The New Clarion

Had H.L. Mencken been revived from his grave to watch the last night of the Republican National Convention, he would have recognized the scene. He would have heard the anecdotal, folksy speeches, the paeans to family and God, and he would have understood that the booboisie is alive and well in America. He would have said something wittier than even Mark Steyn or James Wolcott could come up with and then asked to be killed and returned to his grave.

I understand that the Obama campaign and their Democrat PAC’s have spent, according to one number I read, $120 million attacking Mitt Romney. (Obama has outspent Romney three to one so far, but that does not stop him from whining because Romney now has more money.) I understand that the American people, in our dumbed-down age, are susceptible to such an idiotic argument as Romney is mean because he ran a company that, in the course of restructuring businesses, fired people. (And that attack is the Democrats at their most intellectual. When you descend below that, you get nonsense about Romney being mean to his dog. Seriously. This is what the left has become.)

I get all this, but I still wonder why they had to devote so much precious airtime to “humanizing” Mitt Romney. And I laugh at right-wing pundits joyously proclaiming, “He’s human! He’s human!” Great. So glad the GOP didn’t nominate an alien from space. Can you imagine Goldwater succeeding in today’s milquetoast Republican Party?

Listening to speech after speech I wondered, “Is this the best the Republicans can do?” They would not have needed to “humanize” their man if they had been capable of mounting a self-confident, morally certain intellectual defense of capitalism and individualism. Something on the lines of Howard Roark’s courtroom speech, for instance. No, the speeches read as if they were written by Alvah Scarrett rather than Roark.

But I’m no political pro. Doubtless, the Republican brains knew what they were doing. I suppose they know that trying mount an intellectual argument for today’s booboisie is a fool’s errand. How much more effective it is, in this Age of Oprah, to tell a sob story about Mitt and a dying 14-year old boy. I admit, in contrast to the narcissist Obama, whose greatest achievement is writing two books about himself, these stories of Romney’s altruism are powerful. Romney comes off as a man with deep values that he takes seriously. If Romney is no Howard Roark, Obama very much a Peter Keating, more interested in impressing people than actually doing anything.

Romney should win in November. With the economy as bad as it is, in the worst recovery since the Great Depression, the election should not even be close. The Tea Party formed spontaneously because the American people were shocked by the Democrats’ power grabs in the first two years of Obama’s presidency. This election should be a landslide on the order of 1972, 1980 and 1984. If it is not, take it as a sign of America’s cultural decline. Take it as a sign that the Democrats have changed the sense of life of the American people. And be afraid.

Since it should be a landslide for Romney, he should get enough votes to overcome Democrat voter fraud. I fear that the statist-collectivist Democrats now agree with, and secretly admire, Joseph Stalin, who said it doesn’t matter who casts the votes, but who counts them.

What worries me is the day after the election. What do the Republicans do then? What will be their mandate? Having campaigned as a bleeding-heart altruist, how can Romney make any significant cuts in government? The Republicans are now the party of Medicare, which has something like $40 trillion in unfunded liabilities. It’s impossible to pay that off. Medicare needs to be phased out. How can Romney/Ryan begin this critical project when they have campaigned as Medicare’s saviors? Having promised to replace ObamaCare, how can Romney move toward freedom in medicine?

Is this what it takes to win nowadays? Must the Republicans become welfare statists to gain power?

What price victory?