2012 prediction remains the same

Obama over Romney is still my prediction, and the prediction is looking a lot better than it was at various points over the past 6 months.

Bottom line 1: Romney’s the best candidate the Republicans have. And at least he wouldn’t ruin the country if elected, unlike many of their candidates. Romney is basically a moderate (though also a heartless/robotic corporate type). He still drives me up the wall with that personality, of course.

Bottom line 2: You can find plenty of reason to complain about Obama’s performance. But people still basically like him. And in electoral terms, this is probably the first time since Truman in 1948 that a Democrat has not been vulnerable to portrayal as a national defense weakling, which is traditionally where Democrats lose even when you expect them to win (cf. John Kerry, 2004). And finally, for all the repetitive talk about how “people only vote their pocketbooks,” this case will be the exception to the rule. I think people basically realize that the economy tanked under W.

With national defense issues probably off the table (barring some other 9/11 sort of incident or scary world crisis before next November) and the economy possibly creeping back a bit, I’m not sure why so many people still think Obama’s a one-termer. It looks to me like he’s in a very strong position, whether you’re disappointed with him or not.

I’m a lot less disappointed with Obama than many have been (too many Baby Boomers have weird retroactive fantasies that Hillary Clinton would have been some sort of cutting-edge progressive force; the Clintons have always been very smart, politically effective but manipulative sell-outs, and nothing more). It seems to me that Obama’s biggest failure has been the relative waste of his once-in-a-generation rhetorical gifts. Obama has the oratorical power (and inspiring symbolic power, as the first black President in a country haunted by ghosts of the slave trade) to excite people for big causes that might have seemed beyond all possibility– such as a dramatic move away from oil, a backtracking from the post-9/11 paranoid security state concept, and more evenhanded treatment of the Palestinians. But he’s preferred a politically safer course. Perhaps his relative unwillingness to take risks is what enabled him to get to where he is today, and to edge towards re-election. But it’s depriving him of the chance at a historically dramatic Presidency. Then again, the mere fact that he was elected already secures his place as historically dramatic. But he could have been even more important than this.