So what issues are dominating the campaign? Todd Akin, gay marriage, whether there is a racist undertone to attacks on welfare dependency, whether Willard
MittRomney
...former governor of Massachussetts, currently the presumptive Publican nominee for president. He is the son of the former governor of Michigan, George Romney, who himself ran for president after saving American Motors from failure, though not permanently. Romney's charisma is best defined as soporific, which is probably why he is leading the Publican field. On the plus side, he isn't President B.O...
is a stiff. As a visitor, I can only goggle in bafflement.
From the point of view of Democrat strategists, of course, it's clever politics. When 64 per cent of Americans say that they expect their standard of living to deteriorate under Obama, and when Romney has a 19-point advantage on economic competence, it makes sense to talk about anything except the economy. As a fair-minded GOP delegate from Idaho told me, 'Now I now how they must have felt when we kept talking about Kerry'.
Sensing that some Republicans were diffident about their nominee, Lefties tried to make the election all about Mitt Romney: he was a ruthless plutocrat, they said, a Montgomery Burns type who laid people off for pleasure. He's also (whisper it) a devotee of some weird cult that baptises the dead.
Will it work? I think -- I certainly hope -- that Democrats underestimate the extent to which creedal pluralism and mutual respect for religions is built into the American republic. Any faith can be caricatured by having its tenets stated in an exaggeratedly reductionist way. You might just as well say that
Joe Foreign Policy Whiz KidBiden
The former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body...
and Paul Ryan
...U.S. Representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district, serving since 1999. He is a member of the Republican Party. He proposed an alternative to President B.O.'s 2011 budget and made himself the target of both Democrat and Republican verbal pies...
are members of a sect whose devotees believe they devour the body of Jesus in the form of a wafer. Americans generally don't think such things, of course, because they know that religious practices must be understood in the context of faith. Their history, their constitution, their natural good manners and their common humanity tell them to show due reverence to other people's innermost convictions. When they consider Romney's Mormonism, their first thought is not of theology, but of how his religion has made him behave: the way it made him give away his father's inheritance, the way it made him work for others as a young missionary, the way it informs the charitable work of which he never speaks, because he understands that giving is a privilege, not a boast.