Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Paul declined to endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who endorsed Paul in 2008. Johnson was, formerly, the Republican presidential candidate all those young “liberal” college stoner Ron Paul supporters should have gone with if they’d wanted to support a candidate who believed strongly in liberty but who wasn’t a racist Alex Jonesian conspiracy-mongering goldbug loon. But Johnson had “extensive executive experience” instead of a blimp and a sweet logo, so he did not win over many Paul fanatics.

Ron Paul’s strategy seems to be a gradual takeover of the Republican Party itself, instead of attempting to build a Libertarian alternative to the GOP. I think he’ll find that he can get the party to happily sign on, at least rhetorically, to his fiscal message, as they continue to ignore his popular and populist isolationism and his eminently agreeable but politically untenable positions on criminal justice and civil liberties, forever. The party, in other words, will continue to co-opt whatever they find electorally useful about the Paul phenomenon, as the Tea Party movement stole his iconography and messaging wholesale while attaching it to the same religious-right/nativist sentiment that has driven the party’s activist base for decades.

But Paul thinks the future lies with his son Rand, who shares many of his father’s enthusiasms and beliefs while also appearing to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Various Paul allies and a few other Republicans strongly suggest that Rand is gearing up for a 2016 run; which would mean, of course, that they expect Romney to lose, but that they need to not appear to be rooting for Romney to lose.

The problem is that what makes Rand Paul more acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party is what makes him more repellent than his father. Take, for example, Rand Paul’s funny joke this last weekend about Barack Obama and gay marriage.

The president recently weighed in on marriage. And, you know, he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical but I wasn’t sure that his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now it did kind of bother me, though, that he used the justification for it in a biblical reference. He said the biblical Golden Rule caused him to be for gay marriage …

And I’m like: What version of the Bible is he reading? It’s not the King James version. It’s not the New American Standard. It’s not the New Revised version. I don’t know what version he is getting it from.

Haha Barack Obama is so gay, he should read a Bible for once. Libertarianism!

Nick Gillespie, of the libertarian Reason Magazine, does not get this joke. The crowd, at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, did seem to get it, or at least they appreciated it. But Rand sounds very different when he speaks to Iowa conservatives than he does when interviewed by Gillespie and Matt Welch. (His address received a nice notice from Robert Costa of the National Review, who did not mention his funny joke.)

While Rand Paul may be, as Gillespie says, the most libertarian senator, he is also not an actual libertarian, as demonstrated by his support for anti-constitutional anti-immigrant legislation and his very vocal antiabortion position. He is also a dumb lout, and I tend to think that having the Senate’s most libertarian member be a dumb lout is not actually that good for the Libertarian movement. When he makes explicitly libertarian arguments, he makes them dumbly. When he goes all anti-gay talk-radio bigot culture warrior, which he does increasingly frequently, he does so dumbly. (If he wants to be a mainstream politician and presidential contender, it was certainly dumb to appear — more than once — on the radio program of Truther/Birther/New World Orderer/every-other-conspiracy promoter Alex Jones, but for some reason he almost entirely escaped mainstream press scrutiny for these appearances.) While I don’t feel much affection for Ron Paul, he seems both significantly smarter and leagues more principled than his son the senator.

If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.

Whereas losing presidential candidates usually have their pick of well-paying sinecures, their consultants and flacks will need to preserve their reputations just well enough to get the next job. And so, especially near the end of campaigns, we get the anonymous leaks, recriminations and dramatic tales of late-night internal bickering in dim penthouse chambers that fuel Politico ebooks and “definitive” postmortems like “Game Change.” Political consultants are never heroes, but some, usually those with fresh book deals but lacking in fresh narratives, will attempt to portray them that way. As the two Politico e-books released during Republican primary season already indicate, this election cycle’s process of finger-pointing — which consultant is most responsible for making Rick Perry “look” incompetent, for example — is already well underway.

So let’s try to tell the stories of the various campaign apparatchiks before the post-November mythologizing pushes all other narratives into the black hole of deleted history. We’re going to bring you all the dirty tales of consultants, flacks and operatives connected to the Obama or Romney campaigns, showcasing all the kneecapping and fingerprinting and complaining that makes them the Great Minds that they are today. We’ll start with Romney’s personal slave, senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom.

– – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –

It’s a tough call, but the most depressing thing we’ve seen in this early general election season is esteemed Romney and Obama senior advisers Eric Fehrnstrom and David Axelrod’s penchant for trading juvenile, unfunny barbs on Twitter. This is how they spend their time, now, at the pinnacle of their political consulting careers. On April 14, for example, Fehrnstrom tweeted, “By not condemning Bill Maher, @davidaxelrod is signaling to supporters it’s OK to keep up the attacks on Ann Romney. Shame.” Axelrod replied, “@EricFehrn So until you have the guts to stand up to one of your own, you can take your studied outrage and stick it in…your Swiss bank!” This routine is beyond sad.

Much has been written about Axelrod both before and after his candidate won the 2008 election, the moment that crowned him as the reigning brilliant tactical genius of our time. But much less is known about his junior Twitter sparring partner, Eric Fehrnstrom, the challenger to his title.

Like Axelrod and countless others, Fehrnstrom learned the craft of professional trivial assholery in his previous career as a political journalist. He covered the police beat and state politics at the conservative Boston Herald for a decade. Former Herald editor Kevin Convey, sharing his memories of then-Romney communications director Eric Fehrnstrom in a 2008 Boston Phoenix profile, described his former colleague thusly: “My father used to talk about ‘pig-headed Swedes.’ Eric was a pig-headed Swede in the best sense of the term.” Which is exactly what the Herald, which has long considered it its divine duty to destroy Massachusetts Democrats’ careers and lives, wanted.

As Fehrnstrom himself wrote in Boston Magazine years later, his finest journalistic moment involved snapping a photo of Democratic lady on vacation in Florida. It’s scoops like these that show you precisely how thin the line between ideological tabloid writer and partisan campaign flack can be:

In December 1989, when the commonwealth was in the grip of a bitter cold snap and a fiscal crisis, the lieutenant governor, Evelyn Murphy, was on vacation in Florida. Since she was the candidate for governor, it could be argued that she belonged on freezing Beacon Hill, wrestling the state’s finances into shape. … So we lined her up for a kill shot. I jumped on a southbound plane with a photographer, and we staked out Murphy on Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. We found her soon enough, jogging along a road in shorts and a T-shirt. The next day, we splashed her picture across page one, her middle-aged thighs flouncing across more than 300,000 newspapers. It was a terribly unflattering photograph, an image that became one of those iconic campaign symbols, like when Mike Dukakis rode in that tank with a helmet strapped to his head, looking for all the Flying Squirrel, only more dour.

Ah, those halcyon days, when men were men and Democrats were Michael Dukakis and Evelyn Murphy, sitting ducks who’d soon find themselves ruined at the snap of an “unflattering” photo. But that chapter ended when Fehrnstrom accepted a buyout from the Herald’s new owner, who according to him planned to “‘de-emphasize’ political stories, in 1994. He showed signs of remorse for his journalistic dirty work in that same 1999 essay lambasting reporters:

They write the same stories again and again, quoting the same pollsters and pundits, often migrating into Sunday-morning punditry themselves. After a while, they run on automatic. They even stop doing their own research, instead relying on political operatives who package stories for them, complete with photo ops and spin or, worse, blind quotes and low tips.

I was guilty of that, too. Hey, I was the guy who caught middle-aged, heavy-thighed Evelyn Murphy jogging down a Florida road in the middle of her winter vacation—exactly the kind of gotcha story that makes me wince when I see it now.

So Fehrnstrom, having made a name for himself by hyping trivial stories about liberal politicians’ personal lives, decided to change careers. Henceforth, he would protect conservative politicians from journalists who wanted to hype trivial stories about their personal lives. He got his first job in politics as an aide to Massachusetts state treasurer and 1998 Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone. It was there that he began honing the skills that have endeared him to Romney.

Ambitious Massachusetts GOP politicians frequently deal with a unique problem in that party’s politics that, thanks to Fehrnstrom’s current boss, the whole country is now familiar with: Whether to be pro-choice or pro-life, and how to flip back and forth between those positions depending on the circumstances of an election cycle. From the June 22, 1994 Boston Globe:

State Treasurer Joseph D. Malone, long a champion of the state’s antiabortion movement, announced publicly last night that he has changed from an opponent to a supporter of abortion rights.

Malone, a rising Republican star in a state where opposition to abortion rights is considered a political liability, now supports both a woman’s right to an abortion and public funding of abortions, according to his spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom.

“A woman’s right to an abortion is the law of the land, and Joe supports the law of the land,” said Fehrnstrom. “Joe believes this should no longer be a political issue.”

Fehrnstrom’s eloquently fake explanation for Malone’s “conversion” also eerily brings to mind President Obama’s eloquently fake explanation for his own recent “conversion” to supporting same-sex marriage: “There has been a gradual evolution in Joe’s thinking on the subject.” A decent-enough line is a decent-enough line, no matter the party.

Alas, Malone’s gubernatorial bid was unsuccessful, and Fehrnstrom took his slick liar skills to their natural home in the private sector, the advertising industry, where he wrote press releases about the delicious new “spicy” menu at Popeye’s. His ability to lie on behalf of his employer must have caught Romney’s eye: In 2002, the candidate offered him a job on his gubernatorial campaign. Fehrnstrom’s been with Romney in some capacity ever since.

By all accounts, Fehrnstrom’s most important role on Team Romney has been to prevent the hilariously awkward candidate from ever talking to anyone, because that automatically leads to problems. “He wasn’t so much Romney’s press secretary as his bodyguard,” an “old friend” told GQ in a recent profile of Fehrnstrom, whose author added, “Once Romney was elected, he became even less accessible, with Fehrnstrom literally setting up velvet ropes around the governor’s office to keep reporters at bay.” It wasn’t just the reporters. Shortly after Romney took control, Fehrnstrom went on New England Cable News and picked a fight — an actual fight, with the shoving and the tussling and whatnot — with a local mayor who’d been hollering about Romney for some time. It’s confrontations like these that earned Fehrnstrom his reputation as, in GQ’s words, “Romney’s balls.” Fehrnstrom will wave you away if you offered him this … compliment. But privately, he, like all other consultants, enjoys the reputation of the tough-guy enforcer, or testicle-having bulldog monster, or whatever the poison pens run with on any given day.

So that’s been Fehrnstrom’s last decade: Containing Romney’s natural clueless clumsiness as much as possible and, when breached, trying his best to spin such behavior into something resembling goofy charm. When Romney directly contradicts his past positions on abortion, climate change, the auto bailout,, it’s Fehrnstrom’s job to come up with the impossible exculpatory line and deliver it to the press with a straight face. When Romney gives in to any of his grating tone-deaf rich-people pleasures, like flying on a private jet owned by Pfizer en route to a Republican Governors Association meeting, Fehrnstrom comes out and says, this is no big deal, why do you all think this is a big deal? When a reporter magically finds himself face-to-face with Romney and gets the opportunity to call him out on his lies, Fehrnstrom cuts it off and berates the reporter, “Act professionally. Act professionally! Don’t be argumentative with the candidate.” (Although it’s best that to not get caught doing this on camera.)

In his rare non-Romney free time, Fehrnstrom — who started his own consulting firm after Romney’s 2008 loss — serves as chief strategist to Sen. Scott Brown’s reelection campaign. This, better than anything else, shows you the “convictions” from which these strident consultants folks select clients: His job with one client is to convince the electorate that Scott Brown is just communist enough to deserve reelection in Massachusetts; his other is to prove that Mitt Romney is a “severe conservative” who’s prepared to destroy the world, if that’s what it takes. His one job is to demand six years worth of tax returns from Brown’s Senate challenger Elizabeth Warren; his other is to refuse to release more than two years’ worth of Mitt Romney’s.(Fehrnstrom’s other serious duties for Brown include writing secret fake Twitter accounts of Brown’s possible challengers, penning missives like “I promise to devote all my time in office to making gay videos. Shame on Scott Brown for focusing on jobs!’’ until he gets outed.)

Romney appreciates few things more than Fehrnstrom’s grimy, bellicose loyalty, and that’s probably the only reason he’s still around after making that infamous Etch-a-Sketch gaffe on national television a few weeks ago. But Romney’s rewarded him several times throughout his career. In 2005, according to a Boston Phoenix profile written a few years later, Fehrnstrom took over the Romney spokesperson job after the previous occupant, operative Julie Teer, had “lost a behind-the-scenes battle with Fehrnstrom.” (Like most washed-up Republican operatives, Teer is now a vice president at the Susan G. Komen Foundation.) And then there was this lovely pension-snagging post that Romney bestowed upon his good friend, at least for a couple of days until it became the scandal that it obviously would become. From the same Phoenix profile:

A controversy toward the close of Romney’s gubernatorial term made much the same point. In November 2006, the Globe reported that Romney had appointed Fehrnstrom to the Brookline Housing Authority. The posting itself wasn’t lucrative (it paid only $5000 annually), but it would have made Fehrnstrom eligible for a state pension when he reached retirement age. And given his salary history — at the time, Fehrnstrom reportedly was making $160,000 — that pension would have been a whopper. (In Massachusetts, pensions are set by the recipients’ three highest earning years.)

Fehrnstrom has spent ten years taking bullets for Mitt Romney, and in a few months time, he’ll either be remembered in political nerd history as the most brilliant tactical strategist of our time or the incompetent moron who didn’t know what he was doing and singlehandedly ruined Mitt Romney’s shot at the presidency. In the meantime, don’t expect to hear much crowing from Fehrnstrom directly. That would be poor consulting work on behalf of a client. Only expect to hear it, and plenty of it, indirectly, following the insiders’ unique moral code.

While researching this piece, for example, I kept coming across the same line in several pieces about Fehrnstrom: that he had come up with the devastating debate line that put Newt Gingrich out of contention in January’s Florida primary but refused to take credit in the media. Yet if he was refusing to take credit in the media, then why did I keep reading about how this was his idea?

It’s funny how they work.

Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.

On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.

According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”

There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.

Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”

As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member.  He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)

Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.

It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans halfway, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.

What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working-class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working-class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.

But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working-class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.

Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the White House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):

When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.

What a jokester! What a hypocrite.

The reasons are easy enough to explain.  Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner.  He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.

Similarly, to have a realistic chance of defeating him — so goes American political thinking — candidate Romney must be seen as even stronger and more uncompromising, a hawk among hawks.  Whatever military spending Obama calls for, however much he caters to neo-conservative agendas, however often he confesses his undying love for and extols the virtues of our troops, Romney will surpass him with promises of even more military spending, an even more muscular and interventionist foreign policy, and an even deeper love of our troops.

Indeed, with respect to the national security complex, candidate Romney already comes across like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco in the classic film Key Largo: he knows he wants one thing, and that thing is more.  More ships for the Navy.  More planes for the Air Force.  More troops in general — perhaps 100,000 more.  And much more spending on national defense.

Clearly, come November, whoever wins or loses, the national security state will be the true victor in the presidential sweepstakes.

Of course, the election cycle alone is hardly responsible for our national love of weaponry and war.  Even in today’s straitened fiscal climate, with all the talk of government austerity, Congress feels obliged to trump an already generous president by adding yet more money for military appropriations.  Ever since the attacks of 9/11, surging defense budgets, forever war, and fear-mongering have become omnipresent features of our national landscape, together with pro-military celebrations that elevate our warriors and warfighters to hero status.  In fact, the uneasier Americans grow when it comes to the economy and signs of national decline, the more breathlessly we praise our military and its image of overwhelming power.  Neither Obama nor Romney show any sign of challenging this celebratory global “lock and load” mentality.

To explain why, one must consider not only the pro-military positions of each candidate, but their vulnerabilities — real or perceived — on military issues.  Mitt Romney is the easier to handicap.  As a Mormon missionary in France and later as the beneficiary of a high draft lottery number, Romney avoided military service during the Vietnam War.  Perhaps because he lacks military experience, he has already gone on record (during the Republican presidential debates) as deferring to military commanders on decisions such as whether we should bomb Iran.  A President Romney, it seems, would be more implementer-in-chief than civilian commander-in-chief.

Romney’s métier at Bain Capital was competence in the limited sense of buying low and selling high, along with a certain calculated ruthlessness in dividing companies and discarding people to manufacture profit.  These skills, such as they are, earn him little respect in military circles.  Compare him to Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt, both take-charge leaders with solid military credentials.  Rather than a Trumanesque “the buck stops here,” Romney is more about “make a buck here.”  Rather than Teddy Roosevelt’s bloodied but unbowed “man in the arena,” Romney is more bloodless equity capitalist circling high above the fray in a fancy suit.

Consider as well Romney’s five telegenic sons.  It’s hard to square Mitt’s professions of love for our military with his sons’ lack of interest in military service.  Indeed, when asked about their lack of enthusiasm for joining the armed forces during the surge in Iraq in 2007, Mitt off-handedly replied that his sons were already performing an invaluable national service by helping him get elected.

An old American upper class sense of noblesse oblige, of sons of privilege like George H.W. Bush or John F. Kennedy volunteering for national service in wartime, has been dead for decades in our otherwise military-happy country.  When it comes to sending American sons (and increasingly daughters) into harm’s way, for President Romney it’ll be another case of chickenhawk guts and working-class blood.

For election 2012, however, the main point is that the Romney family’s collective lack of service makes him vulnerable on national defense, a weakness that has already led Mitt and his campaign to overcompensate with ever more pro-military policy pronouncements supplemented with the usual bellicose rhetoric of all Republicans (Ron Paul excepted).  As a result, President-elect Romney will ultimately find himself confined, cowed, and controlled by the national security complex — and he’ll have only himself (and Barack Obama) to blame.

Obama, by way of contrast, has already shown a passion for military force that in saner times would make him invulnerable to charges of being “weak” on defense.  Fond of dressing up in military flight jackets and praising the troops to the rafters, Obama has substance to go with his style.  He’s made some tough calls like sending SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden; using NATO airpower to take down Qaddafi in Libya; expanding special ops and drone warfare in Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, including the assassination of U.S. citizens without judicial process.  America’s Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2009 has become a devotee of special forces, kill teams, and high-tech drones that challenge the very reality of national sovereignty.  Surely such a man can’t be accused of being weak on defense.

The political reality, of course, is different.  Despite his record, the Republican Party is forever at pains to portray Obama as suspect (that middle name Hussein!), divided in his loyalties (that Kenyan connection!), and not slavish enough in his devotion to “underdog” Israel.  (Could he be a crypto-Muslim?)

The president and his campaign staff are no fools.  Since any sign of “weakness” vis-à-vis Iran and similar enemies du jour or any expression of less than boundless admiration for our military will be exploited ruthlessly by Romney et al., Obama will continue to tack rightwards on military issues and national defense.  As a result, once elected he, too, will be a prisoner of the Complex.  In this process, the only surefire winner and all-time champ: once again, the national security state.

So what can we expect on the campaign trail this summer and fall?  Certainly not prospective civilian commanders-in-chief confident in the vitally important role of restraining or even reversing the worst excesses of an imperial state.  Rather, we’ll witness two men vying to be cheerleader-in-chief for continued U.S. imperial dominance achieved at nearly any price.

Election 2012 will be all about preserving the imperial status quo, only more so.  Come January 2013, regardless of which man takes the oath of office, we’ll remain a country with a manic enthusiasm for the military.  Rather than a president who urges us to abhor endless war, we’ll be led by a man intent on keeping us oblivious to the way we’re squandering our nation’s future in fruitless conflicts that ultimately compromise our core constitutional principles.

For all the suspense the media will gin up in the coming months, the ballots are already in and the real winner of election 2012 will be the national security state.  Unless you’re a denizen of that special interest state, we know the loser, too. It’s you.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular.  He welcomes reader comments at <em>wjastore@gmail.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses how the two presidential candidates are sure to out-militarize each other in the coming election campaign, click here or download it to your iPod here.

With over 500,000 contributions to the 2012 Romney and Obama campaigns, these contributions represent a lot of money ($177 million, to be exact) and a ton of fascinating data. By counting how often certain job titles appear in these disclosures, we can create a data-driven summary of the degree to which different professions support each candidate. For example, contributions to President Obama’s campaign are 80 percent more likely to be from dancers than those to Gov. Romney’s. And even though Obama enjoys nearly a 30 percent lead with physicians, surgeons favor Romney by almost 200 percent.

An important note on these figures: in the 2012 election cycle, Obama has received the lion’s share of reported contributions (445,000 vs. Romney’s 90,000), although the total amount raised via individual contributions is much closer ($100 million vs. $77 million). Therefore, the numbers in this article reflect the percentage of a candidate’s contributions associated with a particular job title, not the absolute count — because Obama simply has a much larger sample of job titles. Additionally, while I’ve tried to match synonymous titles wherever possible, there may be a slight bias embedded in the self-reporting of titles.

Some of the conclusions drawn from this analysis confirm what we already know. First, that retirees are very active politically, accounting for about a quarter of the donations to both campaigns. Since retirees dwarf every other category, they are excluded from the graphs below. Also unsurprising is that executives and financial professionals are more likely to donate to the Romney campaign, while academics, creative professionals and workers in unionized professions favor Obama. For every contribution to Romney’s campaign, Obama receives (again, on a relative basis) 3.12 from architects, 2.65 from designers, 2.37 from those in advertising, and 1.96 from art dealers. By contrast, for every contribution to Obama’s campaign, Romney sees 16.22 from investment bankers, 4.85 from financial advisors, 3.63 from CFOs, and 3.21 from CPAs.

Let’s look at the top professions that have contributed to each campaign. We immediately notice a few interesting trends. The top three positions for both campaigns are identical, though in a slightly different order: homemakers, attorneys and physicians. The next six positions, however, are wildly different. And, in a remarkable contrast, the “not employed” make Obama’s list, while the “self-employed” make Romney’s:

Credit: Benjamin Wheelock

Medicine is one category that turns up some of the more skewed title-by-title results. Among those who list “doctor” or “physician” anywhere in their occupation, Obama receives 142 percent of the donations directed to Romney’s campaign on a relative basis. An insignificant number of these are “postdoctoral fellows” or the like. Even more strikingly, nurses give to Obama 617 percent more often. Yet Romney still has something to smile about: he sees, relatively, 145 percent more donations than Obama from dentists and 196 percent more from anesthesiologists. Surgeons, neurosurgeons, and podiatrists also prefer Romney, by 186 percent, 456 percent and 702 percent, respectively. Curiously, optometrists see things evenly, as do radiologists.

There are some specific professions that show a slight and surprising — to me, at least — skew. Bus drivers steer slightly toward Romney (by 32 percent), as do pilots (24 percent) and police officers (49 percent). Obama received contributions from 28 people with “Mary Kay” in their title, compared to Romney’s one. Barbers would prefer to trim Obama from the ticket … (sorry, these puns write themselves). Some other pro-Romney professions: appraisers, locomotive engineers, jewelers and coal miners. Those favoring Obama include travel agents, truck drivers, librarians and diplomats.

Credit: Benjamin Wheelock

In many cases, an entire sector skews strongly toward one candidate, yet shows some subtle differences on a more specific position-by-position basis. Across technical roles, for example, programmers, software engineers and those with “IT” in their title give to Obama about five times as frequently, while database and “Web” professionals are doubly pro-Obama. Similarly, those in academia tilt heavily toward Obama — Romney donors are 15 percent as likely to be professors as Obama donors, although that figure jumps to 50 percent for economists and 74 percent for mathematicians. Interestingly, no philosophy or English professors gave to the Romney campaign.

If you’re interested in seeing the data for yourself, head over to the FEC website where you can download comprehensive information for President Obama and Gov. Romney. Though, if you do — and if your job title includes the word “data” or “analyst” — keep in mind that your peers make up a 112 percent larger share of Obama contributors.