A big majority of this country is rightly frightened and appalled by what the congressional Republican party has become over the past four years: a radical cadre willing to push the nation over the cliff into utterly unnecessary national default in order to score a political point.

The hope for many of us was that a Republican president could do a better job constraining them than Barack Obama has been able to do - especially if (as I personally also hoped) the very act of electing such a president would deflate the radicalism of the congressional GOP and revive a more constructive spirit.

But at every point, Romney has surrendered to the fringe of his party. Weak. And now in his first tough encounter with Barack Obama, Romney is being shoved around again. This is not what a president looks like - anyway, not a successful president.

I was thinking the same thing.

It's not just that Romney doesn't stand for anything.

It's that he chose to run on his deplorable Bain record instead of his decent record as governor of Massachusetts. Weak.

And Obama going on the attack looks stronger every day.

While the adage currently being said is that normal Americans do not care about Romney's taxes, I disagree. I think there is a lot that can be discovered about a person by their taxes, hence Mitt's father released a lot of his taxes. There is also a story that McCain did not like what he saw in Romney's taxes, so they already know it could be ugly.

The VCs in silicon valley would love him though.

Andreessen / Romney connection: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/SURPRISE-Silicon-Valley-Hero-Marc-Andreessen-Is-3529200.php

Andreessen says he used to support Democrats – like Clinton/Gore, for example – but "I turned 40 last year and so I figured it was time to make the switch."

//

Interesting comment.

Agreed. Not sure what 40 has to do with it. Obama is older than 40, too, and you know he's not voting for Romney.

I'm still trying to figure out what he meant, ha.

A big majority? You mean the majority of people who elected them in 2010 and is poised to elect them again this year (don't expect coat tails if Obama wins, the numbers so far predict the GOP at least holding if not picking up seats)?

Presuming your politics represents the majority when the vote counts say otherwise is a step down a very slippery slope, not to fascist dictatorship or anything silly like that, but to polarization and civil war.

Both sides are doing this ever increasing virulence and it has to stop, primarily by resisting such presumptions.

Indeed, the center is weaker for a number of reasons. Colbert had a funny comment this week about how the votes that are being courted by both campaigns are the worst people...they wait until they are at the register to look at the McD's menu...

Fascinating blog post: "Playing for 51 percent"

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/playing-for-51-percent/

From Bill Kristol: "So far, the Romney campaign doesn’t resemble the Clinton campaign. It seems to be following more comfortably in the tradition of the five post-Cold War Republican presidential candidates who preceded Romney. They received 37.5 percent, 40.7 percent, 47.9 percent, 50.7 percent, and 45.7 percent of the vote, respectively. The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to (narrow) defeat."