clintonomics

I haven't talked a whole lot about the current presidential race. It isn't because I don't have strong feelings about it, but just because I think other people have covered it a whole lot better than I can.

Matt Taibbi (whom I've mentioned before) is killing it, again, with his summary of how Romney got where he is. Wondered how leveraged buyout works? He covers it. Incredulous about how one of Romney's pollsters (Neil Newhouse) can say "We're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers"? Check. Given thought to how Romney's experience in indebting companies would help him keep the government out of debt? Yeah, I hadn't thought about that angle, either.

I wasn't a big fan of Clinton when he was president. I never voted for him, instinctively distrusting his ability to promise everything to everyone, all at the same time. It even kept me from voting for The Goracle, which I now regret (not that it would have mattered). But my point is that, looking back on what he accomplished, Clinton was quite a good president (philandering aside; although I look at that as a personal and familial failing, not a political one).

But even Clinton's level of mendacity doesn't approach Romney's. When the campaign started, I was thinking of him as the least dangerous (to the country) of the various Republican challengers. I figured he was the most moderate, among other things. Then I watched as he reversed pretty much all of his earlier positions. And since then, I've found out many other things about his concept of "truth-telling" (like what he went through to be able to get on the Massachusetts ballot). Then we've found his repeated changes of direction in when he left Bain (retroactive retirement? Seriously?). I also had no idea about the lengths to which he has gone to avoid paying taxes (real patriotic, dude).

After all of that, though, I've got to say that I think Romney is downright dangerous. I think he'll be the titular head of a kleptocracy (or plutocracy, if you want to be slightly more charitable), similar to what Bush Jr did (but probably on a larger scale).

I'm not real thrilled with how Obama has done (in particular, he's been a disaster in civil liberties, and has a very mixed record on governmental transparency (he has made some good strides, there, with new programs, but his war on whistle-blowers is truly reprehensible)), but I'm still 99% sure that he's been far better than what a Romney administration would be.

I truly do not understand how the race is as close as it is; almost nobody would benefit from the policies Romney has espoused (ignoring the ones he's repeated flip-flopped over, as I have no idea what he'd do about any of those issues). The only people who would are the insanely rich, and even they only would in the very short term. The amount of demand that would be crushed out of the economy by his policies would cause an absolute cratering of the overall economy (I'm not sure how long it would take, but I am sure of what would result), because nobody would be hiring.  And in an economic heavily driven by consumption, that would be a death-knell.

Anyway, the only thing I find encouraging are the polls that ask "who do you think is more likely to win?", because Obama leads those polls by a huge margin. I keep hoping that's a true sign of what is to come.