The President must have believed that all he had to do was show up for the debate and it would be obvious to everyone who the better man was—so obvious, in fact, that Obama was clearly pissed that he had to show up at all! But Romney, who hasn’t had a trick up his sleeve all year, finally came up with ace, while Obama played the deuce.
I will confess to a modicum of schadenfreude. I have been deeply disappointed in Obama’s foreign policy. I felt he did a reasonably good job dealing with the economy, despite his choice of Tim Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury. He has struggled to bring rationality to health care, forgetting that the ultimate purpose of health care is to deal with the supreme irrationality, death. He would have made a deal on entitlements if the Republicans had been willing to let him, but they were not. His green jobs fantasy has proved to be just that.
And one could look forward to an incoming Romney administration with a good deal of schadenfreude as well—the shocked discovery that middle-class tax cuts, massive defense spending increases, and reduced deficits do not go together, that Americans, while they may not want to pay for health care, still feel they ought to have it, and that Americans, however much they hate terrorism, are not up for another round of boots on the ground in the Middle East.
Yes, President Romney would face enormous contradictions. But I don’t want to have to be on the same planet with him as he deals with them. Any administration that takes substantial policy input from the likes of Eric Cantor and John Bolton is not one that I want to see in power. President Obama, if you can’t beat Mitt Romney, that will be your greatest crime of all.
