Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

No, I'm not better off. My hair is grayer, my eyesight dimmer, and my balance not so good.

How can I vote for Obama when he's done these things to me?

Wait, you say. Just because he was President while these happened doesn't mean he's the cause.
Correlation doesn't equal causation. But if you're a Republican convention delegate, you'll add, though, that the President is the sole, unique cause of every single bad thing that's happened to America's economy in the past four years (apparently good things are by definition not to the President's credit).

Oil prices--mostly determined by the world market (so the President apparently is also King of the World), bond prices (oh, wait, federal bond prices are up, since the world regards America as the best place to buy T-bills), corporate profits (oh, wait, they're waaay up--those profits just aren't being shared with employees; top managers and big investors have made out like bandits, though), global warming (oh, wait, Republicans believe it isn't happening or if it is, that human activity had absolutely nothing to do with it).

My Republican friends fail to recognize the degree to which the other party can throw sand in the gears of government if it has a mind to. That ability to obstruct is built into the Constitution and the internal rules of the Senate. However, the people who framed those rules had no reason to imagine that 200 years after our nation became a constitutional republic, those very rules wouldn't be used as part of our checks and balances but instead to drive the vehicle of state from the back seat as much as possible, by refusing to compromise about virtually everything, refusing to OK even minor, nonpartisan appointments, all the while waging a billion-dollar campaign against the very legitimacy of this President from the day he took the oath of office.

Never in American history has total political war been declared and waged on a sitting president to the extent that today's Republican Party has done so on this one.

So--how does a President "lead" such people? This isn't a business. He can't fire these people as if they were his employees. Thats the fundamental disconnect of the business model of government BTW. Every Congressman is an elected or state-appointed official not fire-able by the Prez.

The only "leadership" possible under our system under these circumstances is to hold the mob off at the pass. The only "leadership" the Republican Congress would accept would be total surrender--for the Prez to sign every bill they sent him without comment, basically just leaving his left hand and arm in the White House--as they can be sure will be the case with Mitt Romney if he wins, because his acceptance speech last night caved in to all their demands and then some--totally contrary to the principles espoused by Romney's father who he reveres except for the little matter of political philosophy.

Not to mention the fact that it usually takes a lot longer to fix a problem than to create it, just as it may take one kid a second to kick over a building built with blocks but half an hour to reconstruct that building.

So I hand you a problem that takes a week to solve, and after a day demand to see the results, and dismiss your complaints as making excuses.

That's exactly what the GOP is trying to do to the President.

What the Republicans don't want you to even consider is the possibility that President Obama has led the country as well as it could have been led, given the polarization of the country and the GOP's near-total intransigence.

You can't compare what someone did against some ideal in your head. You have to compare real world actions by real world alternatives.

But here's a thought: the President has far more leeway in foreign affairs than in domestic ones, where Congress dominates in our system. So you can make a good argument that foreign affairs are a better way to gauge a president's leadership.

The Republicans don't want you to think about that either, because in foreign affairs President Obama has done much to restore our position and credibility after Bush II's egregious bull in a china shop performance (the Republicans claim the exact opposite, but it's a tissue of transparent lies, from the "apology tour" canard on forward). The President has taken the war on Islamofascism to the actual enemy vastly more effectively than George "Mission Accomplished" Bush ever did.

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Some assorted thoughts:

When I say "my country," I'm talking about the country of my birth, and the one to which I pledge allegiance.

But when Governor/Bain CEO Mitt Romney talks about "my country," I can't help feeling that he's talking about one of his many possessions.

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There are two Mitt Romneys: the kindly, attentive husband, father, churchgoer, and great friend to the top managements of the companies he didn't suck dry and throw away...and the lying, trash-talking, weasel in a dark suit & a red tie whose campaign centerpiece--his budget proposal--is mathematically impossible, and whose ridiculing of Obama for being concerned with man-caused global warming shows a total lack of concern for his own many grandchildren.

I believe both Romneys exist--neither disproves the other; only the massive compartmentalization in his mind that lets him justify unethical behavior in his public life that he would never countenance in his private one. I can't read his mind but he's so thoroughly both Romneys I can't see any other explanation being plausible.

What I most fault in his presentation of himself is him adopting the kindly, paternal face/demeanor of Nice Romney while the words coming out of his mouth are those of Mean Romney. That's where his two halves clash most, making him as palatable as toadstool swirl ice cream.

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President Obama's biggest challenge is the fact that his domestic policies hardly matter, because he'll never get them enacted into law by a Republican-dominated Congress. All he can offer us domestically is to play Katy bar the door against the Republican government-hating, Voodoo Economics-worshipping mob--and to ensure that the Supreme Court doesn't get one of its aging moderat justices replaced with a second Scalia, as Romney has promised to do.

One more Scalia and the Supreme Court will simply become an arm of Mobil/Exxon.

This means that Obama's soaring rhetoric is not to the point. To the point would be channeling what the Spartans said at Thermopylae, as they fought off the vastly larger number of invading Persians: "Tell the Greeks that we did our duty."

All four more years of Obama can get us domestically is four fewer years of the Republicans completing the transfer they've engineered of America's wealth into around 5,000 pockets.

Footnotes on the GOP convention Day 3

The general nastiness of this convention continued tonight with the CEO of Staples appearing to praise  Governor Romney--which was fine--then moving on to say one lie after another about President Obama, who he doesn't know from Adam. And with every fake indictment he'd puctuate his attack by getting the mob--er, crowd--er, audience--to chant with him "He just doesn't get it."

Lordy do I hate political chanting. Hate it from the left, hate it from the right. It symbolizes the reduction of political discourse to raw tribalism--often with ugly racial overtones.

And it clashed with the following segment in which we met several families who'd been members of Bishop Romney's congregation in Massachusetts, along with a member of his bishopric who'd gone on to become a bishop himself (in Mormondom, a bishop is the appointed lay leader of a congregation, along with two appointed male assistants, who together with the bishop are, collectively, the equivalent of a paid priest or minister in other religions).

These people spoke kindly and positively about Bishop Romney. They reminded me of the many Mormons I know here in Silicon Valley, and they never stooped to the kind of vicious word-war that has typified this year's Republican National Convention.

What they said about Bishop Romney was uplifting. It was also the same as could have been said about the half dozen-plus bishops I've known personally. Let me be a little delicate here. I'm not trying to gainsay what these good people said about the goodness of their bishop towards them. I believe every word they said. All I'm saying here is that such behavior is par for the course. It's a very unusual bishop in any Mormon ward who doesn't do what Bishop Romney did, always backed by his two assistants in the bishopric, along with the Relief Society president and her assistants, the Primary President and her assistants, the ward secretary, the facilities manager, the teachers, the ward missionary leader, and many other people, all called to their tasks just as the bishop was.

So Bishop Romney definitely deserves the equivalent of a service medal for his work in the bishopric--but not the Medal of Honor. The Mormon culture brings out the kind of service these people described Bishop Romney as providing. And you have to see it in context of his work being backed up by dozens of other people.

I only heard one disturbing note in the "Mormon section" of the convention. The member of his bishopric who'd gone on to become a bishop himself praised Bishop Romney for not preaching every Sunday but rather giving the pulpit over to members of his ward/congregation to speak.

Huh? That's the way the Mormon church is organized. The bishop isn't the preacher giving a sermon every Sunday. Most of each month you have a youth speaker, an adult male speaker, and an adult female speaker. I've been attending Mormon wards for decades, both in my home town and in other states and countries, and that's the way it's done everywhere. So I see this bishop taking advantage of the fact that most non-Mormons don't know how Mormon services are run. And while the rest of his testimony rang true to me, it made me wonder if he wasn't shading the truth in other ways.

I would have thought someone on Romney's team would have vetted the talk and made him change this bit.

This isn't a big thing, but it's one teensy bit of fact-checking you probably won't get anywhere else.

It is a feature of tribalism to be kind and helpful to members of your tribe. The question is how you treat others--people you may not know personally--because Bishop/Governor/CEO Romney will never know me personally. So while this evening's presentation gave me a positive and believable picture about how he treats people he knows, people who work under him...it doesn't tell me how he relates to the half of the country that isn't Republican, the half that challenges much of what he claims.

Thus far what I've seen is that he doesn't like being challenged. No one challenges the bishop of a ward. It's not in the Mormon culture's DNA to do so. And no one challenges his boss at work--not if he wants to stay employed. I know about this from several first-hand experiences, actually, having a tendency to speak my mind. Mr. Romney has a tendency to get aggrieved when people demand to see his tax returns--he being possibly the richest man who has ever run for the presidency, and there being the appearance that he's stashed a lot of money in tax shelters offshore.

And one thing I know absolutely about the Mormon church is that all Mormons are enjoined to avoid both sin--and the appearance of sin.

I know he knows this. But he is used to being revered, and by all accounts he's a kindly if demanding lord and master. Maybe he thinks his himness being challenged is unseemly. He says "trust me." His wife says "trust him." And the Romney's appear to expect you to click your heels and say Yes Sir!

Back to the convention, a black woman who described herself as a liberal Democrat who'd been on his cabinet in Massachusetts, praised Mitt fulsomely, and again I saw no reason to disagree with her description. Nobody said he was a bad boss.

We got a couple of Cuban immigrants, who seem to collectively believe that anything to the left of Paleo-conservatism = Fidel.

The highlight was Clint Eastwood, who said he had President Obama sitting in the empty chair beside him on the stage. He then proceeded to have both sides of the ensuing fantasy conversation. You sure can make someone look like a fool when you put all the words in the other guy's mouth. Especially when the words are obscenities Eastwood didn't utter explicitly, but he made sure you knew exactly what he meant--obscenities more commonly associated with Republicans. In fact, exactly the obscene invitation Dick Cheney made to a Democratic Senator on the floor of the Senate a few years ago.

The audience lapped it up. What better way to show your total contempt for your opponent than to act as if he sinks to your own level?

Eastwood's a smart guy and a good actor, and he did all this cleverly. That shouldn't mask the fact that it brought insulting a sitting President from the floor of the other major party's nominating convention to a new low. And there's no doubt that the same guy who brought his former ward members on stage to speak of his kind heart also brought Clint Eastwood on stage to put obscenities in the mouth of Romney's opponent. That speech was vetted. Every speech was vetted. And this amusing little talk gave me the measure of this man--not Eastwood, whose only public office was mayor of Carmel some years ago. Romney.

How do we reconcile the venality and viciousness of Mitt Romney's political conduct with the virtue of Bishop Romney's personal conduct? And what Romney has his pals say for him after being approved by him is exactly the same as Romney himself saying those words. The RNC convention isn't some SuperPac beholden to no one but their secret funders (thanks, Supreme Court). It is, in toto, the Mouth of Romney; the Mouth of the Republican Party.

And that mouth is a potty mouth.

Then we got Romney's speech. More of Ryan's "more in sorrow than in anger" shtick, the more in anger than in sorrow having already been done by many minions.

And his speech was, at heart, telling America that the GOP's nonstop, four year campaign to prevent President Obama's administration from accomplishing anything domestically, to the extent that it succeeded...was Obama's fault.

It was like the guy who'd mugged you suing you for bruising his fists.

After describing himself as a successful small businessman--though running a multibillion-dollar investment firm isn't often lumped together with the little guy with a laundromat.

This led him to describing Obama as having been unqualified for the job of President due to his lack of business experience.

Meaning that he just said that his Vice Presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, isn't qualified to be his running mate. How could no one in that big hall (built with government subsidies) notice this?

And in his litany of how the fortunes of America's middle class have sagged during his presidency, not once did he mention how people like Mitt Romney--the top 1% in income (I'd say "earnings" but that's open to question)--made out like gangbusters during President Obama's first term. The 1%'s income went up just as the incomes of the rest of us went down.

Then he went on to re-state his trademark string of outright lies about President Obama, leading to a set of promises that sounded great....apart from every responsible economist out there saying they are mathematically impossible.

He administered quick slaps to the faces of homosexuals, lest any Log Cabin Republicans think they had a place at his table.

And he dismissed human-caused global warming by ridiculing President Obama's concerns about it. Scorn and ridicule of scientific fact--a Republican staple.

Then he tried to claim that Romney's foreign policy would be vastly different from Obama's "apology tour" foreign policy--reviving that completely debunked old canard.

Of course he made a play for Jewish votes by stating that Obama has "thrown Israel under the bus" by doing nothing whatsoever but talk to the Iranians. Apparently he's never heard of Stuxnet, or of the careful, thorough work the President has done behind the scenes to squeeze Iran more and more. What Romney could do more than that is nothing short of going to war there.

Apropos of that he made it clear that America's military is languishing on short rations because it's only as big as the next biggest 17 nations' military expenditures combined. That Obama--what a Scrooge.

At the end Ryan came onstage and waved to the crowd, arm in arm with Romney--the man Romney had just said was unqualified to be there waving. Very, very strange.

The most successful businessmen before now who were Presidents? Jimmy Carter...and Herbert Hoover. Yes, that business qualification is really sumpin' ain't it?

The balloons were pretty...

The GOP convention's first night theme was "We built it (on a lie)"

There it was, in big letters on the wall of the auditorium. In case you didn't get the message, one speaker after another harped on the theme of entrepreneurial Small Business Job Creators vs. President Obama, who recently told them "You didn't build it." Meaning, they hammered home again and again, that Big Government built it. You were just along for the ride. You owe everything to European Style Socialist Big Government.

So the first evening's theme was a refutation...of something President Obama never said. I mentioned this to a Republican friend of mine, who responded that he heard the clip of Obama saying exactly that himself. I said it was taken out of context. My friend say where did you hear that? I said MSNBC. My friend said "I wouldn't believe anything MSNBC said." I said they played the clip too--only with the words before and after that showed what President Obama meant. My friend said enough talk about politics.

It was exactly as if I said "I support the death penalty as long as it's for murder, as long as there isn't the slightest doubt as to the murderer's guilt (and eyewitness testimony has been proven to be unreliable), and as long as the prosecutor hasn't railroaded the defendant, withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense." And you quote me as saying "I support the death penalty." Did I say that? Yes. Does it say what I meant by itself?

The President said "You didn't build it" in the context of talking about how every successful entrepreneur depends on America's government for the roads his goods travel on, the safety of his warehouse not being plundered by thieves, the communications possible via the Internet (started 100% as a government project), the education he and his employees received--most likely in public schools, the electricity he gets, the plumbing he uses.

That's what the President said. He in no way discounted what successful entrepreneurs bring to the party. He just pointed out that saying "My achievements are 100% attributable to me and no one else" is a slap in the face to our society, and borders on the narcissism of a vain, boastful little boy who can't admit to having ever gotten any help.

The irony piled on irony is that Mitt Romney's signature achievement--rescuing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics (I mean, other than RomneyCare)--mostly came from getting a $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars from the Federal government to bankroll it (with a lot of that going to pork for local cronies). You can read the gory details here.

Not to mention the fact that most of the self-made men and women cited in the GOP's "We built it" campaign have turned out to be similarly ungrateful about getting substantial largesse from the government they hate so much. The poster child lady first featured in their campaign turned out to have gotten a huge SBA loan a year before--and was featured in SBA marketing for their program.

Here again, the GOP could make an argument for fiscal conservatism. But they're addicted to the mind-altering drug of the Big Lie, which plays with resentful, fearful, angry, uneducated white men far better than the facts. Plus it doesn't force them to reveal the fact that they aren't fiscal conservatives--their proposals for tax cutting without specified expenditure cutting means they're fake deficit hawks.

But they're real government haters, because their hyper-rich patrons are government haters, because they might make a few less billions that is currently being siphoned out of middle class pockets and into theirs.

Robert Reich says the two fears motivating middle class Americans are "the rot at the top and the mob at the gates."

The GOP's propaganda campaign gives them the best of both worlds by misdirecting the "rot at the top" part towards educated people in general and the federal government in particular, and the "mob at the gates" part toward all blacks and Latinos, using code words and phrases (like "welfare queens") to get the word out without having to admit what they're doing.

PS: Mrs. Romney talked about how she and her husband faced the same problems you faced raising your family and dealing with illnesses. She's just like you.

Except for the fact that her "family" includes dozens of maids and whatnot to cushion the burdens of parenthood, and her illnesses didn't result in her health insurance company cancelling her health insurance as soon as she got really sick, forcing the Romneys into medical bankruptcy. Funny how she didn't mention those things.

So apart from those tiny details, yeah...she's just like you & me.

What the first night of the GOP convention tells us

The most interesting thing about the GOP convention's first day isn't what was said but what wasn't.

First, of course, was the fact that Ron Paul and his supporters were shut out completely. Even votes for Ron Paul weren't announced from the podium. This is an authoritarian party whose constant talk of Freedom evidently means "Freedom for me, not for thee."

Second is that parties usually run on their track records--their record of accomplishments from the last time they controlled the Federal government. The nation's president from that time would have a featured place in the convention. The accomplishments would be touted.

Instead, if you watched the proceedings, as I held my nose & did, you would think it was a mystery who the last Republican president was. His name wasn't mentioned by any speaker. Not once. And you'd think it was a mystery who ran the country from 2000-2008. That wasn't that long ago, was it?

You wouldn't know who went to war with the wrong country (OK, we all make mistakes) and thus cost us trillions (yes, in the long run, trillions) of dollars and thousands of American lives.

You wouldn't know how the deficit got so large (a strong plurality of the national debt is Republican tax cuts that were put on the national credit card instead of being paid for by reducing the size of government).

You wouldn't know why America was already in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression at the moment Obama took office. They didn't even bother to try to attribute that to the Democrats somehow engineering this during the time the Republicans controlled all three branches of government (and if they did, doesn't that make the Republicans incredibly incompetent?).

You also wouldn't know that the U.S. Senate's rules enable the minority party to block legislation and appointments unless the majority party has not a majority but a huge supermajority of votes--and even there, the ability of the Republican's super-rich patrons to flood any state-level election with advertising for a month before elections can be and is used to intimidate Democratic politicians in purple districts from voting with the Democratic majority.

And you wouldn't know that the Presidency isn't the King-ency. Presidents can't enact laws. They have a lot of scope in terms of foreign policy, but with domestic policy Congress calls the shots. And even with the nominal majority Obama had for two years, the GOP decision to oppose him in nearly every respect, even down to nonpartisan appointments, meant that Americans can never praise or blame our presidents fully for what happened on their watch, as we could if we had a parliamentary system, because the Founding Fathers designed our form of government to divide up power and responsibility, and to empower the minority party to make life hell for the majority.

As the Republicans will discover if Romney wins. He who lives by the sword...

What you would know is that last night's speakers don't seem to think Romney will win. Because instead of tooting Romney's horn mostly their tooted their own (exactly as Obama did when he was supposed to be humanizing Senator Kerry). What's amazing is that even Mrs. Mitt did this, and when she did speak of her husband it was in platitudes, without a single detail about him that wasn't already known.

You would also know that Mr. Romney's business background is everything. The fact that he was governor of Massachusetts for four years was hardly mentioned and figured not at all in the accomplishments listed. Mrs. Mitt even made a point of Obama's lack of business background being the main reason why you shouldn't vote for him.

Um, exactly what is Paul Ryan's business background?

Zero.

The vice-president's job is to be President if the President is incapacitated or dies. Unless Mitt Romney is immortal and invulnerable to the strokes and aneurysms and cancers and assassinations the rest of us are vulnerable to, then the qualifications for someone to be Vice President are exactly the same as those needed to be President.

So last night's speechifying focused on the one aspect of Mitt Romney that Mitt Romney himself has said--through his actions--is irrelevant.

The other thing you could know from last night is that, despite the delegations from Puerto Rico, the Marshall Islands and American Samoa being right there in front, behind them what you saw was an ocean of white faces--mostly middle-aged, white male faces. I have nothing against white faces--otherwise I couldn't look in a mirror--but seriously, the GOP's convention demographics matched America's from never, even if you go all the way back to 1776--unless, as was done then, you don't count Negroes. The Great American Melting Pot was mostly absent. Orientals, Indians (apart from Bobby Jindall and Nicky Haley, and the former was busy with the hurricane), blacks, Latinos--nope. Might as well have been a political party in Iceland.