Bullet dodged

I’ve looked forward to writing this blog posting. It was never a sure thing that I would get the opportunity but at last it has come to pass. Obama and Biden have been re-elected  and the American people have seen through the prejudice and lies of those that contested the election.

I have already written of how Obama proved a disappointment in many respects. Back in 2008, after eight years of the worst President in living memory, it was easy to be swayed by his high-flown rhetoric and to believe that this relatively young, energetic orator would lead America and the world to a land of milk and honey.

In fact, he failed to right many of the wrongs of his predecessor, and even added some new ones on occasion. Nevertheless, he did break the downward slide of the economy, while Obamacare is a historic achievement. In any event, faced with the alternative of Romney-Ryan, it was easy to swallow the disappointments and rally behind the incumbent.

It was plain from the outset that Romney saw the White House as the only fitting pinnacle to a career of self enrichment and self aggrandisement, and that it didn’t matter what he had to do or say in order to get there. In order to court the conservative Tea Party wing of his party, he quickly abandoned the moderate approach of his Governorship of Massachusetts on issues like healthcare and abortion. He engaged in reckless sabre-rattling against Iran. And he even characterised FEMA as immoral.

Then, when it was clear he was losing ground after the mask had slipped when he made the notorious forty-seven percent remark, he re-invented himself yet again.  No, he would not lead America into war, he said. And – after Hurricane Sandy – no, he would after all see that FEMA was adequately funded. It was the classic incarnation of the Groucho Marx line; that these are my principles but if you don’t like them I have other ones.

That same forty-seven percent gaffe, together with his career in gutting viable businesses to send the jobs abroad, his casual references to wealth that most could only dream of, and his unwillingness to furnish tax returns past two years ago all contributed to the image of an acquisitive man, out of touch with the cares of everyday Americans.

Romney is a narcissistic jerk but he cannot compete for sheer nastiness with his Vice-Presidential running mate. Ryan’s worship of greed and wealth make Gordon gecko look positively benign, while his bigotry and misogyny are positively poisonous.

The plausible middle ground defence of the Romney-Ryan ticket articulated in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere required one to believe some statements that were outright lies.

The first lie was that the Republicans had nothing to do with the current budget deficit. That was hard to sustain, given that George W Bush inherited a surplus and left a massive deficit. So the defence was to avoid mentioning Bush entirely and to dissociate the current candidates from his deeds. This might have cut some ice were it not for the fact that Romney’s team included a number of Bush’s advisors.

The second lie was that Republicans only sought to achieve the perfectly reasonable goal of wiping out the deficit. Ruth Dudley Edwards, in the Daily Telegraph and Irish Independent, criticised an article in the New York Times attacking Ryan, saying that this was all that Ryan was trying to do. In fact, Ryan and Romney were not primarily interested in this aim, and Romney eventually postponed its achievement until 2020 (despite still criticising Obama for not achieving it in four years). No, this rhetoric about the deficit was simply a smokescreen to hide the aim of deepening the inequities in an already inequitable tax regime that blatantly favours the super-wealthy at the expense of the middle class. In order to give the impression that they were doing credible arithmetic (which they weren’t) , and in order to show that they could “kick ass” they advocated swingeing cuts to America’s public services targeting the most vulnerable in society.

The same defective arithmetic was apparent in Romney’s energy policy. Despite the avowed aim of achieving energy independence by 2020 (an aim that is unachievable as long as the Americans fail to cure their energy obesity), Romney’s plan was just about giving the keys of America’s wildernesses to the oil and coal barons that back the Republican Party so that they could produce greenhouse gas-generating fuel more expensively and less efficiently than it could be produced elsewhere.

Oh yes, while I am about it, perhaps the most fantastical notion is that the media were skewing the race in favour of Obama. This might have been true had the Americans relied on European media but, since Fox News is the most widely watched “news” channel in the USA, it is hard to see how even the most brass-necked Republican can expect us to believe such nonsense.

While it is disappointing, therefore, that Republicans still hold control of the House of Representatives, it is heartening to see them failing to wrest either the Senate or the White House from the Democrats. It is also heartening to see that their lies about the economy were not believed; most of those dissatisfied with the economy voted for Obama.  The poor showing by extreme right-wingers is also good news, with the drubbing of Richard Mourdock (pregnancy from rape is God’s will) and Todd Akin (a woman’s body can shut down to stop pregnancy from legitimate rape) is the icing on the cake.

There is still a lot to worry about. Although the ghoulish, racist, woman hating, creationist, climate change-denying wing of the Republican Party (the one that says science is a conspiracy to confuse people) didn’t do well electorally, they are still a force to be reckoned with and I don’t see that Obama has either the strength in Congress or the strength of character to face them down. However, the demographics are against them. This group of aging, white, mostly male and, yes, mostly less well-educated voters opted for Romney en masse. But they are a dying breed, that will be outvoted increasingly by the young, women, and Hispanics.

So I say to John Boehner and Sean Hannity who vowed to make Obama a one-term President; I say to people like Carol Coulter, that adulterous libertine, Rush Limbaugh; I say to the commentators in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere that should have known better:

You’ve LOST! Now get over it!