Face the Facts and Get on With It

Ronald Reagan was a great president, and it is natural that people should  miss him and long for a candidate of his quality. Based on history, however, it is not particularly reasonable to expect to get one. Great presidents simply do not come along very often in this country, about once a century really.  So just as many voters in the 1880’s probably wished they could be voting for Abraham Lincoln, but, faced with the options before them, went ahead and elected Benjamin Harrison, voters today will have to choose among a set of poorer choices.

And the choices are poor. On the Republican side we have a would be Savonarola in Rick Santorum, a shifty, undisciplined,  and power hungry self-proclaimed visionary in Newt Gingrich, an elderly, well intentioned, but quite unelectable near libertarian with a naïve foreign policy in Ron Paul, and a bland, ambitious, un-ideological, establishment party man in Mitt Romney. The Democrats offer the truly execrable Barack Obama, a man already in three years worthy to join George W. Bush, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter among the half dozen or so worst presidents of all time.  

The answer seems clear. We need to go for the dull guy. Romney is not Reagan. He may not even be Clinton. But he is the best of the choices available. People need to  face the facts, accept that the options are what they are, and go ahead and elect  Harrison.