My Initial Thoughts: the Presidential Election

Greetings from Detroit Lakes, MN! I’m currently in a hotel room on work assignment. Hopefully I’ll be back at a decent hour this Thursday evening.

I’m just going to pass along some initial, perhaps myopic, thoughts on the Presidential election.

So we know that the President near the end of January 2013 will very likely be with the current President or Mitt Romney. In general, there will be a lot of money spent of this election, as both candidates, their surrogate supporters and “Super PACs” will not spare any expense to vituperate against each other through pointing out even the slightest appearance of a captious defect to gain an edge. I am hopeful that the election will truly the debate the issues, but I’m not hopeful at this point.

As you know from my prior posts, I’m not too keen on supporting either candidate at this point. The President simply because I strongly disagree with his policies on fiscal and cultural issues (as a newly minted college president told me once, the President only increased the age of adolescence to 26 years old through Obamacare) and Mitt because he has shown that he is a hard to trust anything he says. This to me that it’ll be a close election that either candidate can win, with the winner not providing much confidence to the country that he will bring positive change.

In fact, although I should be more apt to support Mitt based on what other blog readers tell me, I have a hard time bringing myself to support him. In fact, the more I look at Mitt, the more I think of President Nixon. Why? I have two reasons. First, this election somewhat reminds me of Nixon’s successful run in 1968. In 1968, the Democratic Party was reeling and divided (mainly due to the Vietnam War), the country was seen by a large majority of Americans to be on the wrong track and the President’s popularity was consistently below 50 percent. However, Nixon almost managed to blow it due to lack of strong political convictions. Second, by taking a passive approach to making peace with the Right after apparently winning the nomination as noted here, as well as his reputation as being a capricious candidate when it comes to making policy decisions, he has raised notable questions of his authenticity despite being a very erudite businessman.

As many “older” conservatives remember, Nixon liberally chose between conservative and liberal-leaning positions indiscriminately, including imposing price controls (when did the President call the Kremlin to substitute for the Commerce Secretary?).

Now Mitt has already started to show his capricious tendencies again. Just in the time since he was seen as the presumptive nominee after Rick Santorum dropped out of the race, has already said he’ll now supports gun rights, after supporting the Brady Bill’s gun control restrictions years ago and now says that he needs to get “independents and women” and not address conservatives' concerns about his candidacy.

It’s a long way to November, but I’m not confident that there ll be any result that would send a strong signal there is real and necessary change that is going to happen.