Will Mitt Romney Get the Republican Nomination?

Didn't we already leave Romney on the trash heap of history after he tanked in the last primaries? Why am I hearing so many reports about his extremely high chances of getting the Republican nomination for presidency? Do people learn nothing from past experience? We've already had a preppy religious fanatic and a former male cheerleader from an extremely wealthy family as our president for eight years. And we still can't sort out the mess he created both inside and outside the country. Do we really need yet another version of Bush Jr. in power? 

If the Republicans really can come up with nothing better for the elections that will mean so much to them, it goes to show that the crisis within the party is even deeper than everybody thought. Choosing the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama to run against. . . Obama sounds like pickings are extremely slim among the Republicans.

Donald Trump as a Republican Candidate

Of course, he's mildly creepy and he has weird hair, but if I had to choose among Republican candidates for president in case Obama loses (which today seems less probable than yesterday), I'd choose Trump. The reason why I think he'd be better than all the other candidates from that party is that he is not a religious fanatic. Better yet, after all the divorce proceedings, casinos and TV shows, he will not be able to sell himself as a religious fanatic. I believe that there is nothing scarier in the world today that religious fanatics of any persuasion.

Religious fanaticism today is a symptom of not being able to accept contemporary reality. The hysteria of religious fanatics betrays how confused and lost they are in the world they simply don't get. Learning to live with the new and constantly changing realities is an impossible proposition for them, so they'd rather the whole planet went to hell in a basket.

Trump is obviously not one of these folks. He is the exact opposite. He has found a way to manipulate the existing realities to his own advantage and turn them into opportunities. This is a person who thrives and flourishes in today's world. I don't see him buying into the fundamentalist propaganda, not even to win an election.

This is a big country with a huge variety of opinion (I think I deserve the right to an occasional platitude, especially on a Monday). If there is a Progressive movement, there has to be a Conservative counterpart. "Audiatur et altera pars" is a principle that I hold near and dear. For the longest time, I've been hoping to hear what the Conservative discourse in this country is. However, the Conservative movement in the US has been hijacked by a minority of crazed fundamentalists. There must be intelligent, non-hysterical, educated Conservatives who don't evoke Jesus, sin and evil every fifteen minutes and who are as comfortable with today's realities as we are. A candidate like Trump could help such people take back the party. This would be the kind of a Republican party that I would still not support, but at least I'd be able to respect it. Difference of opinion is a great thing, and it's precisely that which no religious fanaticism can allow to exist. I'm a lot more comfortable with (mind you, not happy about but comfortable with) an administrator who asks me to demonstrate how my existence is profitable to the university than the one who requires that I demonstrate how the teachings of Jesus will be integrated into my course on Spanish grammar (a true story).

"But he is a ruthless capitalist who will walk over everybody and everything in search for a profit margin," people say. That he is. And for many people this is what this entire country is about: being able to do whatever is needed to become rich and assume the risk of failure. A Democrat in office is supposed to make sure that we have some protections in place in case we fail. A Republican's job is to remove such protections based on a belief that this will make us try harder to win the competition. One can dislike this position but at least it's based on reason and not on hysterical fanaticism. 

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Democrats Are Hopeless

It is becoming more and more obvious that the Democrats are planning to base their 2012 election campaign on the following message: "The Republicans promised to deliver jobs but they lied and did nothing to boost job creation." This is very similar to their 2004 "Bush lied" slogan, and we all remember how successful that was.

In Solzhenitsyn's major (in my opinion) novel In the First Circle, the character of Stalin says that his opponents lost because they had an extensive knowledge of books but their knowledge of people was non-existent. It is the same with the Dems. They tend to live in the world of ideas and disregard people. They address their campaigns not to actual human beings but to an imaginary concept of what human beings should be like.

The sad truth of the matter is that people don't care about economy. They say that they do but their willingness to vote against their own economic interests time and again proves that the opposite is true. The Dems are trying to discredit the Republican Congress that was elected last November by suggesting that it hasn't delivered what it promised. The truth, however, is that it has. From the day they were elected, the Republicans set out to push very aggressively for the implementation of things that every conservative holds near and dear. Their assault on reproductive rights has been relentless, their attempts to repeal Obama's healthcare legislation started as soon as they got into the Capitol, they are pulling federal funding from countless programs. Their anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric is more venomous than ever. They even took the time to defund the NPR which is hated by conservatives.

Compared to the Democratic Congress of 2006, the Republican Congress we have today can only be described as vigorous, aggressive, and strong. It must feel great to support a party that is so unapologetic about achieving its goals. Every day brings a small ideological victory to the Republican supporters. And ideology trumps economy every single time. While the Democrats had both the Congress and the Presidency, all we heard was a string of excuses why things weren't possible just for the moment. The Republicans don't offer apologies or excuses. They act. They push their barbaric agenda with the single-mindedness of bulls in the arena. 

As long as they do what they promised in terms of ideology, their supporters couldn't care less about the repeal of the Wall Street reform that they have begun.