To paraphrase former President Gerald R. Ford, with apologies– our long national nightmare continues.
Did we actually just spend a reported $6 billion for this, to move two states from one column to the other, leaving all else virtually intact? And did we leave the same guy in office as CEO, after having presided over what was arguably the most incompetent and damaging presidential term in my lifetime? Do the people in the majority on this decision really believe that this man learned anything or that there will be any change in strategy or priorities? What’s the definition of insanity?
You’ll get more than you want of analysis of what went wrong for Romney, where the GOP campaign management failed, that the demographics now substantially favor the Democrats, that the national media is biased to the left, that “superstorm” Sandy was an October surprise that worked, etc., etc., but I will spare you all of that.
What I will say is this–that we will not effectively address the enormous problems this country faces, fiscal as well as social, until we have a generation of leaders from both the public and private sectors who are willing to risk significant political capital to get serious about telling the truth about them and about the pain that will be necessary to resolve them. And I mean truth in all of its manifestations without calibrations for preferred constituencies. There were scant occasions during this long campaign that anything approaching this happened.
One of the most interesting and provocative phrases since election day was the theme of an essay by Kyle Scott, who teaches politics and constitutional law at the University of Houston: “The key to political victory is figuring out how to tell the most people ‘yes’ and the fewest people ‘no'”. Well, my friends, that’s not the solution, that’s the problem. For it represents the underlying strategy for the role of government since the 1930s that has corroded every corner of our lives and produced a sense of entitlement, dependency, and coercion that has crippled our souls and undermined civil society to the point of dysfunction. This is where the truth must start. If I am naive, please correct me.
