Playing “The Game” to Win.  My life has been spent registered as either a Republican or an Independent.  I register Republican because my personal philosophies on government align more closely with their party; but I switch over to Independent when some of the influential idiots in the Republican Party forget that only the winners get to govern and start going their own way.

It is my opinion that one of the most inaccurate concepts in this election is that Mitt Romney is a weak candidate.  For the life of me, when I look at his resume and his overall (not individual) performances on the campaign trail, he is certainly not one of the weakest Republican candidates I have ever seen.  The truly amazing thing is that a great deal of this “weak candidate” chatter is coming from the Republican Party.    I don’t believe there has been or will be a more significant election cycle in my lifetime than the one coming up in November and I view the process as deadly serious and significant.  It infuriates me personally to see many Democrats take a more casual approach to the election, but I have realized that they have a much more effective strategy to win.  Each national party is composed of disparate groups and it is a continuing challenge for each to unify their groups behind their national candidates.  The Democrats seem to better understand this requirement and what some may call blind loyalty and irrational support would be classified by them as “playing to win the game”.  Republicans on the other hand seem to relish the role of being “political experts” and continue to dissect their candidates far past the point of good advisement (like now).  The taking heads on the blogs and radio are so very certain of their conservative principles that they do their utmost to wield whatever self-perceived influence they might have to continually fine-tune the Republican candidate.  In reality, this amounts to dithering while the Democrats long ago accepted their candidate and all his/her flaws and focus on the true point of elections…winning.  The truly amazing thing is that given these two approaches, the Republican Party stands to hold the House, has a decent chance to take the Senate, and is running neck-and-neck for the White House. 

An objective analysis will show that the majority of voting Americans agree more with Republican philosophies than with Democrat philosophies; it has been this way for awhile.  The simple truth, however, is that Republicans think it is sufficient to be more right than the Democrats and the candidate is just a vessel for the Party.  It might very well be the ultimate truth that the party is the vessel for the Candidate.