THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN? A BUST SO FAR

    My favorite op-ed page columnist, Richard Cohen, in his piece in today's Washington Post ("Running on Empty") is critical of both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama and says, "If the presidential campaign were a TV program, it
would have been canceled by now.  Viewers have clicked off, stupefied by a campaign that has one overriding issue, the economy."
    Cohen asks, "Why is this happening?" and answers his own question.  "Some of it no doubt is due to the traditional American antipathy towards politicians, government and anything that lacks a goal post.  We consider it
a triumph of Jeffersonian democracy when 60 percent of us vote, but usually the figure is lower -- 57.1 percent for president in 2008 and 37.8 percent in the last Congressional elections."
    Cohen adds that there are other factors in the mix this year.  "First and
foremost is the paucity of really gripping issues.  There is only one, the economy, and it will do what it wants.  If it improves, Barack Obama will win; if it worsens, Mitt Romney will win."
    Cohen calls it the "nowhere economy -- neither boom nor bust nor much good to anyone."
    "Romney," he says, "is content not to make waves.  He steers clear of the arch-conservative positions he was forced to make in the primaries, revealing as little of himself as possible...he emphasizes his bogus credentials as a jobs creator when what he was, of course, was a profit creator.  He has vast expertise in the private sector, bo so did Herbert Hoover and so didn't among many others, Eisenhower, Johnson, Kennedy,
Clinton, both Roosevelts and -- icon or not -- Reagan.  Giving speeches does not create jobs."
    Cohen is just as critical of Obama suggesting that he is a paradox:  an exciting story, an unexciting man.  His charisma, so evident on the stump,
has a brief half-life.  He somehow covers it, like the snuffer over a candle,
and it casts no glow."
    And so it goes.  Romney drones on about creating jobs, but doesn't say how he's going to accomplish this major goal and Obama remains prisoner to the Republican controlled Congress.  As Cohen writes, "it (the White House) can nudge and it can tug, but the economy goes its own way.  A jobs program would help, but Congress won't pass it.  More deficit spending would help, but Congress won't allow it.  The government is tied up in knots.  It, too, waits for November."
    "It's as if it (the campaign) is being conducted by men who will not --
or cannot -- control events but are waiting for events to control them.  They campaign dutifully but dully, going through the motions until Election Day.
Maybe then they'll get the audience back.  In the meantime, America has gone for a beer."
    Another brilliant column by Cohen and I urge you to read the entire
piece in today's (6/26) Washington Post.