We may be seeing the wave of the future. First Mr. Obama is elected after basically having a cup of coffee in the Congress....and now the GOP is apparently going to nominate Mr. Romney who is basically, as you said, one of the idle rich the GOP policies have created.
If you haven't gotten any battle scars, I guess you look more appealing to the voting public.
As always, we get the government we deserve, style over substance rules the day. Which is why I don't think the election will be a cakewalk for either party. We now field, on both sides of the aisle, candidates who are so risk adverse that you get the canned speech, the canned responses, the "debates" where it is merely a regurgitation of long winded talking points.
In the incubator the American public has created where we can be swayed by media on either side of the debate, I can't blame the candidates for playing their cards so close to the vest. To risk anything is to risk everything because whether it's Newt's affairs or Hillary's likability/femininity the public gets a taste for the imperfection and the media continues to feed it. It is called "the news cycle". And given the herd mentality of the news networks, if CNN is covering it, so will Fox, so will MSNBC, so will ABC, CBS, NBC. Talk radio will talk about it. Don't blame them...if as many people hated Oprah as claim they hate her, you wouldn't see her ever again. Someone likes her. You like Vanilla Ice? Someone does (or did). He sold something like 11 million copies of his record. Please don't sit there and say that the media feeds us, we tell the media what we want. And they give it to us.
This isn't the thread but I continue to advance the notion of making it much, much harder to become President to where the Constitution first ensures debates (6 of them--1 on foreign policy, one of domestic policy, one on national security, then 3 wild card topics to be determined) and then the format for the debates: 90 minutes of moderated debate to set the topics in each category, a break of some length, then 90 minutes of the candidates questioning each other directly on the same evening to pry these people away from their talking points. Every 4 years covering each Tuesday from roughly September 15 through election day.
The political animals who run on the plain Presidential politics are not the ones who are responsible for vetting themselves; we are. Romney's tax returns and his hesitancy to release them are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much larger syndrome...the "lets see if I can get away with it" syndrome.
All too often, the American public's response to that syndrome is "yes".
We get the government we deserve. Always have, always will.
Good post, candycorn. We get what we deserve.We should demand those tax records and demand closing of tax loop holes. We have to pay attention. Are negative ads what we want? Do they vet the candidates or go for "gotcha topics?" We have to be looking at things closely...especially at what is happening around us today with our present leaders.
Well, if the negative attacks didn't work, the candidates wouldn't be airing them.
