Did you watch the third and last debate Monday evening between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney?
I thought assigning foreign policy as the topic was a bad idea. More so than in elections past when the nation had not been going through such hard economic times, what voters most care about now are pocketbook and social issues.
The two candidates apparently agreed as they veered into domestic policy no matter what questions moderator Bob Sheiffer asked. For us – elders – what has most been missing from the debates was a good and thorough discussion of Social Security and Medicare and I’m ticked off about that.
My favorite moment of the Boca Raton debate took place when, after Romney suggested he had been out somewhere counting Navy ships and found the total, in his estimation, to be wanting, Obama schooled him in how the modern military works:
“We also have fewer horses and bayonets,” said Obama, “because the nature of our military’s changed…the question is not a game of Battleship.”
Without question that was more snark than is presidential, but I liked it anyway.
There are only 13 days until the official election day, 6 November. Of course, millions have already voted, me included. Oregon, as it has done for more than 20 years, votes entirely by postal mail.
Although Mr. Romney has been trying to make himself appear more moderate, I don’t think his flip-flopping on issues helps him in that regard; it just makes us even more aware that we can’t believe him about anything, especially when he straight out lies about what everyone saw him say earlier on video tape.
Kinda makes you want to repeatedly bang your head on the television screen when he does that.
Mr. Obama seems to have found his mojo again but I agree with someone who recently noted that voting for Obama this time doesn’t give voters the same thrill of being part of history as electing the first black president in 2008.
That worries me. It worries me that people who would never vote for Mr. Romney might stay home from voting for Obama because he has turned out to be a flawed human being instead of Superman.
It worries me that there are way too many people in the United States who will vote for Romney not because they believe he would be a better president but because they hate black people. (Ooooh, we’re not supposed to say that out loud, are we.)
It worries me that Romney and his running mate are so tuned in, to and with the rabid right on their intention to control women’s bodies and that the media has stopped talking about those outrages in these final days of the campaign.
What worries me most about a possible Romney/Ryan victory is the appointment of Supreme Court justices of whom there will definitely be one and possibly two in the next four years.
Such appointment(s) have the potential to make the U.S. into a vastly different country from what it is now – and not one I look forward to or would be good for 99 percent.
And so on and so forth. Those are a few of my more publicly acceptable ruminations on this endless campaign.
I would like to say that I will be so happy on 7 November when this is all over, but I recall that on the morning of 4 November 2008, one of the first things I heard on the news was a discussion of who would run against Obama in 2012. And already, for the past month or two, there has been speculation about whether Hillary Clinton will run for president.
So, I’m sure that on Wednesday after the election, the 2014 mid-term campaign will begin while others will start positioning themselves for the 2016 presidential race.
Aside from a game-changing revelation about one candidate or the other – which I doubt is forthcoming – I think the campaign is all over but the vote counting. So today, I’m wondering about your thoughts on the campaign and what the results may or may not bode the future of our nation and of elders within it.
At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Johna Ferguson: Memories of Qingdao
