Opinion: Phew! That Election Nightmare is Over

It’s over already

There will be a lot of analysis as to why Mitt Romney despite the supposed odds that had become political Shibboleth for the past 18 months lost the US presidential elections.

The mantra that combined jobs, healthcare, taxes, socialism, misogyny, homophobia, immigration and racism into a compelling conservative narrative was so shrill the world literally stopped to see what will happen as the 7^th of November 2012 dawned on us.

I just wanted the whole thing to be over long ago as I watched cherry-pickers of Mitt Romney’s vaunted business qualities wilfully ignore the realities and the truth of what a Romney presidency would bring to the world.

Scary, it was

There might just be a third of a billion Americans but whoever becomes the president is literally de facto leader of the world, his ideas, opinions, utterances, actions and much else can determine the global outlook of the world in such unintended ways, it is scary.

The day after George W. Bush was elected by reason of that Supreme Court judgement, I said to my friends, this man will take us to war, I just did not know who with. If I had a blog then, it would have been documented, but there we are.

A businessman who became governor whose father was still alive that there would have been reason for him to come out of the shadow of his father, it does not to take much to realise something radical will happen.

Disaster!

The trigger was the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre and the course of world history was changed forever, two wars, economic policies that lowered taxes and cheapened access to money – the whole edifice of false hopes collapsed ruinously as he was seeing off the last few months of his 8-year rule and the world has in no way recovered from the crisis as we close the fifth year of economic turmoil.

We all know that the lower taxes idea does not really create jobs nor grow the economy, not in the Reagan times nor in the Bush II times and this was the crux of Romney’s grand economic recovery scheme, but I am no economist just an observer of the realities as the world suffered them.

False dawns

Romney as a Bain Capital executive in the clearest truth did create wealth but never created jobs, he was at best a corporate raider who both well, piled on debt and sold it off to other mugs who thought the fat organisation had been made so lean and efficient but at what real cost to every single component of the business; especially the people and the communities?

However, the irony of this presidential escapade is in the kind of money that was sunk into the campaigns to the point that it was looking like a black hole casino that would no doubt have fattened the organisations that pushed the advertisements of terminological inexactitudes – to be blunt, lies to an electorate that probably just got fed up with it all as fact checkers worked overtime trying to keep up with the next rotten untruth, half-truth, bending of the truth or complete absence of the truth – it almost made the Devil feel outwitted at his game.

I should expect the networks that ran the advertisements to declare eye-watering profits and walk away with vulgar bonuses, this was a bumper year that they will be looking to make this a formula for each election cycle an assured source of atrocious income.

Run a company like this

Again, let us look at the presumably amazing business machinery that Mitt Romney brought into his campaign for the US Presidency.

If this were a company, it would be a case of the CEO being known to have a clear vision, mission and set of values for the company that changed with the sentiment of the market that none of the company shareholders could determine what purpose the company was for.

Each time, it seemed there was the promise of great returns and shareholders ploughed even more of their money into the company just as others saw that the products were going to a niche market and alarm bells were ringing questioning the viability of the enterprise.

Bust!

Where there should have been clear indicators of profit warnings, the investors were so locked into what had become a Ponzi scheme; they could not cut their losses and run.

For all that was invested, made, sold and accounted for, at well over $1 billion and management experience that made the niche market swoon at the genius of the Chief Executive, the company went bust.

Yes, for all the acumen that Mitt Romney brought to this business, he failed to get a sustainable market for his product, one that did not have enduring quality but was constantly recalled because of flaws and what we might uncharitably refer to as flip-flops.

Alas! No fault

The honest truth was that Mitt Romney was not able, not ready and not reliable enough to take the reins of America and consequently the world in leadership, direction and purpose – if anything, that was the economic solution for America that Mitt Romney had; truncated before it compounded the liabilities we are still contending with.

Sadly, because the quest for office was not like running a company, Mitt Romney rather than be charged with false accounting and running the company to ruin with all investors losing their money, he will return to the comparative comfort of being another footnote in history that will only come up when parallels are required for healthcare reform, hosting the Olympics or running the most expensive campaign that came to naught.

The best outcome

Without doubt from where I could observe things from, Mitt Romney had no business trying to be president and I am so glad that after the campaign revealed the character and substance of the man, not enough Americans were persuaded to hand him the keys to the White House – even though someone suggested a tweet I posted was the dumbest he had read with regards to that election night – whether prescience or just foreboding, I think wars are ending and the prospect of engaging Iran in a war might well have been kicked out of touch.

We need a world of accommodations on the pain of everything within our means, Mitt Romney never showed the foreign policy nous that would have kept the uneasy peace and détente and for that too I am glad that those who could decide stuck with what they already knew with the hope that change for the better is still possible.