Mataconis and Dave Schuler maintain that the party differences are largely rhetorical. Keith Humphreys disagrees. Ezra Klein zooms in on Congress:
I think it’s an open question whether a political party should prefer to control Congress or control the presidency. And if we’re talking about filibuster-proof control of Congress, I’m not even sure it’s close.
There is a huge amount that will not change, because of the deadlocked and polarized Congress. But there is obviously a significant policy implication. If Romney is elected, we will lose the possibility of universal healthcare, we will accelerate income inequality even further, we will double down on carbon energy, and we may see a Supreme Court more radical than in a century. Fiscally, austerity is coming, whoever wins. But the balance of that austerity will shift. Under Obama it will be borne more by the wealthy; under Romney, the budget will be balanced, as someone once said about a much milder proposal, "on the backs of the poor." I'm encouraged by Romney's hints that he will go after deductions for the wealthy, and am open to a serious plan for deficit reduction that does not tip us all into a precipitous double-dip. But the refusal to contemplate increases in revenue does not bode well for any kind of agreement, before the debt forces action on its own timetable.
But for me, this is first and foremost a foreign policy election. If Romney is elected, and if no deal with Iran is accomplished before then, we will go to war in a third Muslim country, and possibly escalate again in Afghanistan. The rebooting of the global religious war would be instant. The US will almost certainly become the guarantor of all of Greater Israel, rendering us cut off from the entire Arab and Muslim world, as well as increasingly isolated from Europe. Russia, Romney tells us, is the number one "threat". Torture could well return.
It is the return to global polarization, confrontation and war that concerns me above everything else. The calming of international relations, the slow reintegration of the US with the global community, the slow strategy with Iran, the quiet rebuilding of alliances in the Pacific: all these are now white noise. But if they collapse, war and terror will return as the polarizing norm.
We know what those things did to the world in the last decade. And we know what they did to the US. Much more and we may not be able to recognize ourselves at all.
The Dish 