more likely they’ll take it out on the rest of the ticket? If Republicans can retain control of the House, that may be enough to keep them from regretting their loss at the top of the ticket. Another wave of victories on the state and local level will perhaps be enough to satiate them, at least for the moment, until they get another crack at the White House. Then they can sit back and blame the President for everything, as the crisis unfolds, while cat-calling from the sidelines: a perfect set-up for career politicians who have no principles, no sense of duty to the country, and no compunctions about defrauding their supporters. With Congress in their hot little hands, they can obstruct the President’s domestic agenda and heckle him into getting more aggressive on the overseas front – a perfect vantage point from which to observe the rapidly accelerating decline of the American empire.
