Election

If I'm really being honest, and if I can shed my accumulated morality from years of participation in the American human experience, and if I could conveniently ignore my quotidian hours' long poll-watching fetish, then I could fill in the starting lineup for the ideal United States government.  Not in a vacuum, but in praxis.  File this under: Shit done, gettin'.  In this exercise, both the House of Representatives and Senate would be overwhelmingly liberal.  The Senate majority leader would be from Vermont, that of the House from any one of California, Oregon, New York, or districts representing either Austin, Texas or Madison, Wisconsin.  All of the swing states would have Democratic senators, but they would be low in rank and influence.  The conservative congressmen would be from the most conservative states and not a single one of them would serve more than one term as they would be voted out for not being conservative enough.  This way, the collective attention of the Alabamas, the Tennessees, the Idahos would be so consumed in vituperative local primaries that they would have scant energy and focus for the broader races. 

The ideal President would be Republican.  A Democratic President would be too consumed with the fear of going Too Far, playing themselves Out Of The Map, that they would have to hold back.  A Republican President, on the other hand, working with a long-haired-and-Molotov-cocktail-throwing Legislative Branch, would go down in the annals as the Greatest Modern Leader this country has seen.  Stymied at every possible move, from the budget to ethics hearings to nominees for everything from the Supreme Court to the Commerce Secretary to the Asst. Postmaster General for the Northern Rockies, the Republican President would have no choice but to play ball with the two chambers.  Being a Republican, he (because it'll always be a he) would be so vainglorious as to not give three shits from Thursday about having to compromise his supposed values in executing the tasks which would be his charge.  Even his token vetoes would be overruled by the supermajority in both chambers, so he would know it could never matter. 

But he would still sign.  By his second year, he would sign anything and everything that came from the Capitol because they would be the most beautiful pieces of legislation.  His knees would be bloody from begging around the rotunda for more bills, more ceremonies, more hand-shaking on podia.  The American way of life would improve exponentially and this Republican, this cocky, shitbag of conceitedness would bask in being the one at the helm when we finally got it right.  He would win reelection on a crest of approval in the high 80s and it wouldn't matter if he spent the whole election introducing a scale for the gradients of rape.  He would speak to the base, work with the chamber, and sop it all up like it was the last morsel of naan going into the final smear of curry.

But we don't live in an ideal world, do we?  We thought we had The Guy, then reality set in.  After eight years of drying their bloody grundles on every civil right earned over the past century, then receiving their comeuppance at the ballot box, the Republicans introduced a brilliant strategy.  They would become Total Fucking Cunts.  Every step of the way.  They voted nay, they filibustered, they even explicitly told the press that they would spend the next four years being such total fucking cunts that the American people would vote them back in.  Checking the polls on Election Eve, it appears as though they were wrong.  But not by much.

I actually think Romney would be an okay President, in the short run.  With Democratic chambers, he would probably revert to his role as a moderate and do everything to ensure the government made him look good.  In the long game, he'd be more like Reagan in furthering a steady course to ruin.  That wouldn't really affect him, so long as the opinion polls in the present were north of the equator.  The Gipper showed us all that projecting strength and affability, on top of some modest contemporary appreciation, was sufficient fodder for the forebears to write the revisionist history upon which good posterity rests.  This man has no vice, except himself; you have to almost respect a man so transparently shameless. 

Alas, I will not be voting for nor wishing in any way, shape or form for a Romney Presidency.  If there's one way I can sympathize with Obama haters, by which I mean people who hate Obama, it is in my imagination of a Romney presidency.  Because I hate his voice.  I hate his fake smile.  I hate everything about his myopic worldview and douchebag religion and raising five hindered sons who look like they still run lemonade stands well into their 30s.  Having Mitt Romney for a President would be like taking a four-year cruise with some clingy, desperate bitch that attended every bingo game and cocktail hour and Meet the Captain in a mink coat and raspy voice with skinny cigarettes and insisted on asking every stupid question at an obscenely high decibel.  You could tell the other passengers that she wasn't really accompanying you, and many of them would quietly sympathize and understand.  The best you could hope for would be pity.  The worst would be those quiet hours when the casino has closed and you're too worn down to even drink; you're sharing the tiny bunk and the only light comes through the porthole above your head.  She's obnoxiously snoring beside you and hogging the blankets as the ship cradles back-and-forth in a gentle heave-haw, and just when you imagine that it couldn't possibly get any worse- she opens her eyes.  She turns to find your own and there's a pause.  And just then, at the trough of your existence, with six more hours until breakfast, she figures it'd be a good idea to have a chat.