Famous American Novelist Steve Erickson attacks Mitt Romney as a Trojan Horse : "calculatedly vacuous campaign", Romney has no new ideas, but those of Bush. - Romney is an "opportunist that voters will find unpersuasive if not contemptible"

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"Frustrated enough, voters will take a leap of faith, but not blind faith." [ with Trojan Horse Mitt Romney ] - "Who can predict what surprises would come out if the Republican candidate wins the White House?."

Californian Novelist Steve Erickson (born 1950), Novels : Our Ecstatic Days (2005); Zeroville (2007); These Dreams of You (2012). Erickson has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Los Angeles.

Currently he is a teacher with the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is the editor of the national literary magazine Black Clock. He has written about film for Los Angeles magazine since 2001.

Steve Erickson is also an essayist and film critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Award in Literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. And is considered an important representative of the Avantpop movement.

The American Prospect
Romney, 2012's Trojan Horse
By Steve Erickson
June 21, 2012

Romney, 2012's Trojan Horse

Some excerpts :

Mitt Romney is running as the Trojan Horse candidate of 2012, the big empty gift to America who will be wheeled into the gates of Election Night only for the bottom to pop out the next morning and whatever lurks inside to reveal itself. Watching his small disaster of an interview on Face the Nation this past weekend, we can only conclude he believes he will win the presidency by answering and offering nothing in the most calculatedly vacuous campaign since Richard Nixon’s in 1968. The difference is that in 1968 the American public knew Nixon all too well and, compared with the specifics of Nixon that people had understood for years, a vague Nixon was considered a step in the right direction. The more vague he got, the more people talked about a “New Nixon,” and whatever the New Nixon might possibly be could only be better than the old one.

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Even as Obama is held responsible for not sufficiently turning around the country’s financial circumstances, Obama’s predecessor is held responsible for creating them, which wouldn’t matter if Romney had an inkling let alone an idea that sounded new. The prospective Republican nominee appears to be under the impression that the fewer ideas he can get away with—new or otherwise—the better; thus he strikes bold stances that are silly or scary on issues of less concern like Russia while taking no stance whatsoever on what are considered more pressing matters at hand like the economy or immigration. This is the Romney predicament, that the Trojan Horse Romney may be the best Romney that Mitt Romney has, any or all other existing Romneys incapacitated by either an unforgiving base or an opportunism that voters will find unpersuasive if not contemptible.

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