Romney Promises New Covers for TPS Reports

The Republican nominee for President, W. Mitt Romney, gave his acceptance speech last night. Here it is: 

http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf

These speeches are seldom negative – they’re usually positive and forward-thinking; they’re inspirational and hopeful. Romney’s was starkly negative, criticizing Obama/Biden 2008 for having been inspirational and failing. 37 minutes’ worth of blaming the President for a crisis that he didn’t cause, and that he can’t solve in a vacuum. The Euro crisis affects us. The absurd cost of energy affects us. The worldwide financial meltdown affects us. 

Romney says he wishes Obama had succeeded, because he wants “America to succeed”. He then blames Obama for the division that came about after he took office. In Romneyland, the Republicans share no blame. 

Romney is blaming Obama for the Republicans’ stated platform of obstructing and thwarting every single policy, law, and nominee that Obama ever proposed. Governor Romney, if Obama has failed, that failure is the exact result sought by the political party you addressed last night. 

The first portion of the speech was a disjointed series of blame Obama, American exceptionalism, and jingoism. 

Romney omitted a lot of stuff from his speech. You’d never know, for instance, that he spent time as Governor of Massachusetts, except for a fleeting throwaway line about how he hired some women while in that position.  Medicare, Social Security, the ongoing wars – all absent. His 12 million jobs are what’s targeted to happen regardless of who becomes President, regardless of what policies they implement. 

Romney noted that Americans are less hopeful, less optimistic now. Well, a largely jobless recovery will do that. But instead of reinvigorating that hope and optimism, Romney simply said that we should have it, and that we should stop thinking about big ideas, and just stick to small basics. He’s running to be not President, but Manager. I’m shocked that there was no mention of Lean Six Sigma. 

Oh, and he got in some digs against Obama for supposedly “apologizing for success”, betraying Israel, and not standing up to Putin. The first never happened, the second never happened, and the third isn’t true. There was never an Obama “apology tour”. The rich? They got richer. Americans are largely pleased with the way in which Obama has handled foreign policy – incredibly, in just 30 years, the Republican Party has completely conceded the issue to the Democrats. 

Are you better off than you were four years ago? Maybe not you, specifically, but the country? Absolutely. Four years ago: 

The Dow closed at just above 13,000 yesterday.

Bank bailouts, lost jobs, decreased trade, auto bailouts, the bursting of the housing bubble, the European sovereign debt crisis – the recession began in December 2007 under Obama’s predecessor, became a terror in late 2008, and ended in mid-2009. Obama dragged us out of recession. You are objectively better off in August 2012 than you were in August 2008. 

I wasn’t going to vote for this guy,  but I watched his speech. It ended stronger than it began, but he didn’t say a thing to persuade me to change my mind. How about you?