Am I missing something?
From my vantage point on the left, it's hard to see how anything good can come of this year's elections. We have a deadlocked Congress controlled by right-wing obstructionists unwilling to work with any president but a Republican and unwilling to move any way but to the right.
We have a corrupt Supreme Court controlled by corporate hacks allied to the same Congressional obstructionists.
If President Obama wins re-election, we can look forward to four more years of gridlocked government; nothing will get done because the Republicans will no more respect the results of this election than they did those of 2008. And in 2016, we will fight the same battle again, with people's faith in their governing institutions more eroded than ever. The eventual result must surely be the replacement of the Republic by some new, probably authoritarian, form of government.
On the other hand, if Romney and Ryan win, the country will descend swiftly to third-world status as the victorious Republicans tear up the safety net, tilt the tax burden even more away from the rich and onto the backs of working people, starve the national infrastructure of needed investment, gut public education, embark on more senseless military adventures, and ensure that government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations will endure forever.
Either way, it seems we lose.
Unless something happens to redress the balance of political and economic power in this country, such a severe winter is coming that none of us may live long enough to see its end.
As a Marxist, I'm supposed to see this in the context of the inevitable triumph of monopoly capitalism, followed by its eventual overthrow at the hands of the oppressed working people. But such an overthrow is surely decades, even centuries away. There is not even the remotest hint of a working people's political movement in America today. And something within me pines for the old Roosevelt compromise between capital and labor that was the New Deal, and the social contract that gave our parents the standard of living they enjoyed while we were growing up.
I don't see those coming back any time soon.