The Choice Is Yours

I want to post one more excerpt from Jonathan Chait's impressive piece in New York Magazine on the "GOPacalypse" -- what 2012 means to the Republican party in its current incarnation and why the right is casting the coming election in such stark, portentous terms.

I'm not sure it's ever been laid out more clearly just what's at stake this coming November.

"The Republicans have gained the House and stand poised to win control of the Senate. If they can claw out a presidential win and hold on to Congress, they will have a glorious two-year window to restore the America they knew and loved, to lock in transformational change, or at least to wrench the status quo so far rightward that it will take Democrats a generation to wrench it back. The cost of any foregone legislative compromises on health care or the deficit would be trivial compared to the enormous gains available to a party in control of all three federal branches.

On the other hand, if they lose their bid to unseat Obama, they will have mortgaged their future for nothing at all. And over the last several months, it has appeared increasingly likely that the party’s great all-or-nothing bet may land, ultimately, on nothing. In which case, the Republicans will have turned an unfavorable outlook into a truly bleak one in a fit of panic. The deepest effect of Obama’s election upon the Republicans’ psyche has been to make them truly fear, for the first time since before Ronald Reagan, that the future is against them."

So that's it. That's why your vote is so important. Why you can't sit this one out just because the current president hasn't given you everything you wanted. I talk a lot about the acceptance of political reality and get a lot of push-back for doing so, but a fact is a fact; you can try to avoid it all you want, but the bottom line is always what things really come down to. And the bottom line in this case is that if you don't have Barack Obama in office, flawed though he may be at times, you will have Mitt Romney, or Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich. Complain all you want, but those are your only choices for who will run the country next -- for who will, as Chait explains, likely set the tone for years to come.

Barack Obama will be President of the United States in January of 2013 -- or one of the current Republican candidates will, and he will be someone who's already professed or at least pandered to the panicked notion that we need to save America by restoring the proud traditions of a past that's no longer a viable option for us nor should it be.

That is your choice. And it's no choice at all.