And Now the Ugly Olympics...

After so many hours of seeing young people compete with grace, beauty and strength in an atmosphere of human amity, Americans are back in the mean season of politicians scoring points by playing to the crowds.

The President welcomes Paul Ryan to the race telling Iowans the new VP nominee symbolizes “a vision I fundamentally disagree with” as his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack goes for the jugular: “Take a look at the Ryan budget. Take a look at what it does to farm families. It destroys the safety net.”

The sudden shift from Greek esthetics to Roman circuses will no doubt be taken in stride by voters, although some may regret losing sight of races in which runners are going all out toward the finish line without elbowing and throwing gobs of mud at one another.

Even in the first lap of the marathon, Mitt Romney cancels an Orlando campaign stop, pleading that he is "too exhausted to make the trip," suggesting that his choice of a younger, energetic running mate may pay off in staying power, if not popularity.

Is it too “old” to be remembering the time only decades ago when voters expected national leaders to offer something approximating truth, no matter how ideologically skewed? Is it too “out of touch” to lament the time when SuperPACs weren’t spreading lies that candidates themselves would be ashamed to utter?

Those who vividly remember such times will welcome Ryan’s entry into the Big Race. He won’t be half as nimble as Romney in evading his own history and vision for the future, he will drag the Tea Party Congress into the spotlight, and he will give ideologically impaired independents a good, long look at where the country has been heading in the past two years.

They may have second thoughts about where that finish line is taking them.

There will be another benefit as well. In 1960 JFK confided he felt sorry for Nixon having to get up every morning and decide who he is going to be that day. Romney, of course, has the same problem, but Ryan does not. It will be good to have someone on the ticket who knows who he is so voters can see exactly what they would be getting.  

Blowback: What Was Romney Thinking?

If he had settled for an attack puppy like Tim Pawlenty rather than controversial Paul Ryan, the GOP standard bearer would not be facing new questions about his wealth, taxes and social insensitivity.

“Instead of a referendum on his own performance,” political strategists point out, “the president has an opening to turn the election into a referendum on the vision that Mr. Ryan has advanced and Mitt Romney has adopted.”

What was the usually cautious contender thinking?

“Romney,  the turnaround artist, decided that he needed to turn around his own campaign,” suggests New York Times resident wonk Nate Silver, adding that the President “will no longer have to stretch to evoke the specter of Congress and its 15 percent approval rating...he will be running against a flesh-and-blood embodiment of it.”

Under a Ryan budget, another critic snipes, underscoring the tax release controversy, Romney would have owed only 0.82 percent of his $21 million income in 2010 rather than the 13.9 he paid.

This VP choice may excite the foot-dragging Tea Party base Romney has been courting, but what will be the ultimate price among independent and undecided voters?

Like John McCain’s “Game Change” choice in 2008, this year’s may also have surprisingly unintended consequences.

Paul Ryan: From Ayn Rand to Romney

The Republican ticket will consist of Two Suits, aptly enough for a party of wealth, privilege and social Darwinism.

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan will propel the word “wonk” into Google heaven, reflecting the poverty of ideas in a time of nasty attack ads and sound bites. His not-Palin qualities may elevate the tone of the campaign, if not the content.

The VP nominee could offer focus to the fuzzy figure President Obama has dubbed “Romney Hood” and allow serious analysis of their desire to take from the poor and give to the ultra-rich.

The changeable Romney must surely be attracted to Ryan’s consistency, but he should not count too much on his running mate’s steadfastness under fire.

In 2005, Ryan revealed “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” the cult figure who in the turgid 1200-page novel “Atlas Shrugged” proclaimed money as “the root of all good” and labeled those who don’t agree as “moochers” and “looters.”

This May, under pressure in the primaries, Ryan backpedaled on his patron saint when a questioner called her "an outspoken atheist [who]... felt altruism was evil, supported abortion and condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor."

“Just because you like someone’s novels,” he weaseled, “doesn’t mean you agree with their entire worldview philosophy...which is completely antithetical to mine because she has an atheist philosophy."

The would-be VP may still subscribe to Randian uber-selfishness but, in debate with Joe Biden and elsewhere, he will no doubt find other language to justify it.

All in all, however, the choice of Paul Ryan should be welcomed by serious voters, who will want to be persuaded that castrating labor unions and dismantling Social Security and Medicare among other safety nets for the needy will strengthen American society.

They may admire Ryan’s verbal dexterity, but will they want to buy a badly used country from him?

Update: As he usually does, James Fallows of the Atlantic reacts cogently, calling the Ryan choice “a good one for the country. It makes the race ‘about’ something, beyond just being a negative referendum on how the economy is going under Obama...

“I hope that when reporters are writing or talking about Paul Ryan's budget plans and his overall approach, they will rig up some electro-shock device to zap themselves each time they say that Ryan and his thoughts are unusually ‘serious’ or ‘brave.’ Clear-edged they are, and useful in defining the issues in the campaign. But they have no edge in ‘seriousness’ over, say, proposals from Ryan's VP counterpart Joe Biden...

“As Jonathan Chait argued in a long and very-much-worth-reading New York magazine article this spring, the ‘brave and serious’ cliche largely reflected a successful positioning campaign, which many people who view themselves as ‘serious’ swallowed credulously.”

2012's Missing Issue

For the moment, all goes well on the Obama-Romney front as the President bumps upward in the polls amid the savagery of personal attacks by both sides.

Yet the main 2012 issue is being lost in the hate Olympics: Will the American people take back their government from a Congress that has brought it to a standstill and threatens four more years of deadlock if Barack Obama is reelected?

Despite head-to-head presidential intensity, little will change if Democrats keep the White House and lose the legislative branch to those who hold it hostage with debt-ceiling shootouts and mindless wall-to-wall naysaying. Even now, before he has their nomination, GOP zealots are looking past Romney to hobbling Obama for four more years if he wins.

Plans for the Democratic convention stress the President’s qualities but, in the urgency of swaying “independent” voters, there is no visible effort to break the Tea Party stranglehold in Washington.

As the only elder statesman available, Bill Clinton might take on that role, but will he? There are compelling reasons for him to do so, even beyond love of country. If there is any hope for Hillary in 2016, their party will have to regain political traction between now and then.

With prospects for Obama brightening, results of Republican primary contests and polling for November offer a bleak down-ticket prospect. If the President doesn’t strengthen his coattails, he could be taking the oath next January as the emperor with no clothes.  

The rest of us will still be out in the cold as well. 

Update: Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate would offer Democrats an opening to spotlight Tea Party Congressional resistance by putting their wonk up front, a gift that could keep on giving through the rest of the campaign.

Obama in the Newsroom

The President makes an involuntary cameo appearance in this week’s episode of HBO’s “Newsroom,” announcing the death of Osama bin Laden after an hour of journalistic jockeying over the propriety of reporting events before they are officially confirmed.

Press criticism flourishes in the real White House too. After eight years of Bush/Cheney feigned disdain, Barak Obama is openly engaged in debate over how journalists shape or distort reality.

The President, reports the New York Times, is “an avid consumer of political news and commentary. But in his informal role as news media critic in chief, he developed a detailed critique of modern news coverage that he regularly expresses to those around him.”

In doing so, Obama is taking traditional Oval Office grousing to its logical next step in the Internet era by not only complaining about coverage but trying to shape it with Twitter town halls, a Google “hangout” and discussion via LinkedIn as well as the usual sit-down interviews with columnists and electronic pundits.

Yet, despite all this, he has had little success in efforts “to tell a story to the American people.” The answer may lie less in Obama’s narrative skills than the vicissitudes of journalism today.

Half a century ago at the dawn of TV, Presidents were overwhelmed by the reality that they no could longer control the public’s sense of the world through the words that described distant events. War and disorder were now seen nightly in living rooms, tearing down the wall between political and private.

JFK took a speed-reading course to devour newspapers and magazines before televised press conferences. LBJ had three network news programs on simultaneously. Nixon made aides watch, read and boil down what was being reported so he could be “informed and aware but not consumed by the news.”

Now the 24/7 flood of information is at full tide, breaking down all barriers between public and private with hard if not impossible-to-separate facts, pseudo-facts and factoids.

The loudest and least disciplined figures assail our senses with babble and body rhetoric while the media are overwhelmed in their attempts to mediate, to separate sense from nonsense.

The 2012 campaign will be over in three months, ending this season’s Citizens United gusher of lies and distortions, but little will change to feed endless material  for satire to Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, Letterman and Leno.

It will only hurt when we laugh.

Why Romney Won't Be Reagan This Year

With the President leading in polls, GOP spinners are positing 2012 as 1980 again, when a late Reagan surge swept a Democrat from the White House. That lead balloon won’t float, for numerous reasons:

Obama is no Jimmy Carter. Despite all the venom from the Radical Right, today’s President is far more popular than the former peanut farmer ever was. In 1980, Democrats deserted him in droves—-among them, Leon Jaworski, the Watergate prosecutor, and Eugene McCarthy, who had challenged LBJ over Vietnam in 1968. He called Carter “the worst president we’ve ever had.”

Romney is no Reagan. Behind in the polls at the time, the former actor demolished a sitting President with folksy charm in the October debates, smiling and sighing at Carter’s attacks, “There you go again.” Can anyone picture Romney out-charming Obama that way? Has anyone ever used “charm” and “Romney” in the same sentence before?

Iran can’t control American voters. In the final weekend of the 1980 campaign, Iranians torpedoed Carter by announcing they wouldn’t release their American hostages, depriving him of an “October surprise.” They waited until Reagan took office to do so, but they have no such leverage today.

Looking back at 1980, the political landscape then would unrecognizable today. John Anderson ran as an Independent moderate Republican and pulled 6.6 percent of the national vote.

The Libertarians had their own slate, drawing one percent, with a vice-presidential candidate, David Koch of the Koch brothers, who now fund the Tea Party in its attempt to take down the U.S. government.

The Communist and Socialists were on the ballot as well.

Such rampant diversity is unthinkable today. With Citizens United, the Supreme Court has unleashed money that will wash away minority candidates, narrowing voters’ choice but hopefully not entirely clouding their vision.

In November, they will pull the levers either for Barack Obama, warts and all, or Mitt Romney, who presumably will still be hiding his tax returns and Bain history.

If nothing unforeseen happens between now and then, there won’t be a Reagan repeat this year.

Acts of Violence, Large and Small

The would-be President responds to the Sikh temple shootings by “mourning those who lost their lives” and with “prayer for healing.”

On another August 6, we are jolted into realizing that Mitt Romney wants his finger on the trigger that 67 years ago took more than a hundred thousand lives in the name of peace.

In Japan, the Mayor of Hiroshima cites efforts to provide health care for survivors, now almost 80, so they can continue to bear witness to what human beings can do to one another.

On that day back then, I was in Germany, one of untold thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade Japan. All we knew was that a mushroom cloud had ended our dread of going to the Pacific to storm beaches and fight through cities. For the first time in years, we could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on our lives, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.

It was weeks before we learned the moral price for our relief--that over 200,000 would die from that explosion in Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki three days later and that our country would forever bear the burden of being the first to use such weapons of mass destruction.

Almost two decades later, in August 1963, I was interviewing John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. "Since 1945," he said, "we have gone into an entirely new period of nuclear weapons. Most people have no conception of what it all means. A nuclear exchange lasting sixty minutes would mean over 300 million deaths. We have to prevent the end of the human race."

As voters consider Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on this day in August, those memories must be part of the equation. How much power of life and death will be in the hands of whoever they choose in November and what kind of judgment, character and human feeling will he need to make such choices for them in the future?

Update: Even with so much at stake and more, the latest Gallup Poll shows voters not budging much from their party-line voting in 2008.

If the planet blows up, those who are left in the rubble will still have their partisan campaign buttons.

Marilyn Monroe Memorial Weekend

She died 50 years ago today, but Marilyn Monroe is all over TV this weekend. Turner Classic Movies ended a 24-hour marathon of her movies this morning, and tonight PBS will revive a documentary about her with “ashen-faced talking heads” (including my own).

Everything meaningful, and so much more, has been said about her long ago but, for those too young to know all that and for those who can’t get enough of her, here is the full story of the weekend my friend Ed Feingersh and I spent with her in March 1955.

Fresh Faces for the Future

After soaring into our hearts, Gabby Douglas will soon be transported from gold medals to the pinnacle of sports success, her image on a box of breakfast cereal.

No reward is too great for a young American who, along with so many others, has taken our eyes and minds, however briefly, away from the faces of tired old men who dominate TV screens with vitriol and venom.

For a while we can switch channels from politicians bashing one another over Chick-Fil-A to the sight of an unspoiled generation with, in the words of the President’s weekly address, the “American spirit that says even though we may have very different stories to tell, even though we may not look alike or talk alike or be dealt the same hand in life--if we work hard, we can achieve our dreams.”

Working hard is not the Washington ethos this summer. The Olympic event there in an election year, on everything from lifting the economy to keeping government running, is “kicking the can down the road” to avoid “falling off the fiscal cliff.”

As Election Day nears, their exertions will no doubt set new records for distance and time, if not style.

Meanwhile, for a few more days, their constituents can watch the Olympics and lull themselves into believing that “the American spirit” is alive and well.  

Is it too soon to start campaigning for Gabby Douglas, Michael Phelps and their teammates to run for Congress?

Romney's Not-So-Sweet Sugar Daddy

Q. Who is Sheldon Adelson, and why is he trying to buy the Oval Office for Mitt Romney?

A. A 78-year-old gambling magnate with a shady history of international wheeling and dealing, hatred of labor unions, a fixation on Israel and, in the era of Citizens United, determination to spend whatever it takes to unseat Barack Obama.

Before the Supreme Court flooded obscene money into politics, Adelson was dismissed by George W. Bush as “some  crazy Jewish billionaire.” In 2012, he has morphed into the poster boy for corruption of the electoral process.

Until now, Romney’s new best friend might be seen as just another example of high-bracket arrogance and egomania who puts his money where his mouth is (pace Donald Trump), but as the malleable GOP contender bows and scrapes to him in Jerusalem, Adelson deserves a much closer look.

His clout became visible in Gingrich’s South Carolina primary victory fueled by a $16.5 million SuperPAC tip in return for the former Speaker’s past legislative favors but, as Newt faded, Adelson grudgingly turned to Romney, who leaped into his leash without so much as slipping Gingrich a finder’s fee.

In this era of news snippets and sound bites, researching Sheldon Adelson’s history is a headache-inducing experience, but the outlines of a dark HoratioAlger American success story are clear.      

A child of dirt-poor immigrants, he clawed his way to wealth with computer trade shows in the 1980s and, a decade later, invested in Las Vegas casinos, pivoting right politically after bruising battles with unions. In 1991, he married an Israeli-born MD specializing in drug addiction and, under her influence, became obsessed with Holy Land politics to the point of turning into a right-wing nuisance in Israel.

Adelson expanded into international intrigue by making deals with China to operate a casino in Macao, in a corrupt atmosphere reminiscent of old Robert Mitchum-Jane Russell movies.

A driven, visceral man whose public pronouncements betray limited intellectual content, Sheldon Adelson is on the brink of funneling untold millions into electing Mitt Romney.

He has a right to his opinions but, if he succeeds, the degradation of American politics under Citizens United will be complete.

Update: Adelson demonstrates his usual way of handling criticism by threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and bullying them into retracting accusations that he profits from prostitution at his Chinese resorts.

Pimping is not his style, unlike the candidates he supports.

People Power, Now and Then

As Barack Obama begs supporters for TV ad money and Mitt Romney returns from pandering to Catholics in Poland and Jews in Israel, the death of Gore Vidal is a reminder that politics was a literary enterprise as well half a century ago.

In those days, Vidal was labeled “a man of letters” who wrote novels, plays and essays and, in the emerging new medium, argued raucously on the tube with others of his ilk such as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley and Truman Capote.

In a 1960 play and later movie, “The Best Man,” Vidal signaled the new JFK era by having a former President recall the old days when politicians “had to pour God over everything like ketchup.” Knowing audiences laughed.

In 1968, Vidal was a network commentator paired with his conservative doppelganger, the elegant editor and novelist William F. Buckley. They escalated a dispute on some minor point into calling one another "a pro crypto Nazi" and "a queer." Buckley won the argument by warning Vidal, "Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face..."

The two descendants of patrician families (Vidal was distantly related to Jacqueline Kennedy) pursued their feud on magazine pages, in lawsuits and by running for public office to spread their ideas (unsuccessfully, of course).   

Today, ideas have been replaced by partisan sound bites and SuperPAC attacks funded anonymously by bilious billionaires. Politics is a mindless demolition derby.

Gore Vidal’s departure recalls a time when talented, full-blooded people with names, faces and deeply held convictions had their say and tried to persuade thinking voters to agree with them.    

It may have been messy, but it was human.

Decoding Mitt's Magical Mystery Tour

As he lurches homeward, what have we learned? Beyond the gaffefest, is there a sharper focus on the man who would be president in this time of dangerous turmoil?

Parsing Mitt Romney's trip may require a cultural context rather than political, starting with the Beatles’ 1967 LP and TV film, “Magical Mystery Tour,” which was also greeted as “a disaster” by British critics.

Like Romney, the Fab Four were emblematic of their times, with mindset and lyrics not easily decoded. Their soothing songs had embedded messages (LSD in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) of a psychedelic worldview that infuriated insensitive onlookers.

Just so now with the GOP contender. Below all his apparently aimless babbling is a vision. In contrast to those cheeky outsiders, Romney is the embodiment of today’s country-club insider. How else to explain his implicitly equating Palestinians’ economic woes vs. Israelis with the culture gap between Americans and Mexicans?

Romney’s essence may be glimpsed by going back even more to the 1920s and Sinclair Lewis’ Nobel Prize portrait of “Babbitt,” the prototypically narrow-minded American businessman with a booster mentality who “considers it God's purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements.”

With such a challenger and the President’s defensive status (Babbitt vs. the embattled), little wonder that the campaign, according to David Brooks echoing Peggy Noonan, is “incredibly consequential and incredibly boring all at the same time,” reaching “intellectual stagnation” of political debate.

In the larger scheme, Mitt Romney’s trip won’t weigh heavily in the dehumanized, computerized mechanics of the 2012 campaign, but for those who still care about the human side of it all, the Beatles and Babbitt offer clues.

Update: Maureen Dowd weighs in: “Mitt’s foray showed some new colors, as he intended, but they were not flattering ones. We now know how little he knows about the world, how really slow on his feet he is, what meager social and political agility he has.

“Wherever he went, whatever situation he was in, he remained frozen in himself.”

Cheney, Clinton: Ghosts of Elections Past

As voters sleepwalk toward November, apparitions from their troubled history rise up to remind them of past errors.

Dick Cheney, the vice-president who picked himself, proclaims that naming Sarah Palin to succeed him was “a mistake,” while Bill Clinton emerges for a marquee role in the Democratic convention to nominate Barack Obama for a second term.

Such Scrooge-like emanations may serve, not only as the inspirations they are intended to be, but as warnings to the electorate to mend its ways in deciding the future.

In dismissing Palin, Cheney echoes Lloyd Bentsen’s classic putdown of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate: “I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.”

“I like Gov. Palin,” says Cheney. “I’ve met her. I know her. But based on her background, she had only been governor for, what, two years? I don’t think she passed that test of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.”

When Cheney ended his search for George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000 by looking in the mirror, he was more than ready to take over and did--in an imperial vice-presidency that led to doctoring espionage reports for Colin Powell’s UN speech to justify a needless war in Iraq and dispatching Scooter Libby to out Valerie Plame as a CIA agent when her husband raised questions Cheney didn’t like.

As Mitt Romney ruminates about his tax returns and picks his VP, Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman et al may look like safer investments.

On the other side is the perennial Comeback Kid. Says Obama strategist David Axelrod, “There isn’t anybody on the planet who has a greater perspective on not just the last four years, but the last two decades, than Bill Clinton. He can really articulate the choice that is before people.”

Just so. But the former president may also remind voters of other events in those two decades: impeachment that brought him thisclose to being ousted for unzipping in the Oval Office as well as reckless attacks on Obama only four years ago during the 2008 primaries.

Yet, in the “Christmas Carol” spirit, redemption may be what counts. By the time the Ghost of Elections Future arrives four years from now, a gifted-wrapped Hillary Clinton may be ready and waiting.

Update: A new Gallup poll shows 66 percent of Americans now have a favorable opinion of Bill Clinton.

How far does nostalgia go? How many would want Cheney back, too?

British Out of Bounds on Romney

The spirit of Olympic competitiveness raises unexpected patriotic fervor to protect Mitt Romney from Brits who have been bashing him so joyfully. He is, after all, our boob and they have no leftover colonial right to exercise their snobbery so freely at his “blunders and clangers.”

What if he did say on arrival that the state of preparedness was “disconcerting?” Does that give the Mayor of London the right to use him as a punch line to rouse Olympic crowds? Or PM David Cameron to sniff, “Of course it’s easier if you hold Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere,” in a bitchy putdown of those Romney managed in Salt Lake City?

Americans watching him through two election cycles understand that Romney is a stereotypical rich kid among political rowdies, trapped in a school where they routinely steal his lunch money.

If he gets mussed up here over tax returns and Bain claims, there is something substantial at stake, not just a verbal gaffe like his unfortunate anatomical reference to the “backside of 10 Downing Street.”

As he tiptoes overseas with the announced intention of not setting off foreign policy land mines, the Republican candidate keeps stepping into cow flops instead, but it may be asking too much of him not to do so.

He is clearly a new incarnation of “Babbitt,” the narrow-minded American businessman in a novel that helped Sinclair Lewis win a Nobel Prize almost a century ago for his depiction of a booster who “considers it God's purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements.”

In that role, Mitt Romney is also the undisputed champion of issue flip-flopping but there is no reason to expect him to show a matching verbal dexterity on more mundane matters.

As he makes his way to Israel and Poland, patriotic Americans can only hope the possible future President can show restraint in trying to ingratiate himself with Yiddish expressions or Polish jokes.

Intentional standup comedy is not his long suit.

Update: The campaign has found a way to protect Romney from himself, by taking the unprecedented step of barring the press from his Jerusalem fundraiser with casino owner Sheldon Adelson and other fat cats of the Jewish persuasion.

That will cut down on reported gaffes but hardly improve his relations with media mavens who have been increasingly complaining about Palinlike efforts to keep him under wraps.
 

Update update: Another flip-flop: Reporters allowed to hear Romney remarks but not Q&A.

   

Defying the NRA Death Lobby

Half a century ago 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on hand guns. Now, 53 percent don’t want to outlaw even assault rifles.

Such a massive shift in public opinion has been spurred, sponsored and legislatively enforced by the National Rifle Association, tagged by journalists as the gun lobby but more accurately described as the gun death lobby.

As Mitt Romney disdains new firearm restrictions in favor of “changing the heart of the American people” and Democrats, including the President, shy away from gun control, advocates point out that the NRA may be a “paper tiger” in elections yet terrorizes Congress with its rating system.

“We do absolutely everything they ask,” says a Democratic staffer,

The few vocal politicians who resist include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is too rich to cower, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, whose husband was gunned down on a commuter train. Elsewhere, even after shocks such as Aurora, there is silence on Capitol Hill.

Yet, isn’t an election year the time for voters to push Congressional candidates on the issue? 

Shouldn't both presidential candidates be under pressure to move toward some semblance of gun control?

Shouldn’t the silent majority that abhors random violence be pushing back against an organization that last year arrogantly refused to even discuss the issue with the White House? "Why should I or the N.R.A.” huffed its president, “go sit down with a group of people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment in the United States?"

As those who retain their humanity in the face of such bluster try to redefine guns as a public health issue, isn’t it far past time for voters to push back against the death lobby? 

Shouldn't they let its paid advocates know what's really in their hearts?
 

Update: A Friday New York Times editorial says it all:

“At a moment when the country needs resolve and fearlessness to reduce the affliction of gun violence that kills more than 80 people a day, both presidential candidates have kicked away the opportunity for leadership. On Wednesday, reacting to the mass murder in Colorado last week, Mitt Romney and President Obama paid lip service to the problem but ducked when the chance arose to stand up for their former principles.”