With the stage set for the 2012 election and Mittens essentially the presumptive nominee for the Republicans, the lines are being drawn for the general election campaign and yet I can't shake the feeling that none of it is going to make the slightest bit of difference.
The President is flooding the interwebs and the airwaves with ads and his hip, new t-shirts (some of which, I have to admit do look pretty damn cool) and there's a lot to like about the President. I've already touched on it, but President Obama is one of the few politicians to actually talk to issues that directly affect people my age. It's refreshing and it's well, nice. I may not agree with what he's saying a lot of the time, but wow, someone's actually talking to me and mine. It's refreshing. But he's wrong on pot, wrong on gay marriage, wrong on mandatory minimums, blew a chance to make health care really work and left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed domestically speaking. Foreign policy wise, things are better. Qadaffi, Mubarak and Saleh are all gone, Bin Laden is dead and very quietly, we've shifted our Asia policy in ways that are rippling across the region and will be for years. Although Libya could have been better handled and I wish we would actually shake a leg and do something about Syria, foreign policy wise the President gets a good grade from me.
Is Mittens any better? I don't know... Republicans sat idly by while a Republican President presided over the largest expansion of government since World War II and now scream bloody murder about Democrats and their spendthrift ways? I don't think so. It's going to be a long time before I trust Republicans to govern again.
But the bigger problem is that no one is levelling with the American people. There's harsh truths that need to be spoken out loud and not one politician out there seems to have the courage to do it. Instead of asking what a 21st Century Welfare state should look like and how we can get there, the Left insists on trying to defend a status quo that's beyond unsustainable at this point and the Right's answer to everything is to privatize it. It's symptomatic of a political process that's paralyzed by rhetoric and politicians that gain too much from protecting the status quo than challenging it.
The President came to town last week to talk about student loans. And for sure, keeping interest rates low would help a lot of people, but what's the real problem here? Administrative bloat, frankly useless fad majors that do nobody any good and what did they do to afford all of this? Pass the buck onto consumers. Nobody's saying anything about that.
Mittens and company coyly flirt with privatizing Social Security now and again and yet none of them seem to want to come right out and say it: we can means test Social Security, we can raise the retirement age- we can do a million things before we have to privatize it. And nobody's saying anything about that.
No one is telling the truth. Am I crazy or is this a job for Ross Perot?
I know the guy's ancient and more than a little crazy but he exploded onto the political scene in 1992 with his pie charts and his folksy attitude and laid it out, point by point for the American people. He came damn close to blowing up the whole damn duopoly sky high (coincidentally winning my first entirely fake KidsVotes in 4th and 8th grade in the process) and in doing so put the fear of God herself into both parties.
Sure, he didn't win. Yes, he was probably a little, I don't know, kooky. But neither party is going to step up to the plate and make the hard choices until someone comes along with money enough to scare the shit out of them.
Call me crazy: but isn't this a job for Ross Perot?
Someone needs to mix it all up ... soon.
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