There is no question that Barack Obama, assuming that is his real name, is a bad president, a bad American and a bad man. Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons to believe that as bad as Obama has been, the Republican alternative being offered in November, Mitt Romney, will actually be a good deal worse.
Neither Obama nor Romney is a man of strong character or principle. Obama has always skated along on the goodwill of others, being a pragmatic charlatan reliant upon affirmative action, white guilt and his image as the good, clean and articulate negro to get ahead. Every private school has a student or two like him, who always receives the benefit of the doubt and seven strikes for everyone else’s three, although none have ever before been able to ride the scam all the way to the White House. As evidenced by his 104th round of golf since his term of office began, Obama is much more interested in the trappings of power than actually making use of it.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is so interested in power that he is willing to say just about anything and become just about anyone to get his hands on it. His political positions are actually to the left of Obama on some issues; he signed a rifle ban as the governor of Massachusetts and has been open about his support for a federal ban as well. The Obama administration, quite to the contrary, is known to have actually distributed thousands of assault rifles, although, unfortunately, most of them went to Mexicans rather than Americans. Through a $26,000 grant by the National Institutes of Health, the Obama administration even appears to have funded the lethal performance art of Mr. James Holmes.
The problem with Romney, however, is not his lack of conservative principles. The problem with Romney is the fact that he is even more closely tied to the financial sector that is the source of the present U.S. economic difficulties and the global financial crisis. While Obama was content to sit back and let Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner do their best to maintain the status quo, Romney will not be able to resist the urge to prove his vaunted turnaround abilities. But what works for corporations and large sporting events is not going to work for a national economy.
Consider Romney’s economic policy team. They are Dean R. Glenn Hubbard, professor N. Gregory Mankiw, former Sen. Jim Talent and former Rep. Vin Weber. Notice that, unlike myself and the 11 researchers that Dirk Bezemer recognized for anticipating the current economic crisis, not a single member of Romney’s team saw it coming nor do they have any idea what caused it. I have read Greg Mankiw’s economics textbook, and it barely mentions debt for the very good reason that debt is not incorporated into the mainstream economic models used by the Harvard professor and the members of Romney’s policy team.
There are two reasons why Romney will be even worse for America than Barack Obama has been over the last four years. The first is that instead of instinctively reacting in opposition to the lunatic proposals coming out of the White House (even if they usually end up caving in the end), Republicans in the House and Senate will be running interference for them. In the same way that Democrats flipped on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as Obama became the commander in chief, Republicans will flip on the domestic use of drones and the secret presidential assassination list as soon as it is a Republican who gets to decide which Americans will be targeted.
Has Mitt Romney ever decried Obama’s assassination of Americans or declared that he will end the use of military weapons such as drones inside America’s borders? Has he ever shown any concern for the constant encroachment on American liberties that has continued through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations? Is there any reason to believe that his policies on these vital matters will be any different than the Bush-Obama policies? No. But there will be a difference in how Republican politicians react to those policies depending upon who is in the White House.
The second reason is that Mitt Romney is a hard worker. Given the choice between two corrupt, anti-constitutional, authoritarian administrations, isn’t it obvious that the one run by the lazy golfer who does nothing in the Oval Office but watch ESPN is to be vastly preferred to the one headed by a guy who will burn the midnight oil working out new ways to crush American freedom?
Now, I am not suggesting that conservatives and libertarians should vote for Barack Obama simply because Mitt Romney will be even worse for America. As I seem to have to point out every four years, a vote for a lesser evil is still a vote for evil. It is wrong. The correct action when presented with two evil choices is to refuse to grant democratic legitimacy to either one. I have no doubt that Republican commentators will soon be shrieking that this is the most important election ever again, just as they did when Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry were the previous Democratic antichrists. But I would remind those Republicans tempted to vote for Romney in spite of themselves of how they felt after being betrayed repeatedly by George W. Bush. If you get fooled once by a presidential candidate, shame on you. But if you get fooled twice in precisely the same manner, you’re just stupid.
