Since President Obama is too much of a gentleman, and was probably advised to avoid any back and forth bickering during the debate in order to attract the few remaining undecided voters who by all reports want solutions instead of name calling (oh, the naiveté!), he couldn’t jump all over Mitt Romney’s remark bemoaning his dishonest sons.
My spontaneous reaction to this obviously rehearsed “zinger”, at least in my imagined sudden transport to the podium directly opposite Mitt, was as follows:
“Governor Romney, after patiently listening to your laundry list of brand new moderate policy positions this evening, where you’ve suddenly abandoned virtually every single already tested and failed George W. Bush tax cutting and regulation gutting policy, vehemently argued for by you and your surrogates the last eighteen months, I think I’ve found the reason you’ve been having so much trouble keeping your sons from lying to you repeatedly in the hope you’d finally believe them. You’ve set a bad example.”
BOOM! With a short right jab, ala Jon Stewart.
Then I remove my steely glare from the middle of Mitt’s forehead and turn to the American people, smiling broadly. Of course what follows is no longer my spontaneous reaction to Mitt’s string of mendacity, but what I imagine a real smart guy from Harvard might say as his face goes from smiling broadly to a serious, yet friendly father visage, pausing for effect.
At least the response I’d expect from a real smart guy from Harvard without weak kneed eleventh dimensional chess players as campaign advisors who’ve run out of ways to roll over for the radical right and plutocrats bent on remaking our democracy into a Randian utopia.
“America, in all fairness to generations of mischievous children who continue to challenge parents everywhere with their creative storytelling, what we’ve just witnessed here tonight is a far cry from the charming and innocent fibs that good parents everywhere use as opportunities to teach lessons to their kids.
What we’ve just witnessed here tonight in Mr. Romney’s creative storytelling is a dead serious effort to fool the American people into letting the fox in the henhouse.
We’ve all been waiting for this night anxiously, wondering how in the world Mitt Romney planned on presenting middle class Americans with the warmed over failed economic policies of George W. Bush and his cadre of trickledown economists that crashed our economy in 2008, and tonight we have our answer.
Mr. Romney decided he would simply deny almost everything he’s been saying for the last five years and become a centrist Democrat. Starting just this evening, he suddenly loves teachers, Medicare and Social Security, tax fairness, uninsured hard working Americans denied the basic human decency of medical attention, and even Big Bird.
Mitt now loves them all and all of the middle class programs that keep them from poverty, and he will do more for them and will do better by them, and best of all the doing of them won’t cost Americans anything at all.
FDR, in 1936, famously pointed out that the aristocrats that ran America into the ground and caused the Great Depression were trying to fool America into putting them back in charge. It didn’t work then, thankfully for America, and tonight I’m asking for your vote to prevent it from happening this time.
I would conclude by offering some friendly advice to Mr. Romney, from a father who has come to admire and count on my daughters’ honesty and integrity - lead by example, it works."