This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close

by Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone
September 25, 2012

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/this-presidential-race-should-never-have-been-this-close-20120925

The press everywhere is buzzing this week with
premature obituaries of the Romney campaign. New polls
are out suggesting that Mitt Romney's electoral path to
the presidency is all but blocked. Unless someone snags
an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State
mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a
Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese
carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama's
widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia,
Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

…..
For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate
for the presidency four years after the crash, the
Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect
perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney
is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only
has never done a hard day of work in his life – he
never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until
1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some
seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's
missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The
number of lost souls was astounding").

He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay
well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those
absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan
dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has
used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and
his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in
the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay
for payments to his own company) and moved American
jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should
be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that
pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to
2%. Maybe 3%.

If the clichés are true and the presidential race
always comes down to which candidate the American
people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans
will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall
Street multimillionaire who fires your sister,
unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his
money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss
accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages
finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements"
like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight
and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and
generally speaking has never even visited the country
that most of the rest of us call the United States,
except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him
on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great
out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's
Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy
Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic
to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon
Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything
we've been trained to despise, the guy who had
everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles
and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for
himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have
had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity
contest.

The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain
range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute
incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in
this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of
this system. Bruni of the Times is right that the
process scares away qualified candidates who could have
given Obama a better run for all that money. But what
he misses is that the brutal campaign process, with its
two years of nearly constant media abuse and "gotcha"
watch-dogging, serves mainly to select out any
candidate who is considered anything like a threat to
the corrupt political establishment – and that
selection process is the only thing that has kept this
race close.

Barack Obama is hardly a complete Wall Street stooge.
The country's most powerful bankers seem genuinely to
hate his guts, mainly because they're delusional and
are sincerely offended by anyone who dares to even
generally criticize them for being greedy or ethically
suspect, as Obama has with his occasional broadsides
against "fat cat bankers" and so on.

On the other hand, Obama's policy choices in the last
four years have made it impossible for him to run
aggressively against the corruption and greed and
generally self-obsessed, almost cinematic douchiness
that Romney represents.

With 300 million possible entrants in the race, how did
we end up with two guys who would both refuse to bring
a single case against a Wall Street bank during a
period of epic corruption? How did we end up with two
guys who refuse to repeal the carried-interest tax
break? How did we end with two guys who supported a
vast program of bailouts with virtually no conditions
attached to them? Citigroup has had so many people
running policy in the Obama White House, they should
open a branch in the Roosevelt Room. It's not as bad as
it would be in a Romney presidency, but it comes close.

That's left the media to speculate, with a palpable air
of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever
you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you
rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be
disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against
such an incompetent challenger. Weirdly, there seems to
be an expectation that presidential races should be
closer, and that if one doesn't come down to the wire
in an exciting photo finish, we've all missed out
somehow.

Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote a thoughtful,
insightful editorial today that blames the painful,
repetitive and vacuous campaign process for thinning
the electoral herd and leaving us with only automatons
and demented narcissists willing to climb the mountain:

   Romney's bleeding has plenty to do with his
   intrinsic shortcomings and his shortsightedness:
   how does a man who has harbored presidential
   ambitions almost since he was a zygote create a
   paper trail of offshore accounts and tax returns
   like his?

   But I wonder if we're not seeing the worst possible
   version of him, and if it isn't the ugly flower of
   the process itself. I wonder, too, what the
   politicians mulling 2016 make of it, and whether,
   God help us, we'll be looking at an even worse crop
   of candidates then.

The Times, meanwhile, ran a house editorial blaming
Romney's general obliqueness, his willingness to
stretch the truth and his inability to connect with
ordinary people for his fall. David Brooks ran a column
suggesting that Romney's overreliance on a message of
strict market conservatism, ignoring the values message
of "traditional" conservatism, was what killed him in
the end.

All of these points of view have merit, I guess, but to
me they're mostly irrelevant. The mere fact that Mitt
Romney is even within striking distance of winning this
election is an incredible testament to two things: a)
the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which
would have this and every other election for the next
half century sewn up if they were a little less money-
hungry and tried just a little harder to represent
their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our
propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to
accept the idea that the American population,
ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the
middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer
to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking
about since last year.

Think about it. Four years ago, we had an economic
crash that wiped out somewhere between a quarter to 40%
of the world's wealth, depending on whom you believe.
The crash was caused by an utterly disgusting and
irresponsible class of Wall Street paper-pushers who
loaded the world up with deadly leverage in pursuit of
their own bonuses, then ran screaming to the government
for a handout (and got it) the instant it all went
south.

These people represent everything that ordinarily
repels the American voter. They mostly come from
privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked
with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They
not only don't oppose the offshoring of American
manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it,
financing the construction of new factories in places
like China and India.

They've relentlessly lobbied the government to give
themselves tax holidays and shelters, and have
succeeded at turning the graduated income tax idea on
its head by getting the IRS to accept a sprawling
buffet of absurd semantic precepts, like the notions
that "capital gains" and "carried interest" are somehow
not the same as "income."

The people in this group inevitably support every war
that America has even the slimmest chance of involving
itself in, but neither they nor their children ever
fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious
and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from
cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of
criminal penalty for their behavior.

That last thing I would say is probably appropriate,
except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor
(and mostly black and Hispanic) kids get tossed by cops
every year (would you believe 684,000 street stops in
New York alone in 2011?) in the same city where Wall
Street's finest work, and those kids do real time for
possession of anything from a marijuana stem to an
empty vial. How many Wall Street guys would you think
would fill the jails if the police spent even one day
doing aggressive, no-leniency stop-and-frisk checks
outside the bars in lower Manhattan? How many Lortabs
and Adderalls and little foil-wraps of coke or E would
pop out of those briefcases?

For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate
for the presidency four years after the crash, the
Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect
perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney
is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only
has never done a hard day of work in his life – he
never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until
1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some
seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's
missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The
number of lost souls was astounding").

He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay
well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those
absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan
dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has
used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and
his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in
the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay
for payments to his own company) and moved American
jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should
be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that
pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to
2%. Maybe 3%.

If the clichés are true and the presidential race
always comes down to which candidate the American
people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans
will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall
Street multimillionaire who fires your sister,
unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his
money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss
accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages
finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements"
like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight
and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and
generally speaking has never even visited the country
that most of the rest of us call the United States,
except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him
on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great
out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's
Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy
Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic
to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon
Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything
we've been trained to despise, the guy who had
everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles
and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for
himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have
had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity
contest.

The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain
range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute
incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in
this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of
this system. Bruni of the Times is right that the
process scares away qualified candidates who could have
given Obama a better run for all that money. But what
he misses is that the brutal campaign process, with its
two years of nearly constant media abuse and "gotcha"
watch-dogging, serves mainly to select out any
candidate who is considered anything like a threat to
the corrupt political establishment – and that
selection process is the only thing that has kept this
race close.

Barack Obama is hardly a complete Wall Street stooge.
The country's most powerful bankers seem genuinely to
hate his guts, mainly because they're delusional and
are sincerely offended by anyone who dares to even
generally criticize them for being greedy or ethically
suspect, as Obama has with his occasional broadsides
against "fat cat bankers" and so on.

On the other hand, Obama's policy choices in the last
four years have made it impossible for him to run
aggressively against the corruption and greed and
generally self-obsessed, almost cinematic douchiness
that Romney represents.

With 300 million possible entrants in the race, how did
we end up with two guys who would both refuse to bring
a single case against a Wall Street bank during a
period of epic corruption? How did we end up with two
guys who refuse to repeal the carried-interest tax
break? How did we end with two guys who supported a
vast program of bailouts with virtually no conditions
attached to them? Citigroup has had so many people
running policy in the Obama White House, they should
open a branch in the Roosevelt Room. It's not as bad as
it would be in a Romney presidency, but it comes close.

If this race had even one guy running in it who didn't
take money from all the usual quarters and actually
represented the economic interests of ordinary people,
it wouldn't be close. It shouldn't be close. If one
percent of the country controls forty percent of the
country's wealth – and that trend is moving rapidly in
the direction of more inequality with each successive
year – what kind of split should we have, given that at
least one of the candidates enthusiastically and
unapologetically represents the interests of that one
percent?

To me the biggest reason the split isn't bigger is the
news media, which wants a close race mainly for selfish
commercial reasons – it's better theater and sells more
ads. Most people in the news business have been
conditioned to believe that national elections should
be close.

This conditioning leads to all sorts of problems and
journalistic mischief, like a tendency of pundits to
give equal weight to opposing views in situations where
one of those views is actually completely moronic and
illegitimate, a similar tendency to overlook or
downplay glaring flaws in a candidate just because one
of the two major parties has blessed him or her with
its support (Sarah Palin is a classic example), and the
more subtly dangerous tendency to describe races as
"hotly contested" or "neck and neck" in nearly all
situations regardless of reality, which not only has
the effect of legitimizing both candidates but leaves
people with the mistaken impression that the candidates
are fierce ideological opposites, when in fact they
aren't, or at least aren't always. This last media
habit is the biggest reason that we don't hear about
the areas where candidates like Romney and Obama agree,
which come mostly in the hardcore economic issues.

It's obviously simplistic to say that in a country
where the wealth divide is as big as it is in America,
elections should always be landslide victories for the
candidate who represents the broke-and-struggling
sector of the population. All sorts of non-economic
factors, from social issues to the personal magnetism
of the candidates, can tighten the races. And just
because someone happens to represent the very rich,
well, that doesn't automatically disqualify him or her
from higher office; he or she might have a vision for
the whole country that is captivating (such a
candidacy, however, would be more feasible during a
time when the very rich were less completely besotted
with corruption).

But when one of the candidates is Mitt Romney, the race
shouldn't be close. You'll hear differently in the
coming weeks from the news media, which will spend a
lot of time scratching its figurative beard while it
argues that a 54-46 split, or however this thing ends
up (and they'll call anything above 53% for Obama a
rout, I would guess), is evidence that the system is
broken. But what we probably should be wondering is why
it was ever close at all.

ed. note.  Paragraph order in this post was re-arranged to get to the point sooner. If you prefer the original order, use the link.