Election 2012

On September 2, 1939, the day after Hitler invaded Poland, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made clear in the House of Commons that he still entertained hopes for negotiations with the Führer: “If the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier.

Richmond, Va.

Cincinnati
 No candidate has won the presidency without Ohio since John Kennedy, and no Republican has done so ever. At this writing, the state’s 18 electoral votes are in play, and both campaigns are visiting Ohio with the insistence of a determined suitor.

In the first presidential debate of 2012, we saw, up close and personal, what Harvey Mansfield called in last week’s issue the ennui of Barack Obama. Obama’s ennui is related to his dislike for the real challenges of governing. More fundamentally, his ennui reflects his declinism. What’s exciting about governing for the next four years if it’s just going to involve managing austerity at home and decline abroad?

About the only talking point Joe Biden didn’t repeat in his debate with Paul Ryan was the one lionizing President Obama for having saved the country from another Great Depression. Biden used it in his speech at the Democratic convention, as did others, and it remains a hardy perennial of Obama lore. The president, ever immodest, has credited himself for this achievement.

A website called 90days90reasons.com went online this summer, after the writer Dave Eggers got worried about the diminishing enthusiasm for Barack Obama among people like him. Eggers is a hipster, I guess you’d call him. He lives in San Francisco. He’s best known as the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a long, funny, clever, and annoying memoir, which was published, like Barack Obama’s less funny and less annoying memoir, when its author was scarcely pushing 30. Kids grow up so quickly these days.

Slowly but surely, the toxin of bias is being leached out of American culture, if incrementally and by degrees. A Catholic was elected president in 1960, and since then Catholic nominees and candidates have become commonplace. A Jew was nominated in 2000 for vice president, and was a help to his ticket. In 2004 and 2008 respectively, Joe Lieberman and Rudy Giuliani ran for president, and their names and religions did not become issues.

The mini-storm over Mitt Romney, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Big Bird pitted two visions of the show’s finances against one another. Mitt Romney claimed he’d cut funding so that Sesame Street would have to air commercials. Big Bird defenders imagined a world in which a lack of federal money would put Big Bird out of business.

The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’ Reagan” and heralding the story inside as “What Obama Will Achieve in His Second Term.”

When Mitt Romney stepped on stage at the first presidential debate in Denver on October 3, he had been losing to President Obama on the issue of taxes for two solid months. The Obama campaign bombarded Romney with TV ads claiming he would raise taxes on middle-class families by $2,000 in order to pay for his tax cut for the rich.

This is perhaps the most lucid, even-handed, and convincing examination to date of the threat that President Obama—and his potential reelection—poses to our republic. No one who reads I Am the Change will come away thinking this election is about the economy. In truth, this election pits America’s founding principles against Obama’s efforts to transform them.