Mitt Romney

Barack Obama is foreign. Oh yeah? Mitt Romney is a bully. Think the U.S. presidential election will be about the economy? Think again. We'd like to imagine that elections are decided on the issues, by voters responding rationally to competing policy proposals. But myth and narrative are stronger than reason -- and strongest of all when, as now in the U.S., times are hard and solutions are lacking.

It's been a year since Osama bin Laden went down, but a debate rages on. Republicans accuse Democrats (if not Obama himself) of trying to get political mileage out of the anniversary, while Democrats (and Obama) say that Romney felt it wasn't worth spending billions of dollars to catch one man. Both factions are right, and both factions are wrong.

Unless Romney's anodyne economic policies and milquetoast pronouncements are masking a robust agenda of true reform, he will mostly likely lower expectations of the office while managing America's decline. Even so, he beats the alternative.

Alberta's election result was a reprieve for the Obama administration. The reasonable Redford government will temper somewhat Harper's enthusiasm for petroleum realpolitik. Had the Wildrose Party won the election, Washington would have been in for a wild ride.

This stuff that Mitt Romney doesn't "relate" to ordinary people is a smokescreen. What presidential candidate is mindful of ordinary folk? They're all millionaires. Romney's appealing virtue is that he's not a Washington insider -- not part of the Beltway cabal who exist on taxpayers' money.

What's remarkable about Romney is these primaries, is how he can be lagging disastrously in some states, and then in the last week or 10 days before the primary, surge to overcome a 15-point deficit (as in Ohio) and win by a narrow margin. But a win is a win -- 72% to 12% in Massachusetts is no greater a win than 38%-37% win in Ohio.

Apart from being impressed with what seems a class act by Mitt Romney, I have fond memories of his father, George Romney. When he was still CEO of American Motors in Detroit, I wrote him a letter about a defective door panelling in my snappy new Metropolitan convertible. A couple of weeks later, I got a message to phone the car dealer.

Now that candidates can run respectably on a platform of torture, how long before we see a frontrunner advocating slavery? Surely everything's open for reconsideration. It's time to retire an inconvenient prejudice: that America's progress should be in a forward direction.

It is disturbing that as the United States flounders through one of the most precipitate declines of prestige and economic and fiscal strength in its generally upwardly mobile history, there is such a scarcity of galvanizing candidates to take the headship of the country.

The U.S. has never in its history endured a decline like that of the last 20 years. This time the office has to seek someone serious, and whoever that person is, has to come out of the closet soon.

The Tory lead is not insurmountable, but to some, any Tory lead is a bit of a puzzle. Hudak has not been ranting and railing for change and attracting all sorts of publicity. In fact, he seems to have been practicing the Dormouse approach -- quiet, laid back, not making waves, just offering himself as an alternative.

China's 4:2:1 problem is ours, too, just with a different name: A glut of people are growing old and there are fewer of us to pay for their care, while also having to save for our own retirement. At the personal level, there are more of us without siblings shouldering the costs of care for aging parents.