Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president. He doesn’t have the delegates yet, but everyone knows he is the candidate and everyone has known he would be the candidate for months.
And yet, the GOP primary race continues, a freak show of remarkable proportions that has done little more than succeed in damaging what little credibility Romney had.
Today’s big news, that Rick Santorum has “suspended his campaign,” really isn’t news at all. Santorum was never going to be the nominee and never should have been taken serious as a candidate. Santorum is a right-wing nut, a religious conservative with 16th-century views on women, sex and patriotism. His success in the primary — carrying the most rabid and backward voters imaginable — only proved the existence of the dark heart of the GOP.
Santorum was only the latest in a long list of the kind of candidates that Hunter S. Thompson would have loved to write about. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — all of them were varying shades of dangerous and weird.
Only Ron Paul, who had his own nasty baggage, offered any kind of alternative (criticism of crony capitalism and imperialism), and he was dismissed by the commentariat from the outset.
To capture the nomination, Romney — nominally a centrist/moderate in his past — has sprinted to the far corner of right-wing lunacy, with few among the mainstream press batting an eye. It was just something he needed to do, they say, and now he can tack back to the center and run the campaign he’s always wanted to run.
In this kind of atmosphere, one in which the strategy of the campaign is all that’s worth discussing, we are unlikely to get the kind of conversation about issues we need, or any honesty about the corporate-centered policies both parties push.
The difference between Romney and Barack Obama is one of degrees, not one of major substance. Both are beholden to the corporate order and tied to (different wings of) the foreign policy establishment. At least Obama doesn’t have to cowtow to the lunatic fringe. That, in and of itself, may be earn him a second term.
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Hank Kalet 