All posts by Rand Simberg

Romney Is No Savior

…and that’s the point:

Do you hear yourselves? You’re Americans, not Europeans. You are the fruit of a nation constituted in liberty and based on the idea that the people can govern themselves. You should not wait for the king who sleeps beneath the hill.

Oh, I realize — I see — you look at 1980 and now, and you see the similarities and then you cry out “Romney is no Reagan.”

This is good, because Obama is no Carter. And our situation is in many ways far worse than it was.

But it is good, most of all, because Obama was bad enough that he woke the force that protects this country. It had been asleep for seventy years, sleeping beneath the dark hill of statism. It is now up, and roused and active. It is moving. The tea parties are proof of that, as is the massive swatting the Lords of Political Correctness got over the Chick-fil-A business.

Romney is a decent business manager. He’s a decent man. He likes America. He wants America to like him. He’s not going to actively dismantle our way of life, as will the one now in power. There will be no attacks on freedom of religion, no wild power grabs for the Internet, no executive orders that violate the laws of the land. He will not hanker for more “flexibility” so he can give more to Putin. And — this is petty but important for how the world sees us — he will neither apologize nor bow to foreign leaders.

Is he perfect? Oh, goodness, no. Is he exactly what we need? Probably not. Who is? Do you know the trouble we’ve got ourselves into by trusting presidents for this long? It’s a big hole. No one man can get us out of it. Only we can. And it will take time.

But that’s fine. He won’t be anointed by any gods. There will be no halos and no Greek columns. Instead, he’ll be the elected by the people and the people — the sovereign people of this free land — who are now awake will stand ready to make sure he knows it.

The Founders didn’t envision the president as a messiah, and neither should we. That kind of thinking was one of the reasons that our ancestors left Europe.

[Update]

Link is fixed, sorry!

In Case You Were Wondering

I was at Space 2012 most of the day in Pasadena, sans laptop. In theory, I can blog from my phone, but it’s very clumsy (linking is a real pain). I did see Colin Ake there (among many others) and expressed my condolences on the Masten mishap. He told me their next vehicle (which is designed to go to a hundred kilofeet) is standing up on the floor in the shop, and might be able to fly in the next two or three months. I guess they’ll have more time to work on it now that they won’t be doing as much flight test for a while…