Presidential Silly Season

Oh dear. So Mitt Romney has doubled down on his awful RomneyCare and Newt Gingrich has put his foot in it by trashing Rep. Ryan's budget plan, a plan so radical that it puts off Medicare reform for ten years.

We must be in the presidential silly season, as candidates maneuver and the media and the pundits look for cheap laughs.

All the old tropes are appearing. First of all, we have the usual complaint that all the Republican candidates are midgets. In fact most of them are seasoned and successful politicians. Mitch Daniels has been governor of Indiana since 2005. Before that he was head of the federal Office of Management and Budget, a corporate officer, a think tank president, and a political staffer. Tim Pawlenty was a two-term governor of Minnesota, and before that a state legislator and city councilman. Newt Gingrich was the guy that ended forty years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives. If these chaps don't make the grade then what exactly do people consider a top-drawer candidate?

If you don't like soundness and solidity in Daniels and Pawlenty or the excitement of Newt, there are the girls: Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Our liberal friends like to sneer at them, but I suspect that they will both prove much better politicians than their enemies believe. Bachmann is in her third term in Congress and before that served for six years in the Minnesota State Senate. Before that she was an activist in pro-life and education politics. Sarah Palin has been in electoral politics since 1992 as city council member, mayor, and governor. Really, what's not to like?

Of course, my taste runs to the girls. I ask: Is America ready yet for a conservative woman president? Is it, liberals?

Let's face it, the politics of the next generation is going to be about trimming the welfare state down to size, converting wasteful government programs in health, education and welfare into rational, sensible, compassionate social cooperation where government plays a limited backup role, and people, the American people, actively engage in these vital social and moral activities and turn away from the current culture in which we pay our taxes and leave all the dirty work to government functionaries.

What better than for a woman to be in charge of this immensely difficult work, transforming America from the corruption and cronyism of Obama's Anmerica into nothing less than the best it can be?