Electorate to Mitt: “Oh, be quiet!”

Am I the only one who thought that Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s demand that President Barack Obama take his “campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago” sounded a tad bit divisive, angry and hateful?

ROMNEY: Rancid rhetoric?

Or was it just cheap, petty and whiny – the rhetoric of a political loser! Which is kind of an angry statement on my part, and foolish for Romney to say unless he wants to face the wrath of “the Chicago Way” of doing things.

IT’S JUST THAT it bothers me to listen to this campaign rhetoric that is meant to accuse Obama of the nasty bile that the ideologues of the GOP have been spewing for years.

As though Obama’s very existence in the White House is the hateful, divisive act that is splitting the nation. Then again, to the ideologues, it is.

The people who are the bulk of the Romney campaign backers are the ones who haven’t gotten over the 2008 election cycle, and are convinced that the nation as a whole shares their anger and contempt.

Even though there are various bits of evidence that indicate the real majority of the people of this country find Obama himself to be somewhat likeable.

OBAMA: Too nice?



OR AT LEAST more likeable than they find other government officials. Personally, I got my  kick out of a pair of Gallup Organization stats on Wednesday. The Obama “favorable” rating was 45 percent, compared to 10 percent for Congress – which consists of many of the people who claim Obama IS the problem.

In fact, if there is a flaw to Obama and his first term as president, it may well be that he’s too likeable. He has been a bit too willing to try to negotiate and compromise with his political opposition – not taking into account that the “other side” has no interest in negotiating and compromising with him.

Heck, the Democratic partisans who are only reluctantly voting for Obama this time around would probably be enthusiastically backing him if there were a touch of truth to what Romney is claiming.

WASHINGTON: Too reminiscent



Then again, we have a president going for the moral high ground – which may reflect well on him decades from now when somebody writes yet another book trying to rank the presidents and attempts to figure out where on the list Obama belongs.

BUT FOR NOW, we have a political system that all too often devolves into a bloodbath. It literally would be a national version of “Council Wars,” if only there were a political personality at the federal level capable of taking the lead of the movement the way that Ed Vrdolyak was able to galvanize the opposition to Harold Washington back some three decades ago.

Instead, we get “personalities” such as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Romney himself – politicos who are capable of making former Vice President Al Gore seem interesting by comparison.

Listening to Romney claim that Obama is causing the “division and anger and hate” is ludicrous. It sounds way too much like the schoolyard bully getting upset when one of the people he terrorizes manages to ball up his fist and pop the bully in the snout.

Then again, I’m sure there are some people who are convinced all the hostility of “Council Wars” was Washington’s fault, just by winning that ’83 election.

WHAT WE HAVE is a case of a campaign on Romney’s part that is desperately trying to bolster itself and is accusing the opposition of the things it may well be guilty of.

Personally, I got a kick out of Romney saying that Obama’s campaign strategy, “is to smash America apart and then try to cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.”

That has long been the GOP strategy for trying to win presidential elections, particularly since the days of Ronald Reagan. Take Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as a vice presidential running mate.

The Gallup Organization came out with a new poll this week showing the nation seriously split about Ryan (only 39 percent think positively of him, compared to 42 percent who don’t). The idea that such figures could become the final result of the Nov. 6 elections is probably Romney’s biggest fear – and the reason he’s resorting to such nonsense talk these days.

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