What Will Happen If Mitt Romney Wins? Probably Not Much
What will happen if Mitt Romney wins the 2012 election on Tuesday? Will it be the end of our nation as the left would have us believe? Will it be America’s saving grace as the right would have us believe? A small consensus is emerging which says that should the GOP candidate take the Oval Office, it won’t really matter much at all in the end.
A speculative op-ed roundup shows everything from panicked fear to casual fatalism in the case of a Mitt Romney win. The New Statesman is perhaps the most concerned about a GOP presidency, with Nicholas Wapshott writing that the GOP will “impose their reactionary social agenda on the half of the US they disagree with,” including the “reversing [of] landmark civil rights, gender equality and sexual orientation legislation,” concluding that if the Senate goes GOP, “both houses of Congress, the court and the presidency will all be in the hands of conservatives and there will be no check on what they enact.”
That doesn’t sound familiar.
On the other hand, if Romney should lose, it might be Conservatives who race over the border to Canada. Nigel Horne of The Week points out that our neighbors up north, long-thought to be happy citizens in a progressive model what with universal healthcare and all, are actually a lot more conservative than we think. Case in point, Canadian musician Rufus Wainwright lives in New York now because Canada is currently its most Conservative in decades “which I hate,” he says.
Furthermore, Politico notes that if Obama wins, despite being a “seriously vulnerable incumbent,” that “the Republican Party will have to go through a painful process of self-examination and internal debate in order to explain what went so badly wrong.”
So what’s the truth? It’s likely somewhere in the middle of severe expectations on either side. Interestingly, a perspective is emerging that a Romney presidency will fall short of both hopes and fears. Matthew Yglesias of Slate says that if Romney wins, “his agenda probably won’t be as far reaching as conservatives would like, or as liberals fear.”
“The starting point is to realize that Romney has been overpromising and liberals have been overworrying about it. The fact of the matter is that unless current polling is badly mistaken, even if Romney wins, Democrats are overwhelmingly likely to hold a majority in the Senate, meaning swathes of his stated agenda will be dead on arrival.”
What do you think will happen if Mitt Romney wins the 2012 election?
