I'm dropping the I-am-Sir-Oracle tone favored by political bloggers so as to confess that I regard the presidential campaign with (almost) mute amazement. Remember when one of Romney's TV talkers, questioned about the "severely conservative" positions the presumptive nominee was adopting, assured a watching nation there was no problem, it was only the primary season, and the Etch-A-Sketch would soon reset? This was pilloried in the press. What kind of farce was the Romney campaign? You say one thing now, you intend to say the opposite later, and you admit, on TV, that that's your strategy? Is it wise to wear your cynicism on your tongue? Doesn't announcing such a strategy make it impossible to execute?
Well, now it is being executed, and the story line is not the Romney farce but the artful Romney pivot. The farce is not the Romney campaign. It's our entire political culture, which seems to be built of nothing more than chattering chicanery. Obama has been criticized for regarding it with disdain. But that's the appropriate attitude. Also, however, a losing one. Catch-22.
I still think Obama is more likely to win. Romney's sojourn in Nevada may be his way of admitting that Ohio is a stretch. But why should that be? He should cut an ad in which he declares himself a stuffed shirt, air it nonstop from Cleveland to Dayton.
