It’s midafternoon on Christmas day 2011. The kids opened their presents early and then faded away to nap. We haven’t had our Christmas dinner yet, but my mind is already fast-forwarding to the New Year. What will the year hold for me, for my family, and for the United States?
Those are unanswerable questions because the future remains as elusive as it always has. Suffice to say, I’m no Nostradamus. I have no mysterious powers that will permit me to create wonderfully vague, ambiguous, and elusive words, phrases and sentences that highly intelligent people like Joe the Plumber will interpret and assign certaintities of time and place to catastrophic events in my name.
I’m just an ordinary guy who lives a low-key life without a lot of daily drama. In short, I’m no politician. I’m just Bob, the guy who lives next door in a neighborhood that’s been around awhile and is beginning to show signs of wear and tear but still is called home to a lot of nice people with a kind of benign nosiness and a tendency toward arguing in favor of their pet loony belief.
Because I’m the only normal man among a bunch of wierdos, I’ve learned to recognize their predictibility and hence foretell their future actions and reactions. For example, one of my neighbors is a man named Bob. People can’t seem to tell the difference between us. But Bob is predictible. He is absolutely certain that the election of that Kenyan guy as president was the first step in the takeover of the United States by the Soviet Union.
Forget for a moment that the Soviet Union ceased to exist a couple of centuries ago. Forget that the President of the United States is a white guy from Kansas. Forget that Shirley Temple was an ambassador to Tanzania or someplace. But remember that Bob will blame every occurrence in the universe on Brock O. Bama. Bob is predictible.
George Romney is also predictible. George is going to say something today, say something different tomorrow, and revert to his original something day after tomorrow. Nutt Gingrich is predictible. Everytime he has an affair, he will blame it on his love for our country.
Rick Perry is predictible. His hair is always perfectly coiffured and he talks in a silly fake Texas accent. Ron Paul is predictible. He’ll lambast black people and blame his words on ghost writers. Michelle Bachman is predictible. She’s smart and tees off everyone else because Tea Partiers can’s handle smart women, or smart anyone for that matter.
If you haven’t grasped my drift yet, peredictibility is at the heart of political analysis. In the field of human resources, the experts tell us that the best gauge of how a new employee will perform is how that employee performed in the past.
The same general rule applies in the world of politics. If you want to figure out how a candidate will perform as President of the United States, take a detailed look at his or her past performance. Be careful, however. The responsibilities and authorities of the President far outweigh those of any other office in this country public or private.
As Richard Nixon once said, “Don’t listen to what I say. Watch what I do.” That’s a brilliant observation. Nixon may have been a crook, but he knew a lot about human behavior.
And it’s good advice for anyone who really wishes to assess the current crop of Republican candidates for the presidency. Ignore their debate performance. Ignore their slick ads. Ignore the pronouncements of their supporters.
Look at their records. For example, if a candidate has supported a bill or a law, ask first and formost, “Who benefits? Does the law provide tax breaks or other good things to the one-percenters?” If it does, you will have a firm fix on the strong possibility that the candidate’s policies as President will follow a similar tack.
Once you’ve completed your analysis by collecting the facts, preparing a spreadsheet, and gnashing your teeth because you can’t find an iota of difference between any of them, throw away the whole pile, close your eyes, whirl around three times, and then vote for Obama.
