How Best To Consider the Current Election Cycle?

I keep hearing that "no president has been re-elected since the 1950s with unemployment rates this high," or words to that effect, but I think a different pattern may well apply to the 2012 elections – 1936 and 1940.  People voted FDR back in even though the country was still suffering through the Great Depression and unemployment (though down from 1932-34's stunning over-20% figures) remained distressingly high.  They probably voted for FDR because they had memories extending back at least a bit more than, say, five minutes, and they understood that the Republicans had nothing to offer except soup lines and a return to the policies that had at least in part resulted in the Great Depression, which was a worldwide phenomenon, just as the economic distress today is global.  When you have la merde smeared all over your tie, you can't get away with telling everybody it's chocolate ice cream.  At least not for a while, anyway.

Current polls show clearly that a big majority of Americans (something like 67%) do NOT blame the president for the economy.  It is stupid to toss a president out on his ear solely because of how the economy is performing, unless you have rock-solid evidence that his policies are contributing to the problem.  Presidents' control over the economy is limited in spite of the claims they feel compelled to make when they're running for election, so the question is whether the current leader is doing the only things that can be done, given the circumstances.  In the present case, that pretty much means advocating intelligent policies since, of course, congressional cynics, liars and knaves have blocked most of what the president has tried to do.  They have disregarded just about every known ameliorative strategy since the advent of modern economics, for a reason it's hard to construe as anything other than the thoroughly despicable one of ensuring President Obama's failure.

But on the whole, what I'm suggesting is upbeat: we may be looking at an election in which millions of voters make their decision and carry it out more along the lines of the 1936 and 1940 cycles than anything we have seen recently.  That would make sense because the downturn we have been going through is widely acknowledged to be the worst economic trouble the country has suffered since the Depression itself.  Mitt Romney is a poster child for the sort of predatory capitalism that scares the hell out of a lot of working people.  He seems to me to be ideologically sympatico with the ultra-privileged Wall Streeters who caused our troubles in the first place.  What's not to not like about such a candidate?  The more people know about him, the less they're taken with, or taken in by, his usually genteel manner and always elegant appearance. 

There are some signs that the Obama campaign is a lot tougher than some previous Democratic ones: the Bain ads strike some people as mean (mostly whiny disingenuous Republicans and mush-mouthed otherpundits), but they're exactly the sort of thing successful candidates do: define opponents as something unflattering before they know what hit them, and then it's too late for them to define themselves. 

Besides, the heart of the matter with regard to Romney's tenure at Bain isn't SEC forms or anything like that, it's the fact that the man wants to take credit for the experience he had with that firm, but only selectively.  And why is he doing that?  Well, because, like all market mythologists, he's eager to acknowledge all the good stuff a person can say about capitalist enterprise, and determined to disavow any connection with the not-so-good stuff.  These guys treat capitalist economics like a god, and of course that means you give "god" all the credit for positive outcomes, and lay the blame at somebody else's door for negative or disturbing events.  The deeper implication of the above is that the GOP isn't in the least concerned to face up to reality: as usual, they're selling snake-oil as a cure for serious ills and mocking their detractors because those detractors won't extend full faith and credit to their preposterous quack prescriptions for nirvana.

All that said, I might as well admit that every election these days seems to be a referendum on just how uninformed we are as a nation, so all we can do is donate some dino dinars or cephalodupois sterling (or that human-made green paper everybody swears by in this degenerate geological epoch), help out physically if possible, and keep whatever kind of digits we have crossed. 

Finally, keeping abreast of the voter-disenfranchisement efforts being carried out all across the country also seems vital: if the devious right-wing faction in various states get their way, they will outright steal this election, disenfranchising potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of overwhelmingly Democratic voters on the pretense of preventing "voter fraud," which phenomenon is beyond sane doubt almost non-existent in America.  What's being attempted now, I believe, goes far beyond any ordinary attempt to confuse and abuse the electoral process and the voting public: I view it is a sinister attempt at taking down the entire system of representation by specifically preventing massive amounts of voters in one political party from voting.  A viable republic cannot allow that to happen.