The Etch-A-Sketch Candidate

There is something to be said about the vicissitudes of Presidential campaigns.  Even though the current one has seen obscene gobs of money spewed forth by Super Pacs to merely denigrate the opposing side, it has proved helpful in getting to the heart of the matter by showing us the true character of the current would be Republican nominees.  After umpteen debates and dozens of “misquoted, misstatements”, a pattern is clearly visible.  The American people are able to see through the smoke screens conjured up by the political consultants, and view the candidates for who they really are. It is not a pretty picture.

     Mitt Romney, a/k/a the “etch- a- sketch” flip flopper , has been done in for the general election by his own General, top campaign aide  Eric Fehrnstrom,  who compared the primary positions Romney has had to take to the positions he will need to pivot to in the general election to an “etch a sketch” process. He said “You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again!” The result? The red bordered metallic erasable tablet manufacturer's stock shot up 200%, while Romney's stock as a credible candidate plummeted.  Mitt Romney has taken flip flopping and etch- a -sketchery to new heights!

     His Republican primary opponent Rick Santorum, whose own views on such issues as abortion, contraception, and gay marriage are etched instead in stone tablets handed down to him on some remote Pennsylvania mountain,  has now said that he would even prefer a continuation of the Obama Presidency to having the “Etch-a- Sketch Presidency” of Mitt Romney. 

     Wow! Did he really say that? Has it come to this? If the Romney train is finally leaving the station on the tracks of inevitably, who will be at the campaign's final destination to greet him when and if it arrives?  If not  Santorum, will it be just Jeb Bush?

     Perhaps the only crowd to greet him will  be the enthusiastic stock holders of the Etch- a- Sketch company.  There are pitifully few others to cheer him on,  excepting the most avid Obama haters. These are the folks who would conceivably back Lucifer himself, were he to chastise, cajole and challenge Obama in a red meat sort of way.  But wait, their candidate would be the cheerful Mr. Newt Gingrich.., and his train seems to have left the tracks somewhere west of Georgia.  So even they might not show up at the end of the tracks.

      Suffice it to say that Washington’s Union Station will be mostly empty  on the day Romney arrives as the eventual Republican nominee. Why?  Because he has continually traded principle for political pivoting,  consistency for chicanery and bald faced about facery for the truth. No amount of Super Pac money will ever be able to hide the two , three, or four faces of Romney that the campaign has allowed us to see.  He huffed and he puffed and he blew his own house down.  There is no putting this Humpty Dumpty back together again. The jig is up.

    In fact, maybe we should just  move up the date of the Presidential campaign to September,  and get the agony over with.  Why spend umpteen millions more on negative ads between now and November, when the choice will be clear by the end of August.  Maybe September would be a good time to put aside the partisan divide, and start to rebuild our national consensus.  Of course, that can’t happen, but at least we know that by the time the November election does come, we can choose to spring forward, not fall back.  It will seem good to have it all over, and have a real chance to begin to put the country back together, again.