Switch on TV.

They get on stage, debate. We see, listen. Jim Lehrer also sees and listens—which is pretty much all he did. Not counting the veep debate, that’s one down, two more to go. (Do they matter?) Romney, even the liberal pundits bemoan, was the more forceful, consistent, articulate. He took the fight to Obama who, they said, seemed—variously—tired, petulant and just plain out of it. Admittedly, even his closing statement, taken singularly, let alone when compared to Romney’s, was listless. Yes. Obama’s mojo was awol, and conspicuously so. Round one, Romney, proclaimed TV’s talking heads. Scarce seconds after, the candidates’ respective families grushed (the scripted action, peculiar to families of American politicians, of rushing onto the stage, to group-hug their all-American heroes, while simultaneously gushing, immediately after their bravura, b-rate performances). Obama’s daughters were, tellingly, missing; Romney’s brood, in contrast, unsurprisingly, turned out in full force. Ah, to see our wonderful public servants on stage—black and white—commingling, chatting warmly, smiling, happy—like some Norman Rockwell propaganda print.

Switch off TV.

Whom should I vote for? The half-life messiah who promised hope and change four years ago to America and the world, both aghast and reeling from the Bush administration’s disastrous and criminal policies, internal and external, too well documented to belabor here? Should I vote for the wastrel who squandered the pregnant goodwill of the American people—again, also the world’s—by eloquently offering so much, yet delivering—insultingly diluted—so little? Should I vote for the yes massah who sheltered the Shylocks of Wall Street, even as he hung out to dry the myriads who lost their homes, jobs, health insurances, pensions and savings on Main Street—the very people without whom his historic Black presidency would have remained but a gleam in his eyes, as well, the eyes of millions of guileless Americans who transcended slavery’s shameful legacy to repose their (by-now-broken) trust in him? Should I vote for the man who bailed out the too-big-to-fail banks and financial institutions with the blood sweat and tears of the too-small-to-succeed, all across the globe’s marketplace? The turncoat who, after promising to counter the culture of greed in Washington and Wall Street, ensconced himself with Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers—Goldman Sachs insiders, the very people responsible for the financial meltdown, deleterious effects of which still resonate around the world? The man who promised to close Guantanamo—but hasn’t? The liar who, after promising he would not ride roughshod over human rights and legal precedents, signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), “codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history? …The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.”1 Should I vote for president the deceptive dove who has escalated drone warfare which necessitates his “embracing [of] a … method for counting civilian casualties that … counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously [POSTHUMOUSLY!] proving them innocent”?2 The would-be healer-in-chief who promised universal health care (single payer) to citizens of the richest, most powerful country in the world (who by the way, pay more in “health care costs than ‘socialized’ European medicine"), but buckled under political pressure and settled for a watered-down version which “forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t”?3

Or, should I vote for the Mormon multimillionaire widely seen as having won the first debate? (It is a sad commentary of our times, that lying, far from detracting from a win, enhances it.) Yes. He won it on form, not substance—not that you’d learn that from the Fox News folks. (Oh, how I hate that word—folks; politicians use it, patronizingly, of course, referring to us. It’s as demeaning as the plaid shirts they wear or the trucks they drive, or the hunting rifles they carry whilst tramping for votes around the country, even as their campaign strategists, via focus groups comprising such folks, fine tune their Orwellian phraseologies to make said folks vote against their own interests. They should call us by what they really think of us: fucks—not folks.) Should I vote for the multimillionaire (estimated worth: $250 million) who ran Bain Capital,4 which ran companies into the ground, then, resold them at profit by firing workers and sending jobs to China, the very country he wants to get tough on, per his campaign ad? Should I vote for the plunderer who invested his ill-begotten wealth in “dozens of offshore holdings with names like Ursa Funding (Luxembourg) S.à.r.l. and Sankaty Credit Opportunities Investors (Offshore) IV, based in the Cayman Islands”? Should I vote for the prevaricator whose “bold-faced lies to the nation on debate night” have since been called out by virtually all fact-checkers, who, per Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, were peremptorily dismissed thusly: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”? Should I vote for the tax-evader who refused, steadfastly, to make public his tax returns, something that perplexed even the hard-to-perplex Bill Clinton who remarked that he hadn’t seen such an effort to hide his tax returns from a man running for president in thirty years? Should I vote for one who, with sneer of cold command, told Jim Lehrer, the avuncular 78 year-old moderating the damn debate that his job and Big Bird’s would be toast? Should I vote for this philistine whose idea of running a tight fiscal ship involves cutting the one-hundredth of one percent (0.012%) of national spending that funds TV characters (Big Bird & Co.) millions of American kids love and learn from?

I can go on, but finally:

How can I vote for a quarter-billionaire who, amidst the rich clatter and clink of fine china and wine glasses at his $50,000 a plate fund raiser, was secretly videoed telling his potential donors that 47 percent of Americans are “victims” who are “dependent upon government” and “pay no income tax”? “My job,” he explained, “is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Incidentally, the dinner was hosted in Boca at the home of Romney believer Marc Leder, head of 8 billion dollar equity firm Sun Capital, the man with a penchant for hosting “midsummer night bacchanals” in the “playground of the 1 percent” on weekends at his “$400,000-a-month oceanfront mansion” in the Hamptons, “where guests cavorted nude in the pool and performed sex acts, scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms and men twirled lit torches to a booming techno beat.”

Actually, I think I know why Obama was so out of it. Not because, as Al Gore suggested, his head was fuzzy from the high-altitude Colorado air. And not because of Bill Maher’s speculation that since Obama’s wedding anniversary was on the same day as the debate, “he apparently had the sex first, and was completely spent, had nothing left.” Nor because, as the left-leaning pundits point out, the president had weightier affairs of state to contend with; or that the responsibility for the lives of US soldiers and innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Pakistan and who knows how many other countries whose fates he, as head of the by-now-not-so-covert US empire decides, weighed him down (which may all be so, in various proportions, mind well).

No. I think the real reason for his abysmal debate performance was that Obama was nauseous for having to share the floor with the lying, cheating, elitist, Republican reptile who truly thinks that 47% of the American people (155 million people, this writer included) are bad for him and his top-one-tenth-of-one-percent ilk. Obama was, hence, doing all he could to not vomit on stage for all the 67 million viewers around the world to see.

I am convinced that I wouldn’t have been able to stomach Romney and all he stands for, for the full duration of the debate. I would’ve puked. Obama didn’t.

Just for that, he has my vote.

Post Scriptum: Had Jill Stein been on my state’s ballot—she isn’t—and had my home state’s electoral votes not been crucial to Obama’s winning, being one of six to eight swing states in play, making the difference between having a Romney-Ryan presidency and four more years of Obama-Biden, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, would’ve surely had my vote—not Obama.

ENDNOTES:

1. Quote taken from the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) website.

2. Read the full New York Times article.

3. Read about it here.

4. Read Matt Taibbi’s excellent, in-depth Rolling Stone article (Aug 29, 2012): “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney & Bain Capital” to understand how Romney’s modus operandi.