Watched Romney's concession speech. Maybe I'm wrong but it didn't seem rehearsed and looked like he was speaking in the moment. Looked gracious in defeat. Then waited for the Obama victory thing. It was good I thought seeing his family on the stage with his two kids. The older one (dunno her name) I mistook for Michelle Obama at first as she's just as tall now, spiting image of her mother. They left the stage and I waited the few moments for his speech to begin.
By now it was on every free to air channel here, much to my daughters disgust who can't be bothered with US politics and it was on her bedroom telly as well (she only just recently discovered who Romney was). Obama said his first sentence.... something about "200 years ago".... with all the same mannerisms and speaking style that he's had from the start 4 years ago..... I immediately cringed and thought "Oh man here comes the bullshit again". It sounded completely rehearsed and uninspired. Turned off the telly straight away, calling out to my daughter "What a fuckin load of bullshit". Yeah, he won again, meh, but I wasn't going to listen to his same old drivel again.
I assumed he was going to expound on some high sounding moral rhetoric about past struggles, and how it was all going to get better, and trust me I will make America great again, and bla bla, and bla bla bla. Everyone will cheer like it's all going to happen, and we'll all be singing kumbaya. What crap. My assumptions were confirmed this morning when I read the odd bit from his speech, here's from the news in New Zealand:
US President Barack Obama has rolled to re-election, vanquishing former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney despite a weak economy that plagued his first term and put a crimp in the middle class dreams of millions. In victory, he confidently promised better days ahead.
Obama spoke to thousands of cheering supporters in his hometown of Chicago, praising Romney and declaring his optimism for the next four years.
"While our road has been hard, though our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come," he said. more
Seriously, does he really believe that shit? I certainly don't believe him. Maybe if he closed that Gitmo gulag, and stopped bombing innocent people with drones without declaring war, I'd have just the tiniest bit of faith in him again. Yeah, Romney lost so at least we're not likely to end up invading Iran any time soon, but it's like Obama has another 4 years to rearrange the deck chairs instead of Romney blowing another hole in the Titanic.
Other than that the biggest concern from all quarters down here is WTF is going to happen about this fiscal cliff thing? Which BTW is hardly anything like "the best" about to come, but more akin to Obama trying to patch up the gaping hole where the iceberg has ripped through the hull. Evidently the cranks and crazies are still trying to govern from opposition over there.
It's a dangerous cell called the US Congress, and it threatens to blow up the US economy, and its credibility and its status as a strong and responsible power. Obama has 54 days to strike a budget deal with Congress and if he can't, the US will topple over the "fiscal cliff" into a new recession, dragging the world after it.As well as that the SMH has a very good analysis of the Republican party.
The cliff is a legislated bundle of government spending cuts and tax increases totalling $US608 billion that are due to take effect automatically on January 1.
Wayne Swan in Washington yesterday said it would have a "dramatic impact and flow-on effect to the global economy", including Australia's. A group of 15 of America's biggest financial institutions has warned it would be "very grave". Read more
Where does the Republican Party go in a country that again has affirmed its middle-of-the-road political personality?
Its primary process of selecting a presidential nominee smacked down a frightening queue of ideological hardheads – Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum – but the fundamentalists in its ranks still wield inordinate power and on Tuesday they were the cause of unnecessary self-inflicted wounds.
This was supposed to be the election that Republicans would have won by staying at home – Obama's re-election with the economy in such dire straits was supposedly a democratic impossibility. But Mitt Romney won back just two states and a couple of seats in the House of Representatives that were traditionally Republican leaning. So much for "take back our country" – it was offered on a platter and they still couldn't take it. By contrast, the Democrats took back two Senate seats and, more importantly, held on to another couple that would have gone to the Republicans had the Tea Party not forced unelectable candidates on the party.
One of the unelectables was Todd "legitimate rape" Akin in Missouri. No sooner had the seat been called than the first dart was fired at Akin by the party's policy chairman, Jason Whitman, who tweeted: "I just want to say a quick thank you to @ToddAkin for helping us lose the senate." Had Romney won the election, he probably would have become a hostage to the radicals.
But having lost, the party now is likely to engage in internal civil war, as it struggles with its policy demons – how to respect a woman's right to make her own health decisions; how to make itself acceptable to the country's huge African-American and Hispanic communities; how to live and work alongside gays and lesbians and to grant them the same citizen rights enjoyed by straights. Above all, to work together as a nation, formulating policies that work towards middle-of-the-road compromises in economic and social policies.
On election night, Ross Douthat of The New York Times, self-described as a "less starry-eyed conservative", wrote: "A weak nominee in many ways, [Romney] was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn't particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012." But in a purists-v-pragmatists showdown, how can the self-appointed true-believers be cajoled into backtracking from their faith-based absolutes – abortion is killing is murder; homosexuality is depraved, disgusting; Islam is a threat to the fabric of the nation, even when it is "over there". Read more
All in all, the Republicans look (deservedly) like a spent force federally. Despite Romney's efforts to look more moderate at the end of the campaign I don't think the Republicans ever recovered from those extremist lunatics who he was up against at the start. We were all laughing down here at what a bunch of incredible nut bags they were. Fuckin hell, how could any rational person take them seriously? Made it all the more unbelievable for us when Mad Mitt actually made a race of it with Obama, seriously when we saw it was getting close I think all of Australia did a mass "WTF?" Had the US become as extreme as the Tea Party Republicans?
Well thankfully not. Near the end though (in these days of the net) it became a particularly ugly display of the sort of mind numbing hatred, bigotry, and prejudice that does exist within sections of the US population. Which is exactly what happens when a political party demonises sections of the population in the hunt for votes (Howard did it here with boat people asylum seekers). Personally, I'm surprised the Republicans weren't comprehensively hammered into the electoral ground with the sort of zealot extremism on display from them.
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