Ok, here is what may ultimately be the best case scenario:
McCain will take the nomination, but Romney will be respectably close.
I don't know who will be the Democrat nominee (don't care) but I think they will definitely win the national election.
In 4 years the democrat will have gone crazy with spending and a million new programs and amnesty for all illegals and giving away goodies to everyone, and our country will be in an impossible financial situation. Four years from now no one will be able to ignore it because it will have taken on emergency proportions. I'm hoping that we don't have another 9/11 with the inevitable scale back of national defense. Yes, it would help our cause, but that is too big a price to pay.
In four years McCain will be out of the picture. He'll be too old and he won't run again, having been soundly beat four years previously.
Romney (or some other real conservative) will come in and finally start talking sense. The media might actually even report it because our country's financial situation will be so bad. Americans will finally realize that the government can't keep spending money we don't have, and they'll finally see the need for someone who will come in and drastically clean things up.
Conservatives will have 4 years to do some real soul-searching, and come back to their senses and to their conservative roots.
The way will be paved for Romney, or someone like him (I hope it's Romney, though), to take the 2012 election and save America before we spend ourselves to death.
Maybe it's even better that Romney not take the nomination this time around. It could very well be that the country is not ready to elect him. Given the reluctance of "conservatives" to fully embrace the only conservative left in the race, this is a very real possibility. And if he did get the nomination and didn't win the national election, he would have the same problem McCain will, and won't be able to run again.
Additionally, in four years the fact that he's Mormon will be old hat, and won't have the shocking, scandalous quality that it has now.
So, I'm now hoping, not that Romney comes from behind and takes the nomination, but that he comes close enough so that it makes sense for him to run again in four years. No matter how things look tomorrow, I really hope he'll stay in the race until the end.
And yes, this is me trying to feel better about the way things are shaping up.
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6 comments:
gabrielle, i'm not sure if i should jump in and offer some opinions, since you showed great fortitude and will power by not responding to my comments on Paul's web log.
I just want to raise one thing that I think is maybe important (although my mind is not totally made up on the issue as of yet): it seems like the 2012 america you are describing is actually the america we have ended up with after 8 years of republicans in the white house. They have cut taxes and increased spending and our country is now in an impossible financial situation. it is hard for me to imagine complete financial ruin will follow a democrat in the white house, especially considering our economic situation during Clinton's time as President.
just one last thing: america is in a bad way, and needs a major rebranding. i don't know if it was the last few years of republican majority, or the last twenty to thirty years of the evangelical-based conservative movement (i suspect it's a combination of both, enhanced by enormous foreign policy debacles of the bush administration). we need a new face to america, someone to represent us well not only to the rest of the world, but to ourselves as well. that person is, of course, barack obama. the excitement he will bring to our country will be enough to bring us out of our current economic funk.
well, what do you think? sorry to invade your blogspace. maybe we can get paul in on this as well...
clinton inherited the largest economic bubble in modern history. he spent to his hearts content because of the tech bubble. the good times during the clinton era came on the backs of corportations in the tech sector (conservatives), not bill clinton.
paul: nice. so you're saying every single person in every single corporation in america is conservative? and my argument was not that bill clinton caused the financial prosperity of the 90s, but that he didn't ruin it.
I'll have more comments later on today, no computer time right now. But in response to Stephen's last comment, the reason Clinton didn't ruin the good economy was because he was dealing with a Republican Congress who wouldn't let him! LOL Also, Clinton was very moderate. He just wanted everyone to like him. He was much more moderate than Hillary, and in a different universe than Obama.
gabrielle, very nice. i'm looking forward to more later.
Stephen, I don't disagree with you that part of our nation's precarious financial position at the moment is the fault of decisions made by the Bush administration. It is certainly very possible to cut taxes and still be able to raise spending (every time our country has significantly cut taxes, tax revenue has correspondingly *increased* because of the economic stimulus of the tax cuts). But the Bush administration as certainly done little to curb spending at all. This is the main reason why most conservatives are pretty ticked off with Bush. But I think our financial situation is MUCH better than it would have been *without* the tax cuts. Imagine how bad things will be when taxes are increased and spending is increased. It will be very bad.
I agree with your assessment that America (and especially conservatism) needs a major rebranding. I also think it is probably a combination of the two factors you mentioned, plus some others I can think of. I disagree with your statement about the enormous foreign policy debacles of the Bush administration. I don't think there have been many true debacles. I think the way the war was run during the first few years certainly had some flaws. I'm not sure it's fair to judge too harshly about this, however, because hindsight is 20/20and some things cannot be predicted. I don't think America has *ever* been in a war that was run perfectly from the very start. What matters is how we adapt to problems as they come up and as we recognize them. And I think the Bush administration has done a decent job in addressing some of these problems. The surge has been an enormous success, for example. Where I think Bush has utterly failed in the foreign policy arena, is in effectively articulating and communicating to the American people *what* the administration is doing, and *why* they are doing it.
I completely agree that we need a new face to America, and someone who can lead us well and represent our country as well as possible to the rest of the world. I totally and completely disagree with your conclusion that Barack Obama is that guy.
The huge problems that I see in America have come about because of our incremental departure from conservative principles, which (not coincidentally) are also those principles that made America great. Hard work. Accountability. Responsibility. Independence. Self-sufficiency. Determination. Freedom.
These principles and values are (sadly) 180 degrees out of phase with those currently espoused by the Democrat party and liberalism in general.
The extent to which our country has departed from these "traditional" values is precisely the extent to which we have departed from our best potential.
We need a serious return to conservative values, not a complete rejection of them, which is what Barack Obama would bring to American policy.
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