If we conceded to Obama now, we could save a bundle.
I’m recoiling, not against the lack of real conservatism burning inside Mitt Romney nor to the fecklessness of the Romney campaign. I recoil against the pointless attacks on Romney by Republicans, conservatives and those who pretend they want Obama to lose.
Example: It was a conservative panel on a conservative network. Last Friday’s jobs report was so awful that if you walked up to the sinkhole and yelled downward, “Awful!” you wouldn’t hear an echo until the next jobs report. And what did those highly sophisticated panelists talk about? The weakness of this administration’s job-generating? Or the exciting new opportunities this failure opens up for Romney? Nowhere near! Their deliberations pinwheeled around “Why is it that even when the ball floats slowly over home plate and Romney takes his heftiest swing, he just can’t seem to hit it far enough?”
Is blaming the victim some new kind of fun? Is ignoring Obama and his team’s failure a kind of journalistic shrewdness beyond my meager abilities to master? Sports will always be more popular than politics because there are scores – frequent, definitive and unargued-with. In politics, we wait up to four years for the score.
Political discussions are almost a hundred percent subjective, fielder’s choice; there’s no “score” for you to brag about or explain away. That makes it all the more maddening when those you think are your allies haul off and do harmful things unnecessarily. Suppose Rupert Murdoch had simply not said, “Romney should fire his entire staff”; suppose he’d commented on Romney’s fundraising success or making a real fight for the battleground states; or suppose Murdoch had said nothing at all; would he be guilty of some cowardly political evasion? Or ignoring some “score”? Absolutely not. And when Murdoch damns the entire Romney team and gets an approving tweet from Jack Welch, Mr. American Business himself, the effect is beyond dismaying. How about devastating? And why? What am I missing?
Romney was far from my first choice as the main challenger to Barack Obama – but now he’s the only one who can rid us of Obama. Remember the message from Obama through Russia’s then-President Medvedev to Vladimir Putin: “After my election, I’ll have more flexibility.” “Flexibility” to do what? God forbid we have to find out! I classify an Obama win as a national disaster. Many of you pretend to agree.
So, what’s the matter with you? Do you suppose there’s some kind of political “heaven” where your eventual admittance will be a lot smoother if you can show you weren’t all that keen on Romney in the first place? Are you aware Mitt Romney is the only American with the ways and means to save us all? England begged America, in 1940, when England stood alone, “If you cannot help us, please don’t hinder us.” That’s an apt message from the Romney campaign to all who see the need to stop Obama.
Nobody’s asking you to lie, or even spin. Just select which pro-Romney truths glide most comfortably off your tongue and let’s hear them; loudly and with enthusiasm. It’s no crime to feign enthusiasm, in a worthy cause. Enthusiasm is vital in politics. Your own vote requires no enthusiasm. But your ability to get others to the polls, to donate, to volunteer, to get good things going – that demands enthusiasm. Morale is major. And with early love of Obama gone four years sour, Romney is much better positioned today to generate higher and wilder waves of morale.
If I can show enthusiasm for Romney, without a single day of acting school, you’ve got no excuse. Blunders. Failures. Disappointments. Cosmic idiocies. We’ve got them all, and our production rate is sure to climb in these remaining weeks. But that’s no excuse for failure to get in there and yell and scream and fight and produce and get it done for Mitt Romney.
This is the most important point I can make, and I’m sorry it’s so smoky and abstract. Everybody facing a crisis with the one he wants to marry, or the angry boss, or his frowning military superiors asks himself the same question as sweat trickles down his spine; namely, “Is it too late, or do I still have a chance?”
The good news is, despite everything that’s gone wrong and balls not being hit far enough and – horrors! – jet-skiing on vacation, Mitt Romney still has an excellent chance of beating Obama. But that chance can’t take many more demands from the likes of Rupert Murdoch to sack the whole crew, seconded by former GE boss Jack Welch, and allegedly conservative TV panelists turning the spotlight on Romney rather than Obama when the June jobs report translates into Obama’s Stalingrad, and legions and legions of you still emitting sulfuric fumes about what kind of conservative Romney is and is not.
I have a dream! On Election Night, the anchor-people will interrupt themselves and tell us, “Romney has just been declared inadequately conservative by the Rasmussen, Gallup and Zogby polls; however, he has just crossed the 270 electoral-vote threshold, making an even less conservative candidate the ex-president of the United States.”
