John Kass
January 15, 2012
As the Republican presidential candidates and their mouthpieces prattle on the TV from sunny South Carolina, I look up from the screen and out the window and sigh, a conservative heretic at rest, staring at all that cold Midwestern snow.
There's a yellowed sketch tacked to the wall of my work space, a cowboy Ronald Reagan smiling in eternal optimism. And on a bookshelf is a dusty, dog-eared copy of Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind."
Surrounded as I am by such dry artifacts of forgotten times, I sometimes wonder why I keep them. It could be self-mockery, or something like the way an amputee decides to keep the unused boot in the closet, out of sight, but near.
And still, I can't ditch this feeling that I might be boiled in oil for the heresy I'm about to spout:
President Barack Obama will win re-election in 2012.
The reason he'll win?
He knows who he is. And the Republican politicians don't know who they are. They've forgotten what they're about, or perhaps like some isolated tribe, they've lost the language necessary to explain it to themselves.
Their voters know this and don't really believe them anymore.
And that's why Obama will win.
And the Republican establishment that seeks to unseat him?
Their guy Mitt Romney calls himself a conservative. But he's really a John Kerry in Republican clothing, right down to the phony laugh, and his past flips and flops will haunt him in defeat.
Shouldn't the Romney types form their own party and call themselves the Corporatists? They're often mistakenly called "pro-business moderates" by news organizations, but that's not quite accurate.
For all the rhetoric about opposing regulation on business, they're not opposed to those regulations that crush their competitors.
But do they know why their party is adrift? Can they even articulate the problem? I doubt it.
What's bothersome is that I disagree with almost every single Obama policy, often vehemently, because what he's doing amounts to feeding handfuls of steroids to the federal leviathan gorging on our individual rights and freedoms.
But being anti-Obama isn't enough to vote him out. Republican voters have to believe, and I don't think they do. They see the game unfolding. And they don't want to be suckers again.
What's illuminating is the recent fiasco with Romney's investment firm, Bain Capital. He seized companies, gave out thousands of pink slips and made money for his investors. Now such layoffs are given a noble sounding name: "creative destruction."
Obama will gut Romney with this. Picture the screeching outrage in the TV spots, Obama in shirt sleeves holding out his arms to comfort an America that just wants to make it through retirement without spooning dog food on a hot plate.
There are, of course, legitimate conservative critiques of the creative destruction so favored by Wall Street. Capitalism creates freedom, but it also destroys.
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