Trying to lose

Sometimes you have to wonder if Obama even wants to be President anymore.

It's not too far-fetched a thought since we're already pretty certain Mitt doesn't want to win either. 

The 2012 campaign right now looks like a sheepish shrug to the finish. Voters are pessimistic. Nobody expects either candidate can do much that will make a difference to them.  Neither candidate is making much of an honest effort to convince them otherwise. 

For an election year during which times are as dire as they are, it's the damnedest display of  heavily financed inertia I've ever seen. It's a multi-million dollar exercise in meh. If I didn't know any better I'd say it was all a pointed piece of post-modern performance art commentary.  This is the way the world ends; not with a bang but with an etch-a-sketch.. or something like that anyway.

Which is why, if I had to lay money I might still be tempted to take Mitt in this thing.  Last month I wrote that he's kind of the it girl of our banal moment.  This blog's archive is completely screwed up right now so I can't link you directly there but I said this. 

I'm starting to think of Mitt as a poster boy for several cultural phenomena currently in ascendance: Libertarianism, the detached entrepreneurial hipsterism thing where we all tacitly agree the pose is more important than the substance, the meaningless vanity that characterizes so much of social media.

I see Mitt as kind of an embodiment of these things the same way George Bush was once the embodiment of the frat boy anti-intellectualism of his day. Sure he's fake and mean but he's fake and mean in the specific faithless, robotic way that America is fake and mean at the moment.  In other words, he's beginning to look more electable than ever. 

I still feel that way.  Granted, it's close. I think the President is pretty fake too. I just don't think he's quite as perfectly fake as Romney is which is why Mitt still has an edge here.