By Steve Sailer
10/04/2012
Here’s a link to a semi-coherent transcript of the first Presidential debate.
The President seemed peeved having to deal with somebody who evidently hadn’t been briefed that Obama is always The Smartest Guy in the Room. Hadn’t Romney gotten the memo from Valerie Jarrett?
From the bits and pieces I saw, it looked like Romney would have won pretty decisively if he wasn’t stuck with the reigning Republican orthodoxy. Like I've been saying, the notion that Romney is some particularly horrible individual candidate is silly. He’s a man of varied accomplishments (and ridiculously good looking for his age). He’s not particularly gifted at politics, but he makes a decent generic GOP candidate. He’s a well-adjusted grown-up with a track record of executive skill.
The problem is that the GOP ideology of tax cuts and stronger military and not much else is well-suited to solving the problems of 1980. There are diminishing marginal returns to tax cutting, and (as far as I can remember) we won the Cold War. Imagine that Romney stood up and said, "Look, one of the things we have to do is cut the bloat from the military budget. It’s a managerial problem. I have years of experience going over budgets line by line. President Obama has years of experience writing his autobiographies. Who do you trust to do a better job?" But, he can’t say that.
Further, the GOP is so throttled in what they can talk about by their concessions to political correctness that they don’t have much to say.
The word immigration never came up.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.