Ezra Klein rocks. He’s pretty well nailed what our choices are. Or at least what some of them are. Klein didn’t touch on goreign policy, but that’s ok.
I find it frustrating that people complain that they don’t know where the candidates stand or what they plan to do once elected. I think both Romney and Obama have been very clear. The problem is not with the candidates. The problem is with media coverage, with their “horse race” approach, their fascination with trivia, and their goofy idea of what constitutes “balance.
The Nation recently published a fairly good analysis, “Campaign Trivia and Post-Truth Politics: Media at Work”, Eric Alterman, The Nation 11/12/12.
Alterman points out two problems:
1) “the role that the relentless focus on campaign trivia plays in the ocverage . . .reporters tend to tie themselves to horse race coverage . . . calling to mind the sports pages”
2) “the inability of mainstream reporters to admit to, and account for, the radicalization of the Republican Party . . . [creating] a false ‘center’ between the two parties” and the unrealistic expectation of bipartisan compromise.
It’s what the political cartoonist HerBlock complained about sixty years ago—that if one side said grass was green and the other insisted that it was red, then sure enough, in would come the pundits saying the truth must be somewhere in the middle.
If we are drowning in trivia, fed the odd notion that both candiates are somehow equivalent—if one lies then the other must lie; it’s called balanced and neutral coverage—convinced that elections are actually sporting events, then it’s no womder so many people really don’t know what any of these candidates plan to do or how they plan to do it.

That link should have included a warning or spoiler alert brought to you by the democratic party or at the very least, an “independant” journalist.
I found “some much needed perspective at this late hour,” in the following
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203897404578078510673121172.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Sue Kettleson,
Ezra Klein is an “independent” journalist.
With regard to your link, “Romney, Obama, and Economic Choice” by David Malpass (who was a middling level bureaucrat in Treasury during the Reagan administration) is only available to those who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. I was able to access it once but not for a second read.
If memory serves, Malpass was making the argument that the private sector would be better able to more efficiently rebuild the areas of New York and New Jersey devastated by Hurricane Sandy than can the government.
Pretty much the same argument Mitt Romney made back in 2008 when he wrote in an op-ed piece that the private sector, not the government, should provide the money to rebuild our auto industry. At a time when there was no money, nada, nothing, zilch, available in the private sector to allow the auto industry to rebuild.
And we all know how the government providing the money for the auto industry to rebuild, we all know how that worked out.
I think David Malpass needs to take another look at what caused the Recession of 1907 (which, by the way, provided the incentive to set up the Federal Reserve conservatives hate so much) and then ask at least himself if throwing New York and New Jersey on the mercy of the private sector is really the best thing to do.
But before deciding, I think we need to keep in mind that when government is run by people who don’t respect what government is capable of doing for the Common Good and the General Welfare, government doesn’t work very well.
I think we need to keep in mind HeckavaJob Brownie and then go from there.

According to the French philosopher Aron : ” What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error. ” The intellectual error is Klein’s hypothetical dream is failing to acknowledge that the choice of the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. Klein’s optimism is unwarranted wishful thinking.

Raymond Aron (1905-1983), post WW II French intellectual, life long friend of John Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Aron was Jewish, joined the French Airforce at the beginning of WW II, and fled when the Nazis conquered France. He joined the Free French Forces in London and spent the war editing “France Libre”. He is best known for his book “The Opium of the Intellectuals” (1955)
Mr Wallin, Aron was operating in a totally different world than the one you inhabit. For one, most of the post-war French intellectuals (the ones that Americans would be most familiar with would be Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir) had been connected with the French Resistance, which was dominated by the French Communist Party. Most French intellectuals of that period were Marxists of one sort or another and very political.
Aron’s observation has to be understood within that context. His argument with Sartre, and other French Marxists, was their simultaneous denunciation of Capitalism and their defense of Communism.
For people who lived in Western Capitalist countries (in Europe this debate was further intensified by the end of Colonialsm; in the US by the Vietnam War) the flaws of Capitalism were pretty obvious; the flaws of Communism far less so because so few people were able to travel to the Soviet Union, Mainland China, N Korea, or Cuba.
Aron’s friend, John Paul Sartre, was a Marxist and “Fellow Traveler”. He played a part in the Resistance and was a founding member of Socialism and
Liberty.
Sartre’s play “Les Mains Sale” (1948), which dealt with the problem of being a politically engaged intellectual is probably most relevant to your comment. You engage with the world, your hands get dirty.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the whole discussion, which dates back to the Revolution of 1848, was rendered moot.
In the post Cold War world where real world alternatives to Capitalism no longer exist, Sartre’s notion of “bad faith” (conformity to bourgeois values) is rendered quaint, and the teetering on the brink of nihilism “lesser of two evils” simply obnoxious.
Besides, I don’t know if it’s honest to conclude, as you apparently have done, that Klein is a deluded optimist embracing an intellectual error

I am a President Obama supporter. Yet, I have moments when I think that a Romney victory could be a good thing. I’m certain that he would cut taxes for the wealthy and I am equally certain that he would not adequately pay for those cuts with changes in deductions, credits, closing loopholes or cutting spending. I am also certain that he would increase defense spending. The net result of all of this will be a massive additional increase in deficit spending.

Romney, like Reagan and the Bushes before him, will be able to do this because those so concerned about the deficit and debt seem to grow silent when a Republican holds the White House.

In theory, after another 4 years, the country may actually learn the lesson that trickle down economics does not work. That would be a good thing.

However, I can’t vote for Romney out of fear of what he would do on Supreme Court appointments. Roe v Wade would be in jeopardy and numerous basic social issues would be taken back to the 1950s. I’d much rather go forward.