Predictable Republicans

Ronald Reagan was an aberration. He was the first Presidential candidate I paid any attention to in my younger days. I remember being in college when Jimmy Carter was elected. I was old enough to vote, but didn't. I remember lots of professors and politically-oriented students were celebrating his victory. I knew nothing about his politics, and probably cared less.

Until I graduated and found out just how dismal things were in the outside world. It's fair to say that today we're repeating Jimmy Carter's term in almost all respects with Barack Obama. So I voted for Ronald Reagan in my first visit to the voting booth in a Presidential election.

My life got much better during the Reagan years, and that's when I abandoned my father's Democrat party to become a Republican.

Each election since then has followed a pattern. George H. W. Bush, then Bob Dole, then George W. Bush, then John McCain, and now Mitt Romney all have the same elements in common. They're all squishy moderates, and were all foisted on Conservative Republicans by the party elite.

Now it's Mitt Romney's turn. The constant media drumbeat is the same for Romney as it was for the Bushes, Dole, and McCain. He's the only candidate that is electable because he's moderate. Independents won't vote for another rock-ribbed conservative in the mode of Reagan. Everybody else in the field is too extreme or too zany.

As someone who actually pays attention, I'm somewhat demoralized by the success of the party elites in ramming another squish down our throats. Once again, by the time the primary gets around to Indiana in May, Mitt will already have been anointed. In fact, the elites anointed him a long time ago.

Even though I much prefer Rick Santorum. I even find Newt a bit more attractive than Mitt. I even like Michelle, who got drummed out of Iowa. Rick and Newt are all I have left in the race, and they're hanging on by their fingernails.

So once again, the election will come down to the media incessantly hammering all of us with the message that the race is between the heartless Republican Wall Street millionaire against the caring man of the people. At least Mitt's better looking than Dole and McCain, which in our image-obsessed society matters more than pretty much everything else and might get him more votes from women. Just maybe they'll put him over the top just like they did Bill Clinton twice in a row.

So nobody's talking about the most important issues of our time, except Newt now and then. Nobody's even proposing a reasonable fix to our crisis-level problems. We're saddled with the radical socialist Obama or the mushy moderate Romney, neither of whom will lead the country out of our fiscal and national security crises.

The best we can say is that at least Mitt won't be as bad a president as Obama.

That's not saying much.