How Mitt Romney is winning my heart

This is how I'm beginning to feel about Mitt Romney.

I've been a fairly depressed Republican. I lost faith in the aftermath of the 2008 election. I was totally discouraged by the way my political party allowed itself to be hijacked by a rogue fringe of extremist ideologues. Yeah, I'm talking about The Tea Party.

See, I'm not the kind of conservative who gets fired up by ideologues. I wasn't inspired. I was frustrated. In fact, I was as frustrated by The Tea Party as I was by Prez. O. 

I was frustrated because ideologues aren't servants of the people. Ideologues do not understand the word compromise. They do not understand the concept of working together. They shun cooperation.

Look, I've listened to preachers and ideologues my whole life. They do NOT impress me. I don't care how damn eloquent they are. I don't care how artfully they can turn a phrase. What I care about is this old-fashioned word called: cooperation.

Cooperation is not popular because it's boring. It takes work. It takes humility. Cooperation takes a certain kind of humanity, gentleness and ability to compromise: traits that are egregiously lacking in Washington's current political climate. And the truth is, President Obama did nothing to change that. How could he? He's never run a successful business, never governed anything. President Obama didn't even stay in the Senate long enough to build solid, working relationships.

Instead, he tried to ramrod cooperation by saying, "Hey, I won the election!" As if that gave him carte blanche to steamroll his ideology over everyone else. This was a novice mistake--the stark evidence of someone who has zero governance experience.

President Obama is an intellectual ideologue. He was elected on the basis of his high-flying rhetoric and bright, shining promises. President Obama was never a servant of the people. Sure, he gave inspiring speeches about hope. But as Romney recently noted in his foreign policy speech: "Hope is not a strategy."

Unfortunately, the GOP made a huge mistake by reacting to Obama. The Tea Party rushed in and elected a bunch of hard-line, no-compromise conservatives who vowed to "clean up Washington." SPOILER ALERT: that didn't happen.

Here's why: because the only thing that happens when you stick a bunch of ideologues is one room is....GRIDLOCK.

But then Mitt Romney showed up to the Presidential debate.

I was taken my surprise. Here I was tweeting all these sarcastic tweets and still feeling all disillusioned with the GOP. But somewhere in the middle of the debate I suddenly realized that Mitt Romney was killing it.

He was strong. He was informed. He was damn Presidential.

Mitt Romney made me feel safe. He made me feel like there was a clear road out of this miry economy. And frankly, that's sort of all I care about right now.

After the debate, I heard my liberal friends bemoan the fact that President Obama "didn't show up." Really? I actually thought the Obama we saw during the Presidential debate was the REAL Obama. The only difference was that the debate pulled aside the curtain and exposed the great Wizard of Oz for what he really was: a bumbling pushover who couldn't even look his opponent in the eye.

By contrast, Mitt Romney made me believe that better days were ahead. OMG, YES WE CAN.