Perfect: The Enemy Of Good Enough
By Mitch Berg
People ask me “who are you backing for President”.
It’s not “anyone but Mitt”, if that’s what you’re curious about.
No, where I stand so far in this race is “a point waaaay to the right of where Mitt is, so that he knows that I, and a few million people who think like me, remain to be convinced, and that he’d better hustle on over to the right to join us. And stay here”.
In an election where I wanted a candidate that would bowl me over with his firebrand free-marketeering gun-toting Iranian-scaring tax-slashing government-throttling mettle, Mitt Romney is…
…acceptable.
As in “waaaay better in the Oval Office than Obama”. As in “maybe so much better than this nation has a chance to survive into my grandchildren’s’ adulthood”. Fingers crossed.
But to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t go to November with the candidate you want; you go with the candidate who gets nominated.
And so while I will do my best as an individual to make Romney know that he’s got Reagan-sized shoes to fill, and he’d better make a game effort at filling them, he’s…
…acceptable.
And apparently I’m not the only one that thinks so:
Mitt Romney is the now the only candidate that a majority of conservative and moderate/liberal Republicans nationwide see as an “acceptable” GOP nominee for president. Conservative Republicans are more likely to say Romney would be an acceptable nominee than either Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.
I shudder to ask how they polled that – but that’s what Gallup says. Gallup’s no Rasmussen, but they’re not the Humphrey Institute, either.
Acceptable.
It’s high time someone made a better case, if one is to be made.
January 11th, 2012 at 6:20 am
Even Huntsman would be better than the Current Occupant. At least Paul would probably follow the oath he took to faithfully execute the nation’s laws, and would allow the Senate to decide when it is in session.
Obama was a professor of constitutional law, wasn’t he? Graduated cum laude from Harvard? Well, he did admit that he benefited from affirmative action.
January 11th, 2012 at 7:36 am
Obama or a sack of hammers? The only question is: Hardware Hank or Home Depot?
January 11th, 2012 at 7:38 am
If not a true conservative, none at all.
If Second-Term President Obama wanted to spent another trillion dollars, Republicans would fight for a quid pro quo. If President Romney wanted it, Republicans would have to toe the party line (and Democrats would fight for TWO trillion or quid pro quos for slashing the budget to only one trillion).
Thus, it would be easier for Republicans to put the brakes on Obama idiocy than on identical Romney idiocy (e.g. massive government takeover of the entire health care industry).
Clinton cut welfare because Newt made him do it, no Republican did because Democrats didn’t make them do it.
January 11th, 2012 at 7:54 am
The appointment of Richard Cordray to the CFPB is reason alone to prefer anyone to the right of Obama to Obama. The CFPB is not funded by congress, it’s funded by the Fed. With the recess appointment — carried when the Senate said it was not in recess — we now have a federal agency responsible for writing the rules on virtually all consumer lending operating with no oversight from the sovereign People of the United States. The Current Occupant is acting like Caesar.
January 11th, 2012 at 8:10 am
“Acceptable” is somebody that can beat Obama in the general election. I’m not convinced that Romney can do that. AFTER the election, we ought to be concerned about whether they could lead the country out of the morass it’s in, or just be one morass in the White House
January 11th, 2012 at 9:03 am
“Acceptable” is a pretty low threshold. Unfortunately, our GOP choices currently do not start with “acceptable,” they end with it.
January 11th, 2012 at 10:27 am
A phrase that has always stuck in my mind is the “ratchet effect.” There is a relentless movement towards socialism–there are brief pauses along the way, but sooner or later you get there.
My first hope for change was the elections of Thatcher and Reagan–sea changes I thought at the time. But statism rolled on and got bigger. Then I held out hope for change with Newt and the Contract with America during those heady days when the Republicans took over the House in 1994 and there was talk about eliminating the departments of Energy and Education, those Jimmy Carter innovations. Now, we have a new Newt but the old Energy and Education departments roll on.
Mitch Berg, you’re a good man and a battler, but you and Romney are merely the clicks in the ratchet. You’ll never shift the political spectrum and if so, let’s move on to real socialism so we can try to re-create the nation from the debris.
January 11th, 2012 at 11:19 am
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/todays-question/archive/2012/01/what-do-you-think-of-the-role-super-pacs-are-playing-in-the-campaign.shtml
January 11th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
It is looking like Romney. Considering the strange leftward turns by Perry and Newt, maybe Romney is the best guy running.
January 11th, 2012 at 4:11 pm
Why any conservative is better than the Current Occupant:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-epa-regulations-create-jobs-epa-touches-lives-every-single-american-every-single
This is known as “The Broken Window Fallacy” or “The Broken Window Parable” in macroeconomics: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
Words cannot express the economic ignorance of this President.
They call it Obamanomics because it’s not Keynesian economics, it’s not Classical economics, it’s just weird and Obama seems to be making it up as he goes along.
January 11th, 2012 at 5:29 pm
I don’t want someone in the WH that wants to fundamentally transform the country, 4 years of that attempt was plenty. And we will need 40 or more years to undo said damage.
January 12th, 2012 at 8:58 am
Words cannot express the economic ignorance of this President.
They call it Obamanomics because it’s not Keynesian economics, it’s not Classical economics, it’s just weird and Obama seems to be making it up as he goes along.
Personally, I think you’re giving him to much credit by saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing and making it up as he goes along. On the contrary, I think he knows EXACTLY what he’s doing, and is trying to at least turn us into a command/control economy where government controls as much as possible. It falls in perfectly with analysts like Dinesh D’Souza who have identified him as anti-colonial.
He wants to destroy this country. Period.
January 12th, 2012 at 10:13 am
No, where I stand so far in this race is “a point waaaay to the right of where Mitt is, so that he knows that I, and a few million people who think like me, remain to be convinced, and that he’d better hustle on over to the right to join us. And stay here”.
I’m not sure what your expectation is on this front. Each of the candidates have pretty much staked out their positions on the issues and I don’t think it’s very likely that any are going to switch a position or modify them in any significant manner this far in the process. It’s unlikely then that the primary process is going to cause Romney or anyone else to “move to the right” so to speak.
If anything because the attacks on him from both his opponents and the perpetually aggrieved who insist on telling anyone within earshot or keyboard view that “he’s an establishment RINO that I won’t vote for and maybe we’d be better off if Obama got another four years” have given him an excellent opportunity to triangulate. When your opponents and most vocal critics (not you Mitch) come off as cranks, it’s usually best to keep on doing what you’ve been doing and say what you’ve been saying because they keep making you look better and better by comparison.