As Michigan goes, so goes the nation

Since Mitt Romney is fixin' to cruise to a landslide victory, possibly even with coattails that win the Senate back, I've been meaning to do some thinking on what the next four years will look like in a Romney administration.  Well, this description of what's happening in Michigan is the Republic's future, painted on a smaller canvas:

What makes matters worse is the fact that the Republican governor elected in 2010 is a businessman all too typical of the businessmen who go into politics. If you have never heard his name, there is a reason. He brings to the political arena the amoral, apolitical mindset all too common among men of commerce, whose only concern is to buy cheap and sell dear; and his thinking is resolutely short-term. Michigan is now and has long been a mess, but he is not willing to address fundamentals; and, at a time, when the state is poised on the razor’s edge, he is unwilling to contemplate revisiting the arrangements made by those in the past who brought us to the disaster we now face.

Do not get me wrong. Rick Snyder is not a complete ignoramus. He was a successful businessman, and he has the wit to understand that the budget must be balanced. But he does not want to upset any of the powers that be. He sees governing solely as a matter of management.

...

Snyder’s fecklessness has left the Republicans divided and demoralized; and, sensing timidity and weakness on their part, the unions and their allies in the environmental movement and in the feminist left have gone on an offensive. The UAW may be on its way out. But, before it disappears, it will, if it can, pass the torch to the public sector unions and the left more generally. Here is how it proposes to do so.

And a more après nous le déluge description of Michigan's likely ruin is hard to imagine.  It's because the GOP establishment refused to implement the mandate that the voters - especially the Tea Party - gave them.

And so think on 2014, with a sad sack President Romney and GOP Congress that nibbles at the edges of the looming crises bearing down on this Res Publica.  What will the energy levels in the Tea Party look like?  And what will the energy levels look like in a Democrat Party stinging from the loss of power?  We say in 2006 and 2008 the voters turn their backs on a similar sad sack GOP.  Those same voters are now turning their backs on the Democrats, but nothing suggests that this vibration is dampening.

Bah.  I've seen Mitt in power, in the Massachusetts Governor's mansion.  The idea that he's some sort of Reagan is a joke.  January of 2017 terrifies me, and you only have to look at Michigan to see why.  Since it looks like Jesus Christ himself couldn't win this election for Obama, I guess we're going to get a chance to see it and feel it, good and hard.