We are less than two weeks out from Black Tuesday and after the debate last night, I'd call it two weeks closer. I'm pretty much ready to throw in the towel on the current President for his performance in rebuilding the economy after the Bush fiasco. The only thing that holds me back is the nagging realization that things were so much worse 4 years ago than we every imagined and the rebuild is just going to take a while. We are forgetting that Black Tuesday was in 1929 and it was nearly 10 years before things got the least bit better. Romney with all the "I know how..." doesn't seem to get it that there are social responsibilities in being president and it isn't just a matter of being the President of Employment that will make this clock tick.
What is clear as a bell is that neither of these guys will have cooperation in righting the ship of state from a congress that seems, how to say this politely, crazy. Congress is where things get granular. Presidents say "let's go over there". Congress is in charge of making it happen in detail and in that I have no faith.
What I fear most in the Romney vision of things is just that; his vision or lack thereof. You got a glimpse of it in the 47% stuff. You also got a glimpse of it in the woman's issue questions. Binders of qualified women that didn't apply but had to be found by his all male associates. The beat was "creating so many jobs that by golly they (employers) might have to dip into the female labor pool. Lord Almighty we might have to hire a woman when all the males are taken.
On a broader note, Romney seems like a throwback to the Black Friday way of thinking, of tycoons and Mr. Scrooge, of upstairs maids and lace napkins. Net history resourcing is an interesting thing. My father was alive and remembers Oct. 29, 1929 when the wheels really fell off the cart but he remembered them getting dicey a year or so before the bad day and that is where we are now.
He had a job at Ford Motor in Dearborn, MI sorting the five lug nuts that were used in all Ford cars. There was only a 16th of an inch difference one to another and barrels of these things were dumped on a central sorting table with a bunch of guys counting and sorting them into little trays for the assembly line. I guess no one ever thought to sort them to begin with so my father made the following suggestion. He cut holes into a long piece of wood that was mounted on something like a coin sorter contraption and he just fed the bolts down and they dropped into the right bin below. It worked like crazy. So Ford management came over, gave him a citation and promptly fired the other 9 guys working with him. He had armed guards take him off the premises at the end of the shift for his protection. and the death threats made it impossible for him to go back to work. So he took a railroad job that his dad got him on the daily run from Detroit to Grand Rapids just in time for the October 29 Black Tuesday, where he no doubt read this paper.
I can easily see Mr. Romney in the above anecdote and the following headline.
