Enough Is Enough, Mitt!

I started writing (but then discarded) a post yesterday about my ever-increasing feeling that Romney's presidential campaign is far sleazier than any I had ever previously witnessed. (The only thing comparable I could recall was the Swift Boating of John Kerry, but (a) that was a isolated tactic in the course of the 2004 presidential campaign, and (b) that tactic carried out by surrogates rather than the Bush campaign itself.)

P.M. Carpenter (via Andrew) is apparently on the same page:

There no longer exists any doubt that Mitt Romney intends to win the White House by conducting the most dishonest, unscrupulous and reprehensible campaign ever devised, in mere whimsy. The unethical stench of this man is not only breathtaking, it's meteoric. I have never seen anything like it, never heard anything like it, never imagined anything like it.

All you American political history books, move over; there's a new king of demagoguery in town, and future history will never see his malevolent depths of dishonor again.

Andrew's take (my emphasis):

Romney, I'm increasingly inclined to believe, is a businessman all the way down. His ethics are about getting, as he put it, 50.1 percent of the vote in any state. He does not believe there are any ethical or principled reasons not to try and get to that 50.1 percent however he can. A businessman can compartmentalize core moral and political questions into marketing. The goal is 50.1 percent saturation. ... [¶] If a line will work against Obama, he will use it, regardless of its truth. Because there is no truth in Romney's world. There is only advertizing [sic]. [¶] There is something increasingly chilling about this shape-shifter, isnt there? He views himself as a product to be marketed to different audiences at different times. And the actual content of that product is completely malleable. ... To predict Romney, in other words, you simply have to merely examine the market he's selling to. [¶] As I noted once before, he doesn't just believe that corporations are people; he is a walking corporation masquerading as a person.

What happens when Romney wins this election (which I believe is going to happen, by the way)? How do Democratic politicians in Congress respond? What will Romney's campaign have done to the legitimacy of the presidency? To the legitimacy of government itself? To the already deep partisan divide in the country?  It was one thing for the Supreme Court to have handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush; Bush himself really had nothing to do with that, the Bush campaign that year was fairly "clean," and the election truly was phenomenally close. It will be something entirely different if Romney wins this year, after having campaigned on lie after blatant lie, with straight-out propaganda funded by dark money blanketing the airwaves, and little to no push back from the mainstream media (and amplification by the partisan press).

Like Jamelle Bouie, if it sounds like I am frustrated, it is because I am. In writing about the efficacy of the GOP's audacious strategy of obstruction to the Obama Administration, he observed: "To many of our pundits and reporters, this is business as usual. In reality, it’s absolutely insane." The same is even more true of the "unethical stench" of the Romney campaign. It's enough to sour one entirely on the prospects of democratic self-governance.