Walter Kirn calls 2012 the "most compelling election in years":
The problem with treating politics as stagecraft, particularly this year, is that it mistakes the production for the play and confuses theater with drama. Theater is shallow, drama deep. And it’s at the dramatic level that this campaign is singularly engrossing. Down in the catacombs of the group unconscious where elections really occur, where the spotlights don’t reach, and where the polls can barely penetrate, a mythological struggle is unfolding between two profoundly different archetypal figures: a lost boy who knew his father largely in dreams and grew up bedeviled by questions of identity, and a favorite son whose father’s support freed him from having to question much of anything.
Barack Obama, a lonely meritocratic floater whose searcher parents met while on the drift and then wafted off in separate directions, fashioned a self from thin air; while Mitt Romney, from a family of pioneers who’d safely reached the promised land, hit the ground already in position.
Last night's biographical sections underlined that stark difference. But both sons do seem to have mastered fatherhood themselves.
(Photo: American politican George W. Romney (1907-1995), announces his intention to run for governor of Michigan, with his son Mitt and his wife Lenore, on February 10, 1962. By RDA/Getty Images.)
The Dish 