Washington Post

Whatever your position on Tuesday’s election results, this cannot be disputed: 2012 has been a great year for big money in politics, and an even greater year for secret big money in politics.

At least $213 million for which no source has been identified has gone into independent campaigns for the presidential and congressional candidates, according to Sunlight Foundation estimates, with about $4 going to Republican candidates for every $1 going to Democrats. Thanks to several Supreme Court rulings, organizations that proclaim themselves “social welfare” groups that provide “public education” don’t have to identify their donors; they’re more commonly known by their tax status: 501(c)(4). In recent years, many such groups — the best known of which is Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS — have been busily educating the public about everything that’s wrong with the candidates and causes they don’t like.

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The 2012 presidential election is fundamentally a contest between our future and our past. Barack Obama’s America is the America that will be; Mitt Romney’s is the America that was. And the distance between the two is greater, perhaps, than in any election we’ve had since the Civil War.

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Any resemblance between the Mitt Romney of recent weeks and the Romney of the primary season isn’t coincidental; it’s an oversight on the part of his managers, who have proven more adept at Etch a Sketching away the Romney of spring than many imagined was possible.

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Of all the critiques made of President Obama’s performance in the first debate, the most telling, I think, was leveled before the debate — 2,000 years before, more or less. The criticism came in the form of a question, but then, that’s how rabbis talk.

“If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?” asked Rabbi Hillel — the first of three questions that he believed people needed to ask themselves if they were to lead decent lives.

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Suppose the growth of the U.S. economy slows to a trickle. I don’t mean in the next quarter or next year or even over the next decade. I mean from this time forth.

That’s the prediction of Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon in a new paper that’s become the subject of widespread commentary.

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Will the questions in the presidential debates reflect the concerns of the Beltway and financial elites, or those of the 99 percent?

Plenty of questions would, of course, rightly reflect the concerns of both groups: questions about war and peace, the deployment of American forces, the right to marry, school quality. But a number of questions related to the top 1 percent’s rise over the rest of our citizenry are simply not part of standard Beltway discourse, and asking them would require some outside-of-the-box thinking from the debate moderators. Herewith, a few helpful suggestions.

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