Obviously, Romney has done a lot of tacking in his political career: first on the Massachusetts stage, now on the national stage. “Tacking” and “tacky” are words that sound an awful lot alike.
I believe that Romney is a conservative, and that he would make a very good nominee and a very good president. Furthermore, I believe he is the only Republican candidate who can win.
But how can you prove such things? You can’t, is the answer. Any of these propositions would have to be tested. Think Newt can’t win, or Santorum? The only way to prove it is to nominate him and see. Think Romney would go all Elliot Richardson on us if he were in the Oval Office? Only one way to find out. Think he’d be more like Reagan? Only one way to find out.
Etc. A very great deal of political discussion is speculation -- informed speculation, maybe, speculation of varying intelligence and credibility, but speculation all the same.
When people speak in absolute tones, as though their political opinions were chiseled on tablets from Sinai, watch out. The more people know about politics, I find, the less absolutely and obnoxiously they speak.
I really appreciated that. Anytime anyone tries to be an expert about this stuff, they are probably way off-base. Jay posted some of his reader response to this topic and one person who had close ties to someone that was highly successful in the market wrote about his exchange with this expert about what he thought about the upcoming year, to which he replied, "your educated guess is as good as mine."
That's all any of the punditry is. Careful of guys like Paul Krugman that pretend to be experts, and more especially, those who refer to him as if his columns were handed down from Mt. Sinai. That guy, and many others, most assuredly, are far from knowing everything about everything, no matter how much they might pretend otherwise.
Anyway, with all of that, just a few thoughts.
- My brother-in-law-in-law (that's right) made some comments on Facebook about Romney winning the Iowa caucus. I loved the short dialogue we had on there about it, and what I mentioned on there I'll say here also: That result is especially interesting because from the media spin, it would be hard to know that Romney actually did win that one. So many people, and many among the media, are in the mode of anyone-but-Romney. So far, Romney is the only GOP candidate not going away, unlike Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and Gingrich. Santorum will likely be the same, but we'll see.
- The nice thing about this primary season, and something that I had forgotten until I read about it recently, is that this year most states are going with a proportional system instead of winner takes all. Maybe you are aware, but in case you're not, in the primary season, a candidate receives the nomination by winning the most delegates from all of the states. States have a certain number of delegates allotted according to their populations. Formerly, and as recently as 2008, many states were winner-take-all. This meant that although a candidate might have only gotten 40-50% or so of the votes in a primary, that candidate would receive ALL of the delegates. A proportional system awards them based on proportions. Super Tuesday, which will be in early March this year, kind of became moot because candidates would drop out early because they wouldn't get awarded delegates because of the winner take all system and the cost of continuing what appears to be a lost campaign. This year, it will take awhile before the nominee is determined because there is no obvious favorite in the GOP field, including Romney. He's still the most likely, but it will be a fight until the end. But I think that will be a good thing because...
- This is the President of the United States we're talking about here. The last time we ended up electing....the current President of the United States.
- A lot is at stake, as always. May the nomination go to the candidate most likely to defeat President Obama, which at this point still looks like Romney.
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