The 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign officially started two weeks ago, when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announced he would be a candidate for the Republican Party nomination. Romney chose as the setting for his momentous, though unsurprising, announcement a beautiful old family farm in the state of New Hampshire, where the presidential race will start in earnest early next year.
The farm was meant to show Romney as being closer to the true spirit of America than President Barack Obama, whose policies he kept characterizing as "European" and thus as un-American as you can get. The anchorwoman on CNN asked the network's colorful business reporter, Richard Quest, about this slagging of all things European, since Quest is English. He didn't seem bothered by it, and said it was all just part of the American political process.
Quite British of Quest, you might say, but Romney's unimaginative parallels between Obama's "big government" solutions and Europe's "socialist" public policies were qualified by his insistence that "wealth and influence" are "not the source" of America's greatness. Maybe, but wealth and influence are certainly the source of most political power in the United States — or any other country in the world, for that matter — and Romney didn't make any concrete policy pledges that would help America's struggling middle class regain its own wealth and influence, which have deteriorated significantly over the past four decades. He simply ticked off all the ways he was opposed to Obama, going so far as to disown the progressive health-care plan he himself championed for Massachusetts when he was governor and which Obama cited as an inspiration for his national health-care reform scheme. The Republicans abhor that plan because it smacks of socialism.