In the ealy 80’s when the Niners were battling the Cowboys for the best team in football – or, atleast, the NFC – I was, of course, a Niner fan. I had my reasons; good reasons. Among other things, the Niners were just a better group of human beings. At some point, somehow – I don’t have any idea of the circumstances  this was about 25 to 30 years ago – I got a Dallas newspaper and I looked at the sports section. (I think I expected to read about how great the Niners were from Dallas’s point of view.)

In the Dallas paper, I was shocked to read about how much better the Cowboys were as people. They had their reasons, good reasons! In detail. I always thought of Landry as an uptight jerk, but the Dallas paper had an article about what a great humanitarian he was and another article – or, maybe, the same one, it was long ago – talked about how uptight, how stiff, the Niners defensive coordinator, George Seifert, was. I had never thought of Seifert as uptight. Maybe a little quiet, formal, but not uptight. (I was truly taken back and – maybe unfortunately – never saw George Seifert, or the Cowboys, the same way again.) It seemed as if the Dallasonian world was completely backward from my San Franciscan world, at least as far as football goes and, I suspect, alot more. I was opened to another point of view.

I am a fervent believer in The allegory of the Cave Theory of Life in that I do believe that there is a Reality and we can only see imperfect shadows of that higher Reality. I’m a Democrt and, more importantly, a democrat. I think Obama is terrific. That is my reading and what I project on the shadows of a higher Reality. I see an Obama that is a centrist pragmatic trying to dig us out of a very deep financial and ecological hole that we have dug ourselves into over, at least, the last 16 years.  That may be the actual Reality. Or it may only be my distortion. What I am aware of, is that there doesn’t seem to be a Dallas-newspaper-analog that presents a reasoned, other, view of Obama.

I got an email, today, from an acquantance who said “Hopefully, the Marxist, Central Planning and Control Obama will wind up in his ‘Elba”; while riding with a friend – who seems conservative to me but refers to himself as moderate – about a year ago, he referred to Obama as a Trotshyite and, when I asked Tell me why you say that, he answered That’s just how I feel, I have a right to feel the way I feel ; after Obama said – in a speach at the UN – that The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied, conservative commentator Erick Erickson said In his speech to the United Nations general assembly today the president of the United States declared that the future does not belong to practicing Christians.  What? Where? How?  Oh, right. He just feels that way.

And so it goes.

With a couple of disclaimers like almost everybody exaggerates – I sure have – and nobody remembers everything, I am fascinated by Paul Ryan’s lying. Not so much the lies themselves, but the foolishness of it; the riskiness. It is one thing to say that he ran marathons when he only ran one or to chop some time off that marathon when having a beer with a group of  business associates and an entirely other thing to put it out in front of the entire world.

For starters, part of that entire world includes people who were there and remember. I am very aware of that as I blog. Anything I say here, opens me up to someone saying, Hey! I was there and you never…. To me, it would be incomprehensible to exaggerate to a reporter, even one from, say, the Portola Valley Almanac.  For Paul Ryan, it is almost a guarantee that it will be checked. For Ryan to imply that he has run multiple marathons or that he climbed close to 40 of Colorado’s 14,000 peaks, just seems nuts.

What was he thinking?

I used to think that Mitt Romney was a very smart man. “Used” is the operative word, here.  Now, I no longer think that he is that smart and I feel, vaguely, sorry for him. As a fellow – but almost infinitely poorer –  businessman, that bothers me. If he is not very smart, how did he make so much money? I know that he started with money, but, but, unlike George W. Bush who started with money from his father’s connections and ended up with less, Romney parlayed his wealthy start into making even more money. According to our national mythology, he has to be smart.

When you are the richest guy in the room, it must be hard not to think that you are also the the smartest guy in the room. After all, Romney is rich, he did make lots of money, and to many people – perhaps most – that is what “being successful” means. He is much richer than Obama so he must be smarter. Paul Ryan said it well when he said, “When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.”  By inference, somebody who does think of themself as stuck in some low station in life – just because they were born black, or grew-up in poverty – is either not very smart or does not have the proper American character (it may not be their fault, but it is not Paul Ryan’s fault, either).

And this is where I feel sorry for Romney. I imagine that Romney thought that once he had a chance to go mano-a-mano with Obama, he – Romney – would have no problem beating him. After all, Obama’s base’s enthusiasm is down, the economy is in the tank and not getting better; how could Romney not beat him? And yet, Romney is slowly losing ground.

Somehow, Obama has a way of making forced errors. It happened to Bill Clinton in South Carolina, it happened to John McCain over the economy meltdown, and now it is starting to happen to Mitt Romney. He should be able to win on the economy but he keeps wandering off to other topics. He is not going to win by making Obama look friendly to radical Muslims! he is not going to win on birth control, and, yet, somehow he ends up there trying to double down on a stupid statement. It must be infuriating to a guy like Romney who is, after all, the smartest guy in the room.