Mitt Romney's first name is Mitt - I shit you not

The Wall Street Journal's weekend edition contains a story about Barack Obama and the unbearable lightness of being black enough but not too black, but not too conscious about being black enough or not too black either. It also contains an interview with the resident Mormon, who promulgates the idea that data is what grounds any decision-making process worthy of the name and is described as a man "who refers to what some would call their 'core beliefs' as 'concepts.'"




I am not one to advert for the return of Hunter S. Thompson, mostly because I believe a suicide is evidence enough of the need for an era to run its course. That said, and adding the caveat that anyone of any political stripe who sincerely hopes that one of these people will rise to the occasion is likely to encounter the bleak vicissitudes of misplaced sincerity, I do believe that the general election will be a battle of attrition conducted during a relatively catastrophic economic decline and a thoroughly depressing media-fixation for a savior.




But (pause for effect) this is not to say that something along the lines of an Obama 04 convention speech or a Goldwater incursion won't emerge as the next proximate cause of a return to an interesting, relevant conversation about what can be done to bring some smelling salts to old sad sack America and restore some semblance of a coherent version of civic life that is neither self-defeating nor self-delusional.