O Tempora!

The quadrennial conundrum is upon us again. Which of the crummy big-government candidates is worse?

Mitt Romney would make a fairly bad president. He inflicted RomneyCare on the citizens of Massachusetts In addition, Obama called Romney’s advisers who helped Romney design the state program. He’s also a hawk who will pursue the same kind of interventionist policy that every Republican in my lifetime has practiced. Romney is not as blatant some Republicans in the “culture war” department, but he’s no laissez faire freak either.

On the other hand, Romney does seem to believe in capitalism and free-ish markets. He has been a successful businessman, which means he’s had to deal with the massive regulatory state. He at least has some knowledge of economics. Romney has at least addressed the danger of the monstrous national debt, though he’s unlikely to do more than slow the increase.

Current President Barack Obama is a disaster. He inherited Bush’s recession and immediately amped up all the wrong big-government meddling and deficit spending that Bush had done. For those who believe that Bush was a small-government deregulator, remember that he signed such dreck as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Energy Independence and Security Act (the lightbulb law), and Medicare Part D. Obama and his cronies have given us Dodd-Frank, the CARD Act, and of course the totally partisan, unworkable, expensive and unconstitutional ObamaCare. They waste your money on “green” energy, which is green for the recipients of government largesse, but red ink for the rest of us. I heard one speaker at the Democratic convention bloviating about “a woman and her doctor don’t need government interference”. What? This from a party hack who likes ObamaCare? And finally, Obama has been spending us into perdition at the rate of about $45,000 per second of borrowed money. In other words, he increased the national debt by over $5 trillion in less than four years.

So the obvious choice is Libertarian Gary Johnson. He’s a former governor of New Mexico who cut government, cut taxes and vetoed dumb legislation. Unfortunately, the Big Two have passed enough campaign “reform” law that minor parties are frozen out, so there’s little chance Johnson will win.

I live in the “battleground” state of Colorado. If the polls show that one of the Big Two is statistically ahead, I will definitely vote for Johnson. If the polls are close, I might vote for Romney, because Obama is the worst president of my lifetime – and that’s saying a lot when you consider such contestants as LBJ, Nixon, and George W. Bush. We simply can't endure four more years of Obama's Hype and Chains.