Election Day arrives: It will be fright night if Mitt Romney

Romney may take the White House from President Obama without having to say anything more than this: Vote for me, I’m not him.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Mike Lupica

Published: Tuesday, November 6, 2012, 12:01 AM

Updated: Tuesday, November 6, 2012, 12:01 AM

AP Photo

Mitt Romney greets supporters at a New Hampshire campaign rally at Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, N.H., on Monday.

Vote for me, I’m not him.

Somehow that became the one enduring truth of a campaign that Romney seemed to keep making up as he went along. And you know what? The people who want Obama gone, all the rich white guys who have backed Romney’s play, absolutely do not care, the way they don’t care that Romney has been more flexible than a yoga instructor.

Give Romney this: At least he’s not lying to you when he talks about being the candidate of change, just because no Presidential candidate of recent memory can change like he can.

Tuesday night we find out if he gets by with that, if it is enough to beat a President trying to keep his job in this time when so many Americans don’t have jobs. Find out if nothing Mitt Romney said really mattered, that all he had to do was show up to win an election this important.

Camille Rivera is the executive director of UnitedNY, a grassroots organization of the city fighting to improve the lives of working people, especially those making the minimum wage or less. Rivera is a girl from Soundview in the Bronx, a woman who still takes the B or D train at 161st St. and switches to the A to get to her offices on 42nd St., and was talking Monday about a UnitedNY online ad showing how often Romney has changed positions on just about everything except who won the World Series.

“It was a small ad buy that has gotten an immense amount of traction,” Rivera said. “It just basically started with us wanting to put together a story line on how the guy will say just about anything.”

So the ad shows you one-half of Romney’s face saying he will protect a woman’s right to choose, before the other half of his face appears, a different shot, and Mitt Romney says, “I am pro-life. . . . I was simply wrong.”

One-half of Romney says every woman in America should have access to contraceptives, the other half says Planned Parenthood has to go.

And there is half of Romney talking about 47% of the people in this country thinking they are victims before the other half says he cares about 100% of us. One-half says he will create 12 million jobs, him, President Romney, and the other half says that the government isn’t supposed to create jobs.

It goes like that. Because Romney has been like that.

This doesn’t mean Barack Obama has been a great President, because he hasn’t, or that he has been a great candidate, because he hasn’t been that, either, has offered no compelling answer to the best question Romney has asked, about why anybody should think that the next four years will be better than the last four.

When people go to the polls Tuesday, there will be a reckoning about that, because at least Obama’s record is right there for everybody to see, at least he has been pretty clear about his vision for the future, whether you agree with that vision, or with the people who have made him out to be some kind of dirty America-hater.

There was a tremendous opportunity for Romney to actually say something over these past months, to offer a clear vision of his own. Instead, he has been as vague as Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardner in “Being There.”

Sometimes you think he has been trying to run out the clock since the first debate in Denver, running more as the candidate from Bain Capital than anything else.

“At least he has a clear record at Bain; it’s why this is such an absolute clear choice on Tuesday,” Camille Rivera, a young American woman, one who fights for American workers, said on Monday. “Buy companies, strip them down, pay low wages, get rid of them. That’s an economy that only works for men like him.”

Romney comes from there trying to take the presidency away from Barack Obama, beat an incumbent the way Bill Clinton did and Ronald Reagan did.

Bottom-line guy finally getting to the bottom line.

A numbers guy finding out once and for all if he has the numbers, which never lie.