The Most Boring Election Since 2000, Amirite?

Glenn, as if wanting to provide ammunition for the least charitable interpretation of his earlier Paul-curiosity, recommends this silly Gush-Borism from Matt Taibbi.   Both premises of the argument — 1)that Romney can’t win and 2)it doesn’t matter, so boooooring — are too transparently wrong to require elaborate argument.   If you think that, just for starters, something like the Ryan budget being passed by the Republican Congress he’d be working with* and a median vote on the Supreme Court to the right of Antonin Scalia don’t matter — nothing I say is going to convince you otherwise.   And if you think Romney can’t win you are either way too optimistic about the economy or don’t understand voting behavior.   I will add, however, that claiming that Mittens is a “calculating centrist” is a classic example of the “what he really believes” fallacy.   Is the Mittens who governed Massachusetts the “real” Romney and the Republican candidate for president the “fake” one?  I have no idea!   But whatever he really thinks, the latter would actually be the president, and as head of the actually existing Republican coalition he’d govern somewhere to the right of George W. Bush.

*Just to pre-empt fantasies that Mittens would be constrained by a Democratic House, here is an exhaustive list of the previous cases of a party taking over the White House from an incumbent president while losing either house of Congress:

…UPDATE: In comments, Greenwald says that he didn’t mean to endorse the whole piece. Fair enough, although 1)my argument is with Taibbi, 2)I don’t know why Glenn thought his argument was worth citing, and 3)the specific point Glenn cites is profoundly wrong. He discusses the piece here; I get off the bus when he talks about “how trivial are most of the differences between the two candidates.” They really aren’t. This is classic Gush/Borism — whether in its centrist or Naderite variant, when pushed very few people would say that Gore and Bush were exactly the same, only that Bush was harmless and moderate enough and Gore conservative enough that it wouldn’t be a big deal either way. Wrong, and as applied to Obama/Romney wrong again.