hughhewitt.com
Anything can happen, but it is increasingly unlikely for two reasons.
First, the country is in very bad shape. The difficulties are enormous, and no one who fills up a tank of gas or watches even a bit of news doubts it. This situation compels the independents and even many Democrats, perhaps privately in the latter case, to pull the lever for Romney.
Second, Mitt Romney is a very good man, and the past two weeks have put that reality on display for everyone who cares to notice to see.
A very good man, and the country wants that right now. They want to trust that someone with great skills also has the great character necessary to ask the country to do hard and complicated things, and the intelligence to choose among many competing proposals on how best to chart a course back to prosperity and security.
The country has been in very difficult situations before --1932, 1941, 1962, 1963, 1974, 1980, 2001 and 2008 to name just eight from the past 80 years.
In some of those cases, as with Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, Watergate and 9/11, the country has no choice but to follow the president it had.
In the other three instances, it got to choose the leader for the crisis from between an incumbent and a challenger, and in each case it chose to change, picking FDR over Hoover, Reagan over Carter and Obama over McCain, who represented an extension of W.
We do not double down on failure, and President Obama has failed. |
