Bissinger's Kiss

I didn’t think too much of Buzz Bissinger’s Romney endorsement this morning because strange endorsements happen every year, and besides… Buzz who? But then I got to an email from Will Collier:

If you followed sports blogs, you’d already know this (and maybe you do anyway), but Buzz Bissinger is the kind of guy a college buddy of mine used to refer to as “ a raging hard-on dick.” He’s also a very typical by-the-numbers old media lib, with a long history of raging hard-on dickness towards anything to the right of, say, Joe Lieberman.

If he’s switching this publicly, it could well be a Chris-Buckley-endorses-Obama-level indicator of things to come.

Note please that’s Chris Buckley, and not the late, great William F.

Anyway, so I figured I ought to take a look at his endorsement, and here’s what I came away with:

Voting for a president is based on a combination of factual and emotional perception. The tipping point was last week’s debate in Denver. Romney finally did what he should have done all along instead of his balky cha cha with the old white men of the conservative Republican wing: he acted as the moderate he is, for the first time running as himself, not against himself, embracing his record as governor of Massachusetts.

I have never seen a performance worse than Obama’s, distracted, his head dipped into the podium as if avoiding the smell of something rotten, acting above the very idea that a debate does provide a pivotal referendum on his first term as it has for all incumbent presidents, whipsawed by the legion of usual advisers telling him to play defense when his own intuition should have told him that he needed to go on the offensive as Romney slapped him around.

But there was more than the entitlement of entitlement. He struck me as burnt out, tired of selling his message although he has always been terrible at selling his message when it veers from idealism into the practical.

That last bit reminds me very much of George H.W. Bush in 1992, which is ultimately why I pulled the lever for Bill Clinton — my first-ever vote for a Democrat.

And what do you want to bet that Bissinger isn’t alone in his assessment, just as I wasn’t alone in 1992?