This morning, MS-NBC reported that Mitt Romney paid the same of amount of money in taxes on his 113 million dollars of income last year as Barack Obama did on his three million dollars in income. That's not percentage people. That's actual dollars. Of course, I'm sure your president isn't getting hosed by the IRS, so we are left to wonder exactly who is getting hosed on this deal.
Mitt Romney is Republican candidate that has spent the most time hammering Obama on the economy. He is a man of the people after all. He has said he doesn't care about the poor people. Of course, he came back and made sure we understood that he still doesn't care about the poor people but he does care about the middle class. This is usually where we ask someone to define middle class. From his vantage point, anyone making 200,000 a year may qualify as middle class. In that case, I believe that he does care about those folks.
The Republican primary has become an O'Henry story. You have one candidate that can relate to normal people in economic terms, but becomes unelectable anytime he opens his mouth about social issues. We have another that seems all the while like a default candidate. He has played the winning and inspirational style of letting the other candidates shoot themselves in the foot. Sometimes you play to win, sometimes you play not to lose, and then sometimes you play to be the only guy with toes left. Then, you have Newt Gingrich. I suppose if you are morally bankrupt then you really have nowhere to go but up.
The key in the general election will be two-fold. First, he must convince people that things are not better now than they were four years ago. Of course, in the process he must find a way to get you to forget who put us in this mess four years ago. If he is able to convince you of that he then must convince you that he has the desire and wherewithal to make our economy better than it is now. No one in recent times has gone from the White House to the poor house, but there varying degrees of comfort. The Republican economic platform has long been established. They want to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. When you preach that as one of the one percent it can be difficult to seem genuine.
I know this is burying the lead, but I have maintained for some time now that the Republican party as we know is dying. Hanging on in quiet desperation may be the English way, but it isn't the American way. We go out yelling and screaming and that is what we are seeing with the Republicans. Mind you, I didn't say conservatism was dying. There should always be an alternative to governmental activism. The trouble is gap in credibility. They have none. Whether the tea party is the next wave or some hybrid form of Libertarian-ism remains to be seen. All parties die eventually and another will appear that will be a better representation of what many Americans think.
I believe the opposite. The law has become popular as more and more has been implemented and this was a compromise solution. The insurance companiere going to be pissed and they won't be pissed at Obama.
www.intrade.com had Obama with a 61% to win the general election last week, and Romney with only a 38% chance. Intrade is probably the most accurate thing out there. (It's a prediction market) Way better than polls at this stage. But if the Supreme Court overturns part or all of The Affordable Care Act, that could spell some trouble for Obama.