Matt Taibbi: Is This the Most Boring Election Ever? [View all]

[kpete]

Is This the Most Boring Election Ever?

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..............this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it'll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It's just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. Even the news reporters who are paid to drum up dramatic undertones are having a hard time selling Romney as half of a titanic title bout.

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Obama versus Bush actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. George Bush's reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama's first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it.

Then there's one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there's no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don't have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don't have that, you really need Sarah Palin.

This race has none of that. Biden is the best character in the series, but for exactly that reason the Obama administration would be wise to bury crazy Joe in a salt mine until the election is over. (The networks have skillfully teased the Frasier-style future spinoff show from this election – the inevitable Hillary-Biden race in 2016 – but they're keeping most of that action under wraps for now). Romney will no doubt stoop to some truly appalling attacks before the election season is over, but he'll do so out of sheer, boring calculation. He's not insane, which is a tremendous insult to a Republican politician.

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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/is-this-the-most-boring-election-ever-20120507#ixzz1uETLdVpy