"If I were King of the Forest" and Romney had Won in 2008

Mitt Romney is now the 2012 Republican nominee for President. Throughout his campaign for this honor he has repeatedly said he is the better candidate.

But Romney also ran in 2008 - the year Obama was elected President.  A lot has happened since then.  So let's look what the world would have looked like, had Romney successfully followed his dream to the Presidency back in 2008.

Romney's Financial Crisis and the Recession 

Stock Market Collapse

• Romney - like Obama - would have inherited the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. 
• The crisis threatened the total collapse of large financial institutions, and downturns in stock markets around the world.
• The housing market plummeted, resulting in loss of value estimated in the trillions of dollars.
• Key businesses were without liquidity, resulting in plant closures, loss of productivity, and massive layoffs.
• Without work, thousands of workers were forced into bankruptcy.
• Evictions and mortgage foreclosures left people without homes and devastated the housing market.

Had Romney been elected, instead of Barack Obama:

• Banks would not have received financing from the U.S. Government to enable them to withstand the crises.(No more BofA, etc. Our savings would have been lost, and the U.S. Govt would have been on the hook for the insurance. But bank execs would have still received their bonuses).
• The automotive industry in the U.S. - representing approximately 4% of the GDP - would have been lost, along with approximately 2% of employment in the US. (No more GM, Chrysler, and probably Ford - if we could afford to buy a car, it would have been built somewhere else.)
• The housing market would have continued to lose value as the number of foreclosures accelerated. (If you were paying on a mortgage to finance your home, the chances of foreclosure would have skyrocketed as the lenders called in loans to cover their losses.)
• If you were lucky enough to have a job, your taxes would have increased as Romney's tax cuts would have been targeted to only the upper 2%. 
• If you were unlucky and had no job, your unemployment checks would have run out after only three or four months.
• Social Security would have been wiped out as Romney's plan was to privatize it and tie it to stock market investments.
• Your Medicare would be wiped out, because Romney's plan was to tie payments to the rate of growth of the US economy - or the rate of collapse as the economy failed.
• Your net worth - all that you own and all the money that you had saved - would be substantially less.
• Your children would not be able to afford to attend college, as higher education's ability to borrow would have been curtailed as a result of the loss of the financial sector, resulting in a failure of colleges and universities to fund their programs.

These are just some of the financial events that might have occurred had Mitt Romney succeeded in his quest for the Presidency in 2008.  They are imagined based upon Romney's own statements in the midst of the financial meltdown, and up to and including his performance as a candidate in 2012.

But let's not dwell on merely on the economics.  Let's look at Romney's foreign policy promises and declarations:

Romney's 2008 Foreign Policy (Some questions...)

• Where would Osama Bin Laden be today had Romney been elected in 2008?
• How many U.S. citizens be fighting in Iraq had Mitt followed his plans?
• Would we be withdrawing from Afghanistan if Mitt's policies been followed?
• What about Iran? Would we have troops fighting there?
• How about the revolution in Egypt? How about Libya?  Would we be setting up to fight in Syria right now?
• China? How would we be engaged in China?

There are a lot of questions - the answers to which most of us can only guess. Why? Because Romney's current stance on Foreign Policy is a mysterious mix of former Bush policies and muttered proclamations aimed at pacifying the Republican's Right-Wing. These policies are more than Neo-Conservative; they are truly Crypto-Conservative.  

Parsing the Image of Romney

There's no question that Romney sincerely believes today - as he did in 2008 - in his ability to "Turn the Country Around".  Today he's capitalizing on the incredibly difficult state of the economy and playing on the dissatisfaction of the electorate. 

He wants the electorate to equate the catastrophe's of the financial collapse with Obama's leadership.  He is ignoring Foreign Policy, as though this topic is not of concern to us.

And yet, had all of Obama's efforts been successful, it's doubtful that it would have made any difference to Romney at all.  Romney's agenda has always been simply to get elected.
But not to lead.
To rule.