Los Angeles, CA 2011: Inauguration Day awaits the long-anticipated winner of Election 2012. Will the President on that day be emboldened to speak soaringly? Will the temperate crowd-pleasing of the campaign give way to the telling of ugly truths and painful realities?

From Trent Ling:

Four debates (three Presidential and one Vice-Presidential) have come and gone over the past 19 days.  They have tightened the 2012 Presidential race into a dead-heat, and they have pinpointed the situs of the electoral verdict within but five States.  While they have demonstrated the poll-tested polish of modern campaigns, they have also left most gritty observers wishing that the candidates could have and would have expressed how they really think and feel.  Despite much anticipation and fanfare, the debates seemed ill equipped to disseminate information and direction commensurate with the burden of the nation to select its President.

Weirdly, President Obama’s debate appeals assumed that his backers would believe his words and representations rather than their own eyes and experiences.  While he spoke of progress and effort, most have undergone the effects of precipitous decline over each of the past four years.  Troublingly, Obama also seemed unable to speak on any one subject for the fully allotted two consecutive minutes.  This worryingly rendered his legendary golf, basketball, television, and vacation agendas more understandable.  Also, strangely, Obama lectured Romney about fiscal responsibility in each of the debates, often warning that Romney would “blow up” the deficit.  This came from the only President in US history ever to run a trillion-dollar deficit (and one who in fact has done exactly that in each of his four years in office).

Governor Romney adeptly executed what appeared to be his debate game plan.  Unfortunately, that plan seemed content merely to edge Obama electorally for the Presidency.  With the nation and the world traipsing upon the precipice of collapse, anarchy, and ruin, it seems a mightily conservative gamble to forego offering an eclipsing and inspiring vision, and to leave all fortunes to a coin-flip’s chance two weeks from now.  While Romney seemed cheerful and steady in weathering bluster from Obama and meddling from moderators, he left the fate of the nation and the world in the shaky hands of voters rather than setting out to change those voters beforehand.  This safe and calculated gamble may or may not work in 2012, but it represents a course that cannot be duplicated in future election cycles where the electorate will be required to awaken or will be altogether displaced.

The debating processes leave much unasked, unanswered, unknown, and unconsidered.  While both candidates exuded expertise in foreign policy, both were but mouthpieces for the intelligence community and its policy formulators.  And while both claimed some economic acumen, “getting out of the way” would likely and most succinctly sum up the best of policies.

Ultimately, the odyssey of Election 2012 will not say much of anything about Obama or Romney.  Rather, it will be but a referendum on the electorate itself–its hopes, fears, minds, and hearts.  While debate procedures and tactics were calibrated to reach and to please assumedly self-absorbed voters, election results will speak to the durability of the Republic and to the nimbleness of the world’s pre-eminent democracy during these times of great comeuppance.  With close-to-the-vest debate strategies and final exits of the stage, the candidates have elected to leave great and hovering questions to the electorate itself.

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