working title: op-ed part 1

so the US elections have been called and now we know who won: obama. i am happy that he won and proud of him. i would have been speechless and dumbfounded if it had been romney. but people who think me a fan of obama would probably be surprised that i'm not as jubilant as one would think. maybe it's just my mood today.

anyway, as one would note, not everybody is happy with the reelection of obama. a good sector of the population and perhaps the world is in mourning. i don't know about the reasons of other sectors and groups, but i would like to identify a particular sector that is extremely disappointed with the results. because i am member of that sector. i am one of the people who think abortion should be banned, contraception and the contraceptive mentality held off, and same-sex marriage opposed. the people who think the same as me are the ones who are disappointed with obama's win. they vote for romney. they vote republican. obama is a democrat and liberal (or perhaps tolerant) in the three-pronged issue of abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage.

my fascination and support for obama is not actually the political kind. admittedly, i stand for obama not for his politics and policy positions but for the decisions he has made in his life that turned him into the person he became. it's personal for me. on a very deep level. barack obama knows what it is like to have holes in your heart carved out by absent important family members. somehow, he learned how to deal with it and how to reconcile it within himself and it is actually for that that i look to him as a kind of blueprint for how to deal with such struggles myself.

i am not american, of course, but if my stance on abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage were to be quantified, it would place me squarely in the republican side of the camp. but why not root for mitt romney?

there was an article i read a few weeks ago on mercatornet that criticized what it perceived as the public pandering of obama just because he was "Mr Charm". elections and votation, the author criticized, should not be based on who is more likeable. it should be based on who is more capable. we should elect Dr Capable, not Mr Charm.

the media is biased, she said. it paints one candidate as cool and the other as stiff. now it doesn't take a genius to figure out which of the candidates she was referring to and who of them has been typecast as what. follow the media narrative just a little and it will quickly yield the information that obama is known for his cool while romney is typically perceived as stiff.

i resented the article somewhat because of its suggestion that obama's charm or cool is of the substanceless kind. i resent it and reject it because i don't think that that's the truth. i don't know what sources and narratives the author had been reading that informed her view that obama's charm was skin-deep, and i'm probably not an expert on this score but nonetheless, i reject and argue against her claim.

perhaps if the author had argued on the basis that a pro-choice stand on abortion, the legalization of same-sex marriages and an uncautioned embrace of the contraceptive mentality would open a pandora's box of morally corrupting evils and would lead to a degeneration of society's culture and moral values and therefore serves as valid and compelling grounds enough for voting against obama, i would not have inwardly rejected her arguments and would have been more receptive to her points.

but she offers the view that, reading between the lines, mitt romney is Mr Capable. i am sure that she is not incorrect in her view. i think mitt romney is rightly Mr Intelligent as well, and i'll bet that he is a very capable person all on his own. he has a JD and an MBA from Harvard University and that's no small accomplishment. he is business-savvy, obviously, having a lot of money and having built a business empire of his own and i think he is a good person.

but mitt romney, also, seems to have a long-held reputation for perennially flip-flopping all over the place as a politician. when i first began to tune in on the race, the news on the network was about the interview of a certain Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to mitt romney, who was asked on CNN about whether or not they were worried that the positions mitt romney took in the primary elections would alienate him to other voters.

he said and i quote, "Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again." i see. actually, we see. we can just etch-a-sketch our position on issues. by it, you mean to say that the positions mitt romney took and the things he said in the primary elections are never written in stone and have just about as much hold as, say, water? wonderful. we see just how much we can trust mitt romney on his word.

of course, it could have been a case of the wrong words said at the wrong time. sometimes, we can string together a group of words and they don't exactly come out the way we intended them to. that happens. that happens to me. it happens to others. it has also certainly happened with obama, articulate as he is.

the problem, and the three presidential debates demonstrated this, was that romney's senior adviser did not seem to be joking really at all. even after the public furor the comment caused, etch-a-sketching positions on economic and political issues continued to be the defining MO of the romney campaign. mitt would take on a position and then change it afterwards as he saw fit. he would say one thing during the campaign and then another in the presidential debates, reversing and revising his positions to suit whatever it was he felt he needed to suit. no wonder obama had trouble taking the debates against romney seriously the first instance. everything mitt said was merely political - and changeable. a debate on policy would have seemed farcical.

perhaps it would have been fine. the shape-shifting and etch-a-sketching could have been more easily dismissed, could easily have been shrugged off as malicious media slandering and insinuation. but shape-shifting seemed to have been a shtick that has been with the mittster for a long time. back in 2008, a former aide of romney described his outlook this way: "Everything could always be tweaked, reshaped, fixed, addressed. It was foreign to him [romney] on policy issues that core principles mattered - that somebody would go back and say, 'Well, three years ago you said this.'"

i don't think mitt romney isn't Mr Capable. problem is, i don't think he is Mr Character either. this perception of saying anything for expedience or convenience on his part was seen as one of the reasons mitt romney didn't get the republican nomination back in 2008. unfortunately (and sadly), i think it must have been one of the bullets that sank his ship this time around.