Reflection on the 2012 election for POTUS

Here are some thoughts about the recent election for President of the United Status POTUS.  I will state once again I am not an Obama fan.  Also I am not a Romney fan.  However in reading the post election news something caught my attention and thus led me to write this post.

Judgement is demonstrated in many different ways and is demonstrated to the world in part by what choices are made and by how one perceives and acts on the news of the world. Judgement is one of the many factors need to demonstrate the competence for any high level executive position including the position of POTUS.

John McCain demonstrated a lack of competence by selecting Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential slot on the 2008 Republican ticket.  His judgement was flawed. McCain considered Sarah Palin to be qualified to be one heartbeat away from the position of POTUS; not a demonstration of judgement..  As much as I dislike many of the Obama policies I suspect that McCain would have been worse.

During the days following the recent election I started seeing reports about how Romney was 'shellshocked' at the loss.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/
What I want to know is how could Romney have been 'shellshocked' when the overwhelming signal from the polling was that Obama was in the lead?  This is not a case of being 'disappointed' at close loss.   'Shellshocked' means you truly expected to win without a doubt  but lost big.  But some might say 'It was not Romney's fault.  His advisers and pollsters mislead him.'  To which I reply 'One key responsibility of any executive is to pick top quality advisers and to be able to detect when they are spouting nonsense.'

Anyone could check the trend lines on
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/
For the three weeks prior to the election the Obama trend was up and the Romney trend was down.  Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics should have seen that there was a lot of data pointing to an Obama victory.  If the internal Romney pollsters were saying something different then why did not Romney bring in a variety of statistics professors and professional pollsters to look at the internal Romney numbers.  So far I can find no evidence that this was done.  Anyone who claims any sort of management or executive competence should have seen this.  Not Romney; he was 'shellshocked'.  I am trying to be nice so I will simply say that I find Romney 'Incompetent for the office of POTUS'.

However it does bring to mind the someone with a distorted worldview who was POTUS for two terms; Bush/Cheney.  I list it this way since it was always unclear to me the extent to which Bush was a puppet and Cheney the puppet master.    Bush/Cheney serves as a perfect example of being unable to see beyond a narrow self-serving and inaccurate view of the world; perhaps self deluding would be an apt description.  Remember the special intelligence channels setup by Cheney; remember all of the nonsense about  a quick withdrawal from Iraq; remember the nonsense about the entire operation paying for itself via oil; remember the reports of Bush blathering on about Gog and Magog to French President Jacques Chirac in 2003; remember all of the lies.  Bush/Cheney was a disaster.  And we suffered through eight years of it.

So whenever I start feeling unhappy about Obama winning the election I can reflect that it might have been worse; it could have been Romney.

Election Notes

Tomorrow Nov 6 2012 is election day in the USA. I have decided to put some of my thoughts on this blog although for a long time I was considering just not blogging about the election because I find it so sad and disappointing.

During the early primaries I expressed my dissatisfaction with Ron Paul  http://blog.lightingonemorecandle.com/2011/12/ron-paul-for-potus-no.html
and some may wonder if I am advocating Gary Johnson. No not at this point. I am still undecided. I have a very high standard and right now I am not sure if Johnson measures up. The primary issue for me is reproductive rights. Since this a topic that Johnson might have changed his views on recently I am still investigating. As far as I am concerned anyone who says "well we will just throw questions about reproductive rights back to the individual states and let them enact the restrictions" is not a Libertarian. To save space I refer people back to my blog post on Ron Paul.

What Obama, Romney and Stein? Let us begin with Stein. Jill Stein is the Green Party candidate and while I do not support many of the Green Party positions at least Stein appears to be more honest than many politicians. I was not expecting much from Obama after he won four years ago and he has been worse than even I imagined; of course McCain and Palin would almost surely have been worse. The Romney campaign is a joke. I find his lack of honesty and his lack of integrity to be just sickening. The polls at this point seems to be leaning toward an Obama victory. If Obama does win the election it might be in no small part to Obama looking intelligent and honest when compared to Romney.
Update: Election day and things still look about the same.  Also fixed a typo.