Epiphanies come in many forms. Some are personal, like the one I had after being invited to a hot tub party in Southern California: “I better start going to the gym.”
My political epiphany occurred there, too. (No, not at the hot tub party. In California.)
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The Oxford Dictionaries have chosen the word “omnishambles” as their word of the year. How apt.
Oxford defines the word as “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.”
One only has to look at the Romney-Ryan campaign and the misbegotten efforts of the “super PACS” to see how applicable the word is to American politics.
But the Romney campaign is not the only one to merit application of the word of the year.
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The candidates in the 2012 election may or may not have addressed big issues, but there is no doubt that the voters did.
A wise man told me many years ago that modest people do not seek political office. And over 40 years around politicians, I have never found his observation to be very far off.
One of the first rules of etiquette in debate is that you do not make personal attacks on your opponent. Last night, President Obama — who has so loudly, so frequently, so eloquently, so passionately and, we may add, so self-righteously — deplored the decline of civility in American politics, broke that rule. Not once, but repeatedly.
At long last, we are past the debate stage of the presidential campaign. Three up and three down. Now we can look forward to Election Day, when the voters decide who gets to be President of Ohio and Virginia.
Wait a sec — what? There’s another debate? Get out. For reals?
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Last night’s presidential debate ended with Mitt Romney claiming that he “cares about 100 percent of the American people” and Barack Obama claiming that he believes that the free enterprise system is “the greatest engine of prosperity that the world’s ever known.”
Neither candidate was entirely believable, because each tried at that moment to flip longstanding public perceptions of himself in order to broaden his appeal to voters. Nevertheless, I think that the exchange was illuminating because it reduced this election to a vote on a single question: Which is more important to the American people at this point in our history: growth or “fairness”?
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Conservatives Vow Outreach To “Welfare-Taking, Job-Killing” Hispanics
The forum, entitled “Reaching Out: Sharing the Message of Liberty With All Americans,” was simulcast on C-SPAN.
“Our message is simple: it’s freedom and economic opportunity,” said Robert “Red” Flange, author of the best-selling book “Invaders: Why We Continue to Welcome Terrorists and Criminals to Our Shores.”
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