Left and Right: Get Ready America, The Dirtiest Campaign in History Is Headed Our Way

It is time to brace ourselves America. We are in for one heck of a dirty campaign.

Mitt Romney all but wrapped up the Republican nomination to challenge Barack Obama for the Presidency in November. He is turning his message to the President and instead of attacking his fellow Republicans. For his part President Obama has been laying the groundwork to go after Romney for weeks.

This campaign is unique in many ways but both candidates are going to have no choice but go dirty and fast for one very simple reason…they are both so painfully out of touch with the American electorate that they have to detract form their records and try to convince the voters that they are not as vile as their opponent.

Mitt Romney, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, who has been essentially running for President for the last 6 years has a daunting task ahead of him if he is going to convince the voters he is less vile than the President. He also doesn’t have the benefit of incumbency. Romney has had two careers in his life. First he was the quintessential Venture Capitalist. Romney specialized in using the system to swallow weak companies whole and profiting off the carnage that he caused. He also is the definition of the 1%. Having made more than $200 million dollars in his career, it is no surprise that he has paid an effective tax rate of less than 15% on his money. Equally of little surprise he keeps his money in offshore accounts and Swiss banks to avoid losing even more of it to the taxman. President Obama is going to have no problem painting Romney as even worse for the country than his favorite enemy George W. Bush. Obama is going to highlight all the ridiculous things Romney has said in his career to make him seem heartless, cold and out of touch with the very values that drive America. Obama has made it a profession to rail against the wealthy, wall street, banks, corporations and speculators. Mitt Romney is the definition of those terms all wrapped up into one living breathing package.

President Obama isn’t any better than Mitt Romney in how the American voters are going to see him. His legislative record is filled with achievements than hardly anyone in America can relate to. Let’s take his healthcare bill as the ultimate example. President Obama made the case to America that he had to tackle healthcare first because Americans were not safe for even one minute from the clutches of the evil health insurance companies. We had to be protected at all costs from being turned down for preexisting conditions, denied care for profit seeking motives and we had to be protected from sky rocketing rates that threaten to put America into an unsustainable level of debt. What does he do instead of adhere to those goals? He passed a huge monstrosity of a bill which not only rewards the Insurance companies for their atrocious behavior but delivers every last one of us into their hands by forcing us to all do business with them. We have no other choice but to buy their product. He actually thinks we will feel better knowing that he empowered the Health and Human Services department to protect us and to force the insurance companies to abide by the rules they say. But what about the day after? Even if we all accept that his administration’s HHS will fight for us against the insurance industry, what happens if someone like Mitt Romney actually does get elected? What happens when Romney’s Secretary of Health and Human Services changes the rules or even worse, the next President decides to make the rules “voluntary” like in a deregulation scheme? Thanks Mr. President, we really needed that one.

President Obama seems to fall out of touch with most Americans on a lot of these issues. As we move further into the millennium there are going to be serious conversations in this country about the environment, alternative energy, immigration and entitlement programs but none of those conversations can happen until a big conversation happens about how we are going to pay for all of it.

Neither candidate has any solution whatsoever to answer that question. America is running a deficit of more than a trillion dollars every year. Money that has to be borrowed and paid back with interest. We will eventually be the next Greece if we don’t figure these things out but neither candidate is serious about doing that. We cannot tax the rich to the point where they cover a trillion dollars a year nor can we continue to cut taxes and boost defense spending until there is nothing left.

It is because of all of this, it is because both Mitt Romney and President Obama refuse to answer any of the serious questions that we as a country face. There is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of blame but there are no solutions in sight. That is why this is going to be one of the dirtiest campaigns in American history. We all better get ready to clean off all the mud.

Left and Right is a three times weekly column by Inquistr writer H. Scott English examining the hottest political issues of the day, the candidates running for public office and the 2012 elections.