It’s almost impossible to imagine teenage Barack Obama holding down another student and forcibly cutting his hair. Can you imagine it? I can’t. I’m genuinely trying to.
(It has been pointed out to me that “he would have been arrested,” and this strikes me as a highly likely hypothetical outcome for such a scenario.)
And IF— let’s just indulge the scenario for a moment— Barack Obama HAD once held down another student and chopped off his hair, is there any way to imagine that we wouldn’t still be hearing about this story EVERY SINGLE DAY? Yet Romney’s own teenage hate crime is now a long-forgotten memory in this campaign, almost as if it’s something that Rick Perry or Herman Cain once did.
On the other hand, it’s fairly easy to speculate that Osama Bin Laden would still be alive if Mitt Romney had been President for the last 4 years.
Obama said, in 2008, that he would send people into Pakistan, if necessary, in order to get Bin Laden. As it turns out, it WAS necessary, since that’s where Bin Laden was.
Romney is on record, in 2008, saying he would NOT send people into Pakistan to get Bin Laden. He said it was a bad idea, and that he would not consider doing it.
If the situations were reversed, this kind of simple contrast would have been the totality of the GOP platform, just as “He Kept Us Safe” was their mantra in 2004 for the re-election of George W. Bush.
(You’ll notice that the question of whether Obama has “kept us safe” for the past 4 years is no longer the standard used by Republicans for whether a President should be kept in office, just as Mitt Romney’s Vietnam avoidance is no longer a relevant concern for the throngs of “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” that sabotaged John Kerry’s campaign.)
Mitt Romney is going to lose this election, and ten years from now Barack Obama is going to be a popular President the way Bill Clinton is now.
About half of the electorate voted for Bush twice and caused what I’d probably say is the single worst 8-year slice of American leadership in my lifetime. By the end of his second term, a great many of those voters were desperately unhappy with what they got for their votes in 2000 and 2004. Those people are now poised to repeat their mistake by voting for Mitt Romney.
These voters are apparently incapable of learning from their mistakes, and I am happy that they are going to cast their vote for a losing candidate this year, because they deserve to feel the burn of that on Election Day.
