I’m so sick of being negative that I’m feeling negative about negativity. I often wish I had never heard of politics. The presidential race is incredibly irritating, and I am not only sick of it, I am sick of my pessimism about the results. It seems like we’re in for a lose-lose. Whoever wins the primary loses. And of course that sets off in my mind a cascade of game theory pessimism in which I judge the “best” outcome according to who is held responsible for the Republican defeat. From a libertarian perspective, if defeat at the hands of Obama is a certainty, then Santorum is the “best” candidate, as he is the least libertarian and has gone out of his way to say so.
These are hardly reassuring or inspirational thoughts. I really ought to be more outraged by my own negativity. But in my defense, it strikes me as tragic that despite the fact that no one in the current crop of candidates is likely to beat Obama, the polls consistently say that he CAN be beaten (oh yes he can!) — but only by a hypothetical generic Republican.
I’ve been so negative that I have actually dismissed out of hand the idea that a generic Republican might exist, and I went to bed angry and bitter last night. I didn’t know it, but I was leaving it to my dream state to figure out. All of a sudden I awakened in the wee hours of the morning with the generic Republican staring me in the face.
Mr. Generic was, simply, Scott Brown. A senator who won with heavy Tea Party support. A real guy who has literally been a bad boy and makes no bones about it. A candidate who would be able to win the hopelessly RINO-infested Northeast, and the moderates, independents, the women vote, and (as the red meat crowd would say) the “squish” vote. Hell, he could probably win a lot of the youth vote, as he isn’t a priggish moralist, a robot businessman, a fat grouch, nor is he popularly perceived as a kook.
I realize this is unlikely to happen, but I can dream, can’t I?
I can even click Facebook like.