Four More Days, Four More Years, the slogans have been flying like crazy the last few days. This is the one election in our lifetime where the choice has never been so clear. Depending on one’s political orientation, it’s either painfully obvious that Obama is the vastly superior choice or just as obvious that Romney is. Depending entirely on which polls you’re watching, either Obama has a modest edge or Romney does.
Well, in Friday’s U.S. News the ultra conservative Mary Kate Cary published a column entitled, "Why Romney Will Win" basically rehashing all the Republican arguments that have been put forth the last 15 months about why Obama has been an utter failure as President and why Romney will be the Not Obama. (Not to worry, USN gives liberal columnist Robert Schlesinger Jr. equal space and he has run column after column as to why the Republicans are living in a fantasy land if they think they can beat Obama.) But with Cary’s column out last Friday, I thought I’d like to contribute my own column giving the other perspective, and for reasons quite different than even the Democrats have bothered to articulate.
I believe the polls are all wrong. Obama’s not just going to win, he’s going to win big. This reminds me a lot of the 1980 race in which all the polls all the way up until election day had Carter and Reagan neck and neck. I remember a perfectly ridiculous poll that was done on a Chicago radio station in which the deejay asked everyone to wait until midnight and everyone who was voting for Carter flush their toilets immediately at midnight. Then at exactly 12:05 everyone voting for Reagan were to flush their toilets. They could then call the election depending on which candidate caused Chicago water pressure to go down the most at the appointed time.
You might guess what happened. At midnight as the report went, exactly half the toilets in Chicago were flushed. At 12:05, exactly the other half were flushed. It was supposed to be the tightest race in history and yet when the votes were counted, Reagan was in by a landslide. So much for polling. That’s how I feel this year too.
I can briefly summarize the obvious facts that suggest that the Republicans have been behaving with a distinct air of desperation for quite some time now. Despite enormous stonewalling from the opposition, Obama has very successfully passed bill after bill that the Republicans had supported just a few years ago, but now oppose simply because they can’t have Obama getting credit for anything, even if it was originally their idea. They say we’re worse off now than four years ago. This is just another sign of their desperation. You have turn a pretty blind eye to all the evidence to believe that. You have to completely ignore the facts that for eight years under Bush the economy lost jobs every single month and that for four years under Obama the economy has added jobs every single month.
They harp on the debt as if it’s sending us down the road to oblivion, claiming that Obama has increased the debt more than all other Presidents before him. Again, a blind eye to the facts. They are ignoring the very inconvenient truth that Reagan more than doubled the debt and that Bush doubled it again. Why is it that the Republicans have no problem with a ballooning debt when it’s a Republican President doing it, but cry bloody murder when it’s a Democrat?
Because of the severe economic emergency that Obama inherited, he temporarily increased the debt by 50% and has a solid plan for paying down all the added debt by the end of the decade, which completely refutes all the cynics who believe quite erroneously that we are now so badly in debt that we can never get out of it. That’s utter nonsense. The nation has always had a lot of debt, we’ve spent most of our 235 year history with debt levels higher than most economists think is healthy, and yet we’ve always managed to pay it off. We will this time too. Again, Obama’s enemies are ignoring the reality that at least a third of the $16 trillion debt number is based on wholly unwarranted assumptions that the bail-out and stimulus monies will never be paid back and that the health care plan will cost trillions of additional dollars, again ignoring the inconvenient truth that most of the bail-out money has already been repaid and that the health care plan is specifically designed to be more cost effective than our current system and thus will not only not add to the debt but actually reduce it. Take out those two completely wrong assumptions and the real debt number is closer to 9 trillion, which is LOWER than when Obama took office.
These are the obvious arguments, some of which have been articulated repeatedly, some of which have not been at all. Obama is not the reason we have an 8% unemployment rate but he is the reason we don’t have 20% unemployment. Obama is not the reason we haven’t fully recovered from the worst recession in history but he is the reason why we haven’t been plunged into another Great Depression. Really, the only legitimate grievance that Romney and the Republicans have against Obama is that things are not healing quickly enough. The only thing they can claim is that perhaps the recovery would have happened faster under President McCain.
But that is Monday morning quarterbacking in the extreme. When oh when in our nation’s history has any president succeeded in turning around a terrible economy in the space of four short years? The answer is never. Roosevelt’s plans did not kick until his second term. The same was true of Reagan. In fact, unlike Obama who can at least claim that things have improved modestly, the economy in 1984 under Reagan was actually in worse shape than when he inherited it from Carter in 1980. Yet he had no problem winning reelection. The same with Clinton in 1996. The voters understood that no President can fix this big a mess in just one term. This time around, the Republicans’ whole strategy has been to obscure this very inconvenient truth from the American people.
Let’s look at the other side of the argument - What does Romney have to offer? One can argue that he may or may not have been an enormously skilled businessman. But even granting that argument (and I’m not saying it’s true), do businessmen make good Presidents? If history is any indicator, the answer is a resounding No! The skills that are required to run a corporation are so completely different from those required to run a government that they bear no resemblance to each other. Corporate CEO’s live in a world where they give orders and those orders are carried out or they fire people. Government leaders must persuade 51% or more of the elected legislators that they are right if they hope to get anything done. If corporations were subject to the same rules of procedure, most would not be in business long. So you might argue that democracy is a terrible thing and that government should be run more like a business. But this ignores the fact that government is not in the business of making profits, but rather in the business of protecting our liberties. When it comes to that fundamental objective, the U.S. has always been willing to say "cost be damned." You spend what you have to spend to accomplish this objective because otherwise what’s the point? This is as it should be.
There have been many candidates for the White House who came from business backgrounds and they have all failed miserably in their attempts to win the office. The voters recognized that a business background is not very good training to be President. There has only been one U.S. President who came from a business background and that was Herbert Hoover. Need I say more?
So if we can eliminate business expertise as a qualifying factor to be President, then the only legitimate thing to look at in the case of Mitt Romney is his performance as governor of Massachusetts. So how did he do? According to the Boston newspapers, not at all well. He came in with a flourish but very quickly lost his standing. For the last three of his four years as governor, he was mostly an absentee head of state as he spent most of his energies building the organization he would need to run for President, and also spent most of his time doing so outside of Massachusetts. When he left office after only one term, he had the lowest poll numbers of any Massuchusetts governor in history and was ranked 48th of the nation's 50 governors. That’s all anyone needs to know about Mitt Romney.
And here’s all you need to know about Obama. The only incumbent presidents who have ever been turned out of office have been those who inherited a flourishing economy and a bright country and then had it go down the tubes under their watch. Never in the 235 years of the nation’s history has there ever been an elected incumbent president who inherited a disaster and then was turned out of office simply because they had failed to completely fix the mess in the very limited space of the first term. Never! And though the polls do show that not all Americans are crazy about Obama’s policies, the polls also consistently show that most Americans genuinely like our president as a person. And never has a president been turned out of office who is as well liked as Barack Obama.
Tomorrow the voters will prove the pundits wrong. They will prove that they understand the nation stands a much better chance of achieving a full recovery under Obama than under Romney. Obama has made some very respectable progress and he must be allowed another four years to finish the job. We must not start over again from scratch. We must not return to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place.
That is why I know Obama will win and that Mary Kate Cary and those of her ilk are just indulging in wishful thinking. But I will be even bolder and predict that the polls have been wrong and that he will win not by a nose but by a mile.
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Note: I should probably clarify what I mean by a "big" win. Historically, a landslide has been considered 55% or higher. Reagan's huge victory in 1984 was around 58%. The 1972 Nixon/McGovern race has the distinction of being the biggest landslide in history when Nixon landed about 59% of the vote. I remember in 2008 telling some Republican acquaintances that I believed that all the polls that had the McCain/Obama race as a squeaker to be wrong and that I predicted a landslide for Obama. The next day they were thumbing their noses at me. "See? It wasn't a landslide. You were wrong!" I said, "What do you mean? Obama got 54.5% of the vote. Of course it was a landslide - or damn close." "54.5% is not a landslide." "Then what is?" "80 percent!" Well, that was the end of that conversation as they betrayed the fact they knew nothing about the history of presidential races. No president in history has ever gotten close to 80%, except George Washington who is the only president elected unanimously by acclimation. But 55% is the traditional number that defines a landslide. Since Obama received 54.5% in 2008, my prediction is that he will do at least that well or better this time around.
Thursday, 11-8-12 2 a.m.
A brief election post-mortem:
Though I am pleased that our man kept his job, I must confess I'm very disappointed with Tuesday night's outcome. I am shocked that a candidate as weak as Romney who did just about everything wrong and almost seemed to go out of his way to alienate the voters did so remarkably well. I will never understand how he managed to capture 48% of the vote. Obama is still president and that is good. But there is no mandate and that is what I was dearly hoping for. We did not beat the Republicans back enough to defeat the Tea Party, which will still be with us and will continue to block any attempts to get anything done.
At least it was a clear victory. As of this hour, Obama has nearly a 3 million plurality in the popular vote and that is a whole lot better than it was this time last night when at one point Romney had even won. In fact as more votes are counted, the President's plurality just keeps growing. Though it is still not a mandate (though some leading Democrats including Letterman tonight are describing it as a mandate), it's still plenty enough so that the election cannot be called a flip of the coin, which is exactly how the Republicans were clearly hoping to characterize it. I could not believe what a fool Karl Rove was making of himself on Fox last night as he steadfastly refused to accept the count, insisting that the call on Ohio was wrong and that we wouldn't know for sure that Romney had not won until the Florida count was finally in. And just what the hell is going on down in Florida anyway? What's holding up their numbers? They keep promising us a count within hours and it's nearly 2 a.m. now on Thursday and they still haven't delivered.
So I'm afraid we may not be looking at a whole lot of change. Wednesday morning, nothing was particularly different than it had been Tuesday morning. Obama is still President, the Democrats still hold the Senate, the Republicans the House and no one got enough votes to create any clout - a recipe for continued gridlock.
There are two big positives that have emerged since last night. First, Boehner has called for greater cooperation from the Republicans and that's a very different cry from their former pledge to be the party of No. Second, Harry Reid has called upon the Congress to finally change the filibuster rules, which have probably been the single most responsible factor for all the obstructionism. The rules were changed in the 90s to make a filibuster much easier and therefore not provide a lot of incentive not to do it. The original idea behind the filibuster and the way is was practiced for over 200 years was that substantial sacrifices were attached to it so it would only be used during a crisis. Until the 90s, there were only a handful of times the filibuster was used in all of history. Since the 90s, and particularly the last four years, it's been used hundreds of times. So if they can fix just that one problem, that will be great. We will see.
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