Mitt Romney at last night's debate:
I want to invest in research. Research is great. Providing funding to universities and think tanks -- great. But investing in companies? Absolutely not. That's the wrong way to go.
Mitt Romney in his infamous
Let Detroit Go Bankrupt op-ed.
I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration.
I know we could all list hundreds of these contradictions if we wanted to spend the time collecting them. But this is one I hadn't seen talked about anywhere else. So just add it to the pile.
I've been busy lately, so not participating as usual. All well.
ReplyDeleteThis post deserves a response. The idea of Romney vs. Romney (I immediately thought of "Spy vs. Spy") is apt, and points to what is becoming clear to me this election is about. We have on the one side a rational politician you can disagree with, Barack Obama. In this sense, he is on the same side as candidate George Bush of 2000, and every other serious candidate in the history of our political system, or at least in my memory of it. GWB in 2000 was someone I couldn't stand, but I knew what it was that I couldn't stand. He made an argument that one could rebut.
2004 was a somewhat exceptional election, full of lies, and the Kerry camp, trying hard to be as "tough" as Bush but smarter about it, didn't help. 2008 was as it happened something of a return to normal. We knew where both Obama and McCain stood in broad strokes and could disagree with either of them intelligently.
Romney is very different. Where even Bush in 2004 seems clearly to have imagined that he was acting a part in a play, Romney is only about Romney. Most candidates reference fact, even when they get them wrong or distort them. Romney only references Romney, even when he is talking about someone or something else.
The problem with this candidate is at some basic level epistemological. I know of no tool to actually know what is happening with him or what his candidacy means, other than it means Romney. I have some vague sense that he would pursue further social inequality and social immobility, but that's it. Nothing specific, and especially where geopolitical questions are concerned, nothing at all.
We call this system democratic, but that implies that there is some process through which a "people" chooses its "government." If Romney wins, people will have chosen, in some literal epistemological sense, nothing at all. I am starting to feel that this is a much greater threat to the actually-existing democratic elements in our system than Citizens United.