Romney Runs Ryan 2012 -- Berkeley Political Review

Hello I'm Alex Kravitz, Opinion Editor of the Berkeley Political Review, UC Berkeley's
only nonpartisan student political journal. As we are nonpartisan,
this video represents my views alone, not those of the Berkeley Political Review.
I made this video because
Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate.
I have a little bit of egg on my face, because I was planning on making this video
uh... before he announced his running mate, and then I was just
watching --
well, not really watching, because I don't have a television -- but paying attention to the
olympics
uh... and uh...
reveling in how great the U.S. team was doing in all these various sports
and uh... then I -- lo and behold, I look and see
Mitt Romney has already announced
his running mate.
i wanted to make this video before he announced his running mate to really
focus on the fact that
his entire campaign is based around the idea that he's
generic.
It's based around the idea that
events could become catastrophic for Barack Obama. Events can be the downfall
of any politician.
But unless some catastrophic events happen between now
and November, AND
Barack Obama
very poorly reacts to them -- you know, like,
something horrible happens, it has to do with China, and Obama is caught, like,
bowing
to the Chinese Foreign Minister, or something like that --
that would probably lose Obama the election.
But... the election is really Obama's to lose. It's not
Mitt Romney's to win.
um...
And
the Republicans have already given up on this election -- the very fact that they let
Mitt Romney become the inevitable nominee.
Before he named
Paul Ryan, I thought there was a slight chance, a slight but -- small but -- nonzero
chance
that the Republicans would go for the nuclear option
at the convention, and that would be picking a nominee other than Mitt
Romney at the convention. Right? Just to completely change the game plan on
Obama, because as it is right now, Obama has Romney very easily beat in terms of the
the thing that has for many years been why people choose [a] President: you know, who
would you most want to have a beer with? Or, or, who is the most likable? Right? There's
there's very little that's likable about Mitt Romney. He very much seems like a...
Late night comedians have made jokes about how maybe he's a...
if aliens came to this planet and they, they looked, they, they just snatched all the
elements of what makes a politician, and they put them together
and they ran that candidate
against who[m]ever the incumbent was, right? And they just tailored that, the
challenger's
party line a little bit
to the opposite of what the incumbent's party is, then
you would get Mitt Romney. I mean, imagine if McCain had won
in 2008:
You could have Mitt Romney running the same campaign, except instead of saying "I'm rich
and I shouldn't pay taxes", he says,
"Hey, I'm rich, and I even want to pay taxes. Why doesn't McCain want me to pay taxes?"
Right?
He could be doing pretty much the same thing, except with less emotion than I had
just now
in this ad hoc video.
And uh... when I saw a James Lipton --
-- uh... the host of Inside the Actors Studio -- giving
acting techniques to uh... Mitt Romney so that he can appear human,
it got me thinking.
I started thinking about uh... Paul Ekman, the famed psychologist
who uh...
pioneered the use of microexpressions to determine what someone is really
thinking.
And I looked at some footage of Romney, and it was it was, it was very difficult to determine
if there was any emotion at all.
And then I realized that I was
I was behaving like a blade runner
looking for a replicant.
Eh... for those of you haven't seen the film Blade Runner, you definitely should,
but, but the only way that you can tell whether someone is human or a replicant is you have to
look into their eyes as they're answering questions.
And uh...
assumingly,
if you were to look into Mitt Romney's eyes, I... I certainly hope that you would
find that he's human. Um, you know...
I mean, it's possible that like, Jon Huntsman is Vulcan, maybe, maybe Barack Obama's Vulcan --
we never saw his birth certificate, his real birth certificate, either. But...
even if that were true, not just a joke, it wouldn't concern me as much as the
idea that
Mitt Romney really could just be a robot. He could just be
sutured together from all these various
campaign elements of what makes a politician.
And I guess my question is:
Do private equity androids dream of General Electric sheep?
Great, and I butchered my own little
gag, which is the only reason I made this video.
All right. Well, these views represent the --
mine alone,
NOT the Berkeley Political Review; we're nonpartisan,
that was just my
analysis.
And uh... yeah.