ETCH-A-SKETCH:

Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney believes he can ride to victory, grabbing the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from Barack and Michelle Obama on the singular issue of a perceived bad economy.

Of course Romney felt that would be a viable strat­e­gy, why not? The Pundits all argue that no pres­i­dent may be re-elect­ed with unem­ploy­ment above 7%. The much maligned Obama-Care had seen Tea-Party Fanatics sweep­ing to pow­er, wrest­ing con­trol of the House of Representatives from Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.

Democrats of course not been go ‑get­ters, sat on their ass­es and did noth­ing, zilch, nada. Republicans went around the coun­try blast­ing the pres­i­dent for what they dis­parag­ing­ly dubbed Obama-care. Every Republican did the same as they do on every issue, they dom­i­nat­ed the air­waves with talk­ing points,“Obama-care is big Government take over of the best health care sys­tem in the world’.

Democrats did noth­ing to not only push back on the good of the pres­i­den­t’s health care ini­tia­tive, they ran as hell from it. Not only did they allow Republicans to shape the nar­ra­tive on what is a good piece of leg­is­la­tion, Democrats allowed it to be so maligned it cost them the House of Representatives.

The truth is, a vast chunk of the American pop­u­la­tion had no health care in the so-called best sys­tem in the world. Even with the por­tion of Obama-Care which has been imple­ment­ed thus far, pre­vent­ing Insurance Companies from refus­ing to insure Americans with pre-exist­ing con­di­tions, there are yet mil­lions of Americans who still have no Health Insurance.

What the sin­gu­lar strat­e­gy of Romney entailed was that he myopi­cal­ly bet­ted that the American econ­o­my would not show any sig­nif­i­cant signs of improve­ment and on that note Barack Obama will be boot­ed from office. There are oth­er strat­a­gems at play demo­nize Obama to the pub­lic, sup­press the Black and Latino vote and he will be guar­an­teed a vic­to­ry come November 6th.

I have no evi­dence that Mister Romney has a hand in vot­er sup­pres­sion, not yet any­way, but it seem rather clear that Republican Legislatures in many states around the coun­try seem to have a sin­gu­lar focus, to ensure that as small amount of elec­tors as pos­si­ble, show up to vote on elec­tion day. It seem also from the vot­ing rules put in place lim­it­ing vot­ing days, lim­it­ing vot­ing on the Sunday just before elec­tions, and most of all, the rigid ID require­ments, if left to stand as designed , clear­ly wants to keep Black peo­ple from the vot­ing booths on elec­tion day.

The argu­ments in sup­port of the new vot­ing laws are con­vo­lut­ed and is impos­si­ble to artic­u­late, by the archi­tects, their sup­port­ers, or even their lawyers court, as was evi­denced in the Pennsylvania high court. The con­fes­sion by the Republican Legislative Leader that vot­er ID law was designed to hand the State to Mitt Romney ‚ought to end this con­ver­sa­tion, and every law so designed should be seen for what they are, a back door repeal of the Voting Rights Act.

Romney has shown no lead­er­ship on pre­sent­ing to the elec­torate, a cohe­sive ‚detailed plan which dif­fers from that of the President. Instead he tells vot­ers to elect him even as he lies about the President’s record and words. If Romney expect­ed to attract the mea­ger sliv­er of so-called swing vot­ers , he set aside from the lazy enti­tled moochers he blast­ed at that pri­vate affair in Florida, he cer­tain­ly must do more than just say “elect me and I will do the oppo­site of what he does”.

When it became appar­ent after the Ryan pick and the less than expect­ed Convention that strat­e­gy was not enough Romney decid­ed to cri­tique the pres­i­den­t’s every word, look­ing for ” ha ha gotcha moments” that will be the game chang­er. First , he antic­i­pat­ed that the Right’s sus­pi­cion of him would be alle­vi­at­ed by his pick of Ryan, well the right may have been some­what appeased but, was it the base that Romney need­ed to shore up , or was he try­ing to grab those per­suad­ables in the middle?

Since Romney had lit­er­al­ly writ­ten off the 47%, whom he stat­ed cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly will nev­er come around to his way of think­ing, you know the lazy peo­ple who believe Government must pro­vide for them, then the mid­dle by my esti­ma­tion, would prob­a­bly be just 3% . If the oth­er 50% are Republicans, just some arith­metic, Clinton style.

The prob­lem with Mitt Romney’s strat­e­gy on Ryan is that Paul Ryan is nei­ther brave, fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, nor a deficit hawk. Ryan vot­ed for every big gov­ern­ment pro­gram of the Bush Administration, Ryan begged for Stimulus mon­ey, even as he lam­bast­ed the Administration for admin­is­ter­ing the stim­u­lus. What that makes Paul Ryan are none of the above, but a hyp­ocrite and a fraud.

Once the National spot­light was shone on Paul Ryan, it became clear that this guy was noth­ing more than a Trojan Horse, with appeal only to the far right, a male Sarah Palin if you will, only a lit­tle smarter. Ryan’s much maligned Convention speech, and a litany of oth­er lies on the stump, quick­ly removed the thin veneer of lus­ter from Ryan, who looked to many like a shiny Golden Orb, but was quick­ly revealed to be clay with spray paint.

As we have come to expect, the etch a‑sketch can­di­date revert­ed to a more rabid attack dog strat­e­gy against the President of the United States. The trou­ble with that strat­e­gy is that it means attack­ing quick­ly, which opens him up to going on the attack with­out all the facts, or in the case of the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stephens , none of the facts.

Romney actions thus far this cam­paign, has been a dis­joint­ed oppor­tunis­tic lurch from one ill-advised strat­e­gy to anoth­er, one which rivals John McCain’s sus­pen­sion of his cam­paign dur­ing the eco­nom­ic melt­down of 2008. As I write this col­umn Mitt Romney has employed a strat­e­gy which seem to be to sit with a note pad lis­ten­ing to the pres­i­den­t’s every word then take a small seg­ment out of con­text to demagogue.

This lat­est ploy by Romney and Ryan smacks of a des­per­ate child­ish not ready for prime time oper­a­tion. The Romney Campaign solid­i­fied that impres­sion by releas­ing a sum­ma­ry of his tax returns (not the actu­al returns), yes­ter­day Friday September 21st. This trans­par­ent doc­u­ment dump, on a Friday evening , designed to stop the bleed­ing from his Boca Raton diss of the 47 %, has done noth­ing to stop the bleed­ing, but have opened up anoth­er artery bleed­ing the lifeblood from this lunatic cam­paign. November 6th will be a wel­come respite for Mitt Romney,it can­not come soon enough.

Once again Mitt Romney and his cam­paign oper­a­tives have decid­ed that the American pub­lic are total fools. Romney has donat­ed a sig­nif­i­cant amount of mon­ey which gives the appear­ance that he has paid a tax rate of 14 % , what he has­n’t done is to claim back all of those deduc­tions, which gives Mitt Romney the option to file for an adjust­ment at a lat­er date, which will see him then retriev­ing the bal­ance of those donations.

It is cer­tain­ly not ille­gal, but it is a cyn­i­cal , dis­gust­ing­ly insult­ing manip­u­la­tion of a sys­tem which is already rigged toward the very rich.

It is a peek into what a Romney Ryan Administration would look like, it is Nixonian in style,secret, cal­cu­lat­ing, dis­hon­est, disin­gen­u­ous, cyn­i­cal and duplicitous.

Americans have a stark choice on November 6th, they will have to decide whether they will once again vote against their own self-inter­est as they did in 2010. They elect­ed a Republican Congress which will go down in his­to­ry as prob­a­bly the least pro­duc­tive in the his­to­ry of this coun­try. True to form they abdi­cat­ed their respon­si­bil­i­ties and went to their respec­tive dis­tricts with­out pass­ing the Farm Bill, they did not address the issue of the Post Office, They did not want to give the pres­i­dent a leg­isla­tive win,.

That is the infan­tile nature of the Republican Party in America.