Every four years I submit myself to the slings and arrows of outraged VC readers and declare my personal views on the Presidential race. Once again, the choice seems rather astonishingly clear, and once again the Dems have the better man.
Here’s how things look to me. I’d give Obama maybe a B or B+ — which after the F the previous officeholder received, looks pretty decent to me. Lots of things to complain about, for sure. But he came into office in the midst of a colossal catastrophe – a global economic meltdown [whatever its cause may have been, and whoever/whatever was responsible]. 800,000 jobs lost the month before he becomes President! And here we are today – unemployment going down (though more slowly than we’d like), the economy growing (though more slowly than we’d like), job creation picking up (though more slowly than we’d like). For some reason I cannot even fathom, many otherwise reasonable people seem to regard this as a terrible failure on Obama’s part.
On the world scene, we’re out of Iraq, getting out of Afghanistan, and as far as one can tell Al-Qaeda and the other militant jihadist groups are at least unable to cause us serious damage at home. The world is a scary place – but it doesn’t seem to me that Obama (unlike, say, Bush) made it scarier.
And finally, there’s Romney. I guess there are people who think that he would have managed the last 4 years better than Obama did, but I’m sure not among them. The guy’s as light a lightweight as I can imagine – he makes Bush look like Schopenhauer. I shudder to think how he reacts when, say, Israel bombs Iran’s reactors, or Iran bombs Israel, or both, or when someone figures out how to shut down the Grid, or when war breaks out in northern Mexico, or when any of the terrible things we can’t even imagine happening actually happen. My guess is that he reacts the way Bush reacted when something he couldn’t imagine happening actually happened — Hurricane Katrina springs to mind – and it’s not a comforting thought.
As they say: my $0.02.