Tired of Obama? Electing Romney or another Republican won’t help

By David McElroy · November 12, 2011

I sense growing frustration among many Republicans. They can’t stand Barack Obama and will do anything to dump him, yet there’s no real enthusiasm for any Republican who might be nominated. I can’t say I blame them.

When Rick Perry jumped into the race, I thought he had the look and feel of someone to come out of nowhere and win the GOP nomination. But Perry has had an instinct for self-destruction that I haven’t seen in a candidate lately. I still think Herman Cain is a “flavor of the month” candidate whose star would have faded quickly even without his female accusers lately. Newt Gingrich? Give me a break. He has no chance. Ron Paul? He has passionate support that’s never going to go much above 10 percent. He can’t win.

Mitt Romney is probably going to be the Republican nominee by default. He’s always at or near the top of the polls, but have you talked to anyone who’s passionate about supporting Romney? I haven’t. I finally saw my first Romney bumper sticker Friday, so I know his supporters actually exist. It’s just hard to imagine why anyone supports him.

So here’s the likely scenario in my mind. Romney and the other Republican candidates keep up their never-ending stream of fake debates for months. (If they add any more of these events that are more like joint news conferences, they’ll be able to save money by just traveling together like the member of a band on tour. When I mentioned this earlier, one friend suggested we call them the Grateful Dead.) Anyway, it’s likely that Romney will win the nomination and all the Republicans who are completely cold about him right now will suddenly decide that he’s Mr. Conservative — all because he’s their only hope to defeat Obama.

A friend of mine who’s also opted out of the electoral system summed it up nicely Friday when he said this:

Whoever ends up getting the GOP nomination will suddenly become the Great Conservative Savior of All Mankind, even though there will be virtually no difference in which liar is actually elected. Some so-called conservatives I know would vote for Joseph Stalin if he ran against Obama.

The biggest single thing Republicans hold against Obama is his health care plan, known collectively as ObamaCare. Well, what was ObamaCare modeled upon? That’s right. It was modeled on RomneyCare. Take a look at this chart comparing the two plans. Although Romney now likes to claim the plans were very different, the only substantive difference is that Romney’s plan also paid for abortions. Does that sound like something to get the GOP masses excited?

If you want a preview of the future under ObamaCare, all you have to do is look at see what’s going on now under RomneyCare. Costs to the state are going up in Massachusetts under the plan, so things aren’t working out as Romney and his friends said they would. (Who would have thought?) And a special commission appointed to look into the problem just recommended this week that the state institute price controls. If you know anything about economics, you know that price controls never work.

Former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace wasn’t a laudable man for the populist stance he took about race relations in the ’60s, but he was certainly right when he said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats.” There are indeed small differences, but they’re mostly in their rhetoric. In actual practice, federal spending shoots through the roof under both, the United States attacks foreign countries under both and both listen to the same set of Keynesian economic advisors.

So tell me. Why are you worried about who’s going to win the election next year? It’s not going to make any difference in the long term. The economy is still going to collapse when the bubble gets so big from printing money that it can’t be controlled anymore. Is it really worth your time, money and effort to help determine whether the person in the White House is a Democratic Party statist or a Republican Party statist?

Wouldn’t you be better off looking for solutions about what to do after the collapse instead?

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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