Mark Steyn as interviewed by Ed Driscoll, Sept. 17, 2012:
DRISCOLL: So with all of that as prologue; with the ongoing collapse of so many aspects of what make up Barack Obama’s worldview, why is Mitt Romney seemingly flailing in the polls as of the time of this interview?
STEYN: Yeah. That bothers me too, because this guy ought to be losing by ten points at least. And I know people say well, it’s a fifty-fifty nation and it’s going to be a tight election and all the rest of it. If it’s tight this time around that says something very alarming. You know, a lot of people don’t — simply don’t get the numbers. The word trillion doesn’t really mean anything to people; it has no relation to their lives. And at a certain point it takes on a bit of unreality because if you can spend trillions of dollars you don’t have and you do it for one year and you do it for two years and you do it for five years, people think well, why can’t we keep on doing that. So that doesn’t seem like a real problem to many people.
And then I think there’s something even more worrying. That if you go back to 2008 — and we all did this at the time — we said basically those of us, you know, who however reluctantly supported McCain. When he lost we said well, the guy gave the impression he wanted to lose and people were exhausted by war and people were tired of the Bush administration and the Republicans hadn’t covered themselves in glory in the previous couple of years and this guy would be the first black president and everyone’s saying he’s the greatest speaker of all time and he’s a real glamorous celebrity figure.
You know, McCain did the thing where he was mocking Obama as the celebrity. Now we’ve had four years of him. He’s a crashing bore. He’s not a great speaker. He’s got nothing new to say. He staggers around doing the same — giving the same leaden speech as the economy flatlines, as the jobs market shrivels, as people in their early fifties go on disability and people in their late 20s move back with their parents.
If he gets sort of elected as the nonglamorous failure, what that would mean is that America is essentially saying there’s no prospect of recovery. We’re sticking with big nanny Obama because at least he’s guaranteeing our food stamps and our disability checks. And they would essentially be accepting — they would be accepting, I think kind of — a European nanny state view of America that would in effect spell the end of this country. They’d be basically saying there’s no possibility of an American dream.
Yes, we could vote for Romney, but who wants to take a flyer on economic recovery. At least if we go with Obama we have the certainty of the food stamps and the certainty of the disability checks. That’s a — there’s no hope — he’s basically offering them the hope — the certainty of no change. And he’s saying when everything gets bad, and it’s going to be bad for as far as the eye can see, vote for me because you’ll get your food stamps.
I think he called it.