I am one of those disaffected Obama voters from 2008. I gave him money. Now I was always skeptical of "hope and change" and all that, and of course I voted for him because ...there was no realistic alternative.
I think the same scenario plays out in 2012.
EVERY bit of news being pumped out about Romney is silly, insane, stupid, and embarrassing for Americans.
Romney's a tax dodger quarter-billionaire with offshore assets and a record of job destruction as far as the mind can grasp.
His "running mate" is a photogenic wackaloon. That makes him a wackaloon.
Everyone will have known this wackaloon tried to destroy health care for people in this country.
Whereas Obama...as Thomas Frank puts it in Harper's this month (subscription only):
[A]nd while Obama and his fellow Democrats have been off chasing postpartisan soap bubbles, the right has seized the opportunity to make itself into the great expression of hard-times protest. When unem- ployment is high this time around, it is the right—with its mythology of heroic “job creators”—that we ask to rescue us. It is the right that talks about the little people, about smashing the cozy Beltway consensus, about bringing in a whole new crop of leaders.
As I watched this upside-down unrest emerge, I used to wonder how long it would take Obama to switch on his inner FDR and start grappling with the nation’s problems the way they obviously needed to be grappled with. The years passed, and I finally realized that this was never going to happen. Then a different possibility started to dawn on me: Maybe a second New Deal is precisely what Obama was here to prevent. Maybe that was the hope all along.
I think Frank is spot on here...except that I got this a couple of years before. As I noted a while ago in a diary here,
an eliminationist party such as the Republican Party must be destroyed, not negotiated with in some post-partisan wet dream.
Obama's mission, is oddly enough, to keep the Republican party alive because he will allow them (and their looniness) a "seat at the table."
And the alternative is to give them not only the whole table, but the whole universe.
So obviously, I'm voting for Obama again. And Romney will drive the election that way for whatever reason the powers that be have seen fit to nominate someone as strange as him and his wackaloon running mate.
But I'm under no illusions that he will deliver for progressives any more than Bill Clinton did UNLESS the majority of voters are demanding it.
And we should, by the way, be demanding the wholesale dismantling of the Republican party. They have done more damage to the United States than Communists ever did.