Post-Not-Quite-Apocalyptic Political Analysis

Well, readers, it's been a Sandy Dandy few days!  The Baseball clan did OK with merely the loss of power to contend with.  We are not defecating in the hallways nor dumpster diving in post-apocalyptic Staten Island.

So there's been alot to absorb and mull over i.e. Michael Bloomberg's staggering, rage-inducing climate change driven endorsements against the backdrop of the largest, pension-besotted municipal workforce in the known universe displaying little to no effectiveness at anything.  W.R. Mead nailed it in pondering the end-of-days arrogance of a massive government apparatus that fusses and frets - and moves to coerce - over the size of sugary beverage portions rather than tend to the long-range thinking, planning and executing of infrastructure hardening.

Here in New York we have a very busy government. It’s worried about the kinds of fats we eat and the size of the soft drinks we buy, and there is no shortage of regulations affecting businesses, street vendors, and individuals. But in all this exciting fine tuning, nobody seems to have bothered to think about the much greater task of keeping floodwaters out of the subway system. Admittedly, getting public support and finding the money for flood protection would be hard, but it is exactly that kind of hard job that governments are supposed to do. Leadership is getting the important things done, not looking busy on secondary tasks while the real needs of the city go quietly unmet.

The problem with nanny state governance isn’t just that it’s intrusive. It isn’t just that it stifles business with over-regulation, and it isn’t just that it empowers busybodies and costs money. It’s that it distracts government from the really big jobs that it ought to be doing.

But of course, there is something else of great import percolating - an election - and while I've been analyzing it intently along the way, I've taken a few days hiatus in the aftermath of Sandy to focus on other things, so I'm at a loss of having something scintillating to say.  However I will lay down some thoughts.

First, I don't think my "Obama Implosion" prediction is scorable pre-election.  It'll only be after the fact, that we'll know if I was right.  Second, I am fairly confident that there are only three potential outcomes: 1) Obama wins in a squeaker, 2) Romney wins in a squeaker, and 3) Romney wins in a blowout.  This should not be a great insight.  So, two out of three outcomes are good, and that's good, but the probabilities aren't even.  I'd say it's 40/40/20 respectively.

But frankly, this election is such a weird election because I don't see it as the President running against a political challenger, because I don't view Barack Obama as the President.  Of course, technically he is, but I view him as more of a leader of a very strange and very dangerous cult.  Mitt Romney, I see as an avatar of normalcy.  Do we return to normalcy and sanity or do we deepen our immersion into the cult and turn over more control of ourselves to the cult's leader?  In that framework it is very hard to apply traditional political analysis.  It's hackneyed but this is a major battle in what is narrowly dubbed the "culture war" (it's much more than that).  Bottom line, I just don't see how Americans can long for four more years of Obama, how they can still be swayed by the starry eyed, naive dreaming of 2008.  I've said it before, the "mega-theme" beyond all the policy and partisan sniping is this: the nation realizes it gambled and lost with Obama. Time to revert back to prudent decision-making.  That's the zeitgeist of 2012.  Ergo, Romney wins, somewhere between a squeaker and a blowout.

UPDATE:  Did I say "very strange" cult?