"The last four years have been a failure"

The heart and core of Romney's pitch to the American voter is that President Obama is a failure. A failure on the economy, on foreign policy, on social issues.

Of all the Big Lies Boss Romney is running on, this is the biggest lie of all.

First: Compared to what? Compared to earlier boom years? That's ridiculous. The only valid comparison is compared to what would have happened from 2008 to 2012 if the Republican candidate had won the presidency instead of the Democratic one.

The fact the Republicans totally refuse to face is that we were teetering on the edge of a second Great Depression--and President Obama pulled us back from that edge. So though times were tough, we weren't seeing a third of the workforce out of work, along with the rest of the social upheaval Americans endured through the Great Depression.

And the best example of what a Republican presidency would have done is what Herbert Hoover and his team actually did under similar circumstances about 70 years ago, preaching almost exactly the same ideas that Boss Romney is peddling. Hoover's fiscal stringency turned a major recession into the Great Depression. So would have today's Republicans, who apparently learned nothing from the last depression.

The second fact the Republicans totally refuse to face is that we are now inextricably embedded in a world economy, and what happens in the EU, in China, in India and elsewhere affects America significantly--and no American president can ignore that. Romney's talk about American exceptionalism and his bringing us back to world leadership is insulting to our allies and is also shallow revanchism. At the end of WWII we were the last man standing. This is a very different world--one in which America is extremely important, but not in anything like the way it was when we had the only nukes and the only plexus of intact factories.

Meaning that Boss Romney's chest-thumping posturing about foreign policy does nothing but insult our allies by positioning them as our servants--except for handing leadership in our foreign policy over to the leader of one faction of one small country, whose own coalition partners and a majority of public opinion in that small country don't agree with.

President Obama's "failure" in foreign policy rests on Boss Romney's unspoken assumptions that we could have stopped the Arab Spring from happening if BR had been in power; that the Arab Spring exactly equates to Al Qaeda's takeover of the Arab countries that have overthrown their dictators; that either killing Bin Ladin doesn't matter, or that President Obama deserves zero credit for it; that what the President does quietly in behind-the-scenes negotiations equates to doing nothing; that his UAV campaign has not degraded Islamofascists' capabilities; and that Al Qaeda is as strong or stronger today than it was when he took office.

Every single one of these assumptions are false, but play well to non-college-educated white men--the heart and soul of today's Republican Party--not according to me, but to easily verifiable voter demographics.

And President Obama's "failure" in social policy depends on whether you're pro- or anti-abortion, pro- or anti-immigration (I'm anti-illegal immigration personally, but BR's base really doesn't like their Anglo white country becoming a multicultural rainbow one--I sympathize with their angst, actually, but enjoy our new multicultural country myself; so whether that's a failure or not is not objective reality but dependent on whether you want a monocultural/monoracial America or not).