October 8, 2012--An Alternate Romney

In an October 2004 article in the New York Times Magazine, Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's "architect" and "brain," was famously quoted--

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

It worked for them. They demanded that the CIA "sex up" the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and we were therefore justified in waging preemptive war against them and then declared "Mission Accomplished" when, as we now know, this was a premature boast.

And then they told us--after failing to track down and eliminate Osama bin Laden, after dealing he was wanted "dead or alive"--that capturing or killing him was no longer a priority and, acting accordingly, they got away with that too. George Bush easily won reelection a few months after the Rove quote appeared in the Times.

Creating reality worked so well for the last Republican president that the latest GOP aspirant to that office is attempting to succeed in doing his version of the same thing.

This was on full display during Wednesday's presidential debate.

Yes, Obama was awful, just awful; and if we are looking to elect a Debater in Chief, we know who to vote for. But since we are determining who to vote for to be Commander in Chief, we need to look at what happened the other evening using a different metric--who told the truth; who was dealing with, not creating reality.

One of the reasons Romney did so well was because the Romney who showed up in Denver was a Romney none of us had ever encountered before--a Romney who indignantly said he never intended to lower taxes for the wealthy; that his tax plan if enacted would not cost nearly $5.0 trillion over the next 10 years as all independent studies indicate; that his plan to overturn Obamacare would retain its good provisions--including requiring insurers to cover all people with pre-exisiting conditions; that Obama's plan for Medicare would cut $716 billion from people's benefits; that . . .

Obama did a poor job of responding (and I am being kind); but immediately after the debate the media, including Fox News, confirmed that we weren't crazy to think that Romney was making things up. Attempting to create an alternate reality, an alternate to the actual Romney.

And when the favorable job figures were announced on Friday, Romney and his supporters immediately had an answer--as alleged economic patriots they failed to feel good about the improved prospects for the people they claim to care about and accused the Obama administration of cooking the books. With so much experience doing that themselves, it was no wonder that this was the GOP default position--alter reality if you don't like it or it doesn't suit your purposes.

But we will see in a few weeks if Romney is as good at creating reality and getting away with it as were Karl Rove and his surrogate, George Bush. So far the news is encouraging--the first Gallup Tracking poll that reflects post-debate potential voters' views shows no change--Obama still leads 49% to 46%. The public may be seeing through the deceptions.