The "they're identical" meme flies in the face of reality. Compare Antonin Scalia with Sonya Sotomayor and tell me Obama and Romney don't have significant differences that'll affect the country as a whole.
I often hear people use this argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Won't the Justices just wait until a President of their preferred ideology is in power before retiring?
Justice Ginsburg is only 79 -- both John Paul Stevens and Oliver Wendell Holmes retired when they were 90.
Edit: It looks like Ginsburg has expressed her desire to retire at 82 (in 2015), so unless she changes her mind, it will matter.
Romney, it bears repeating, has an utterly conventional and mainstream take on economics. This isn't Keynes versus Hayek (or Minsky or Marx or etc.), here. It's Keynesian with one set of tuned parameters versus Keynesian with some slightly differently tuned parameters.
Romney would support having marginally more money in angel investors' pockets and making marginally less government-directed investments, e.g. Solyndra. So there's a minor Hayek vs. Keynes theme in the election.
Romney would also be pushing more stimulus via deficit-funded tax cuts, thereby increasing aggregate demand. So you could just as well say that Romney is the Keynes-side in this election, especially since the politics would be much more favorable toward Romney pushing stimulus than Obama.
In practice, you've got to look at what model of the world is motivating candidates and their economic advisers. In both cases, Keynes is whom they turn to.
His running mate was a self-identified libertarian... until he became the running mate, that is, and started fighting to be the one to pump the most money into Medicare.
Did I say they are identical? Of course they aren't. But one has to be quite out of touch, immature, or just content with corruption to think that expressing a preference for one set of these lesser differences is worth supporting their overriding commonalities.
Or, instead of being "out of touch, immature, or just content with corruption", things like outlawing abortion, preventing same-sex marriage, and installing theocratic laws don't seem so "lesser" to me.
So you're still lacking perspective for whatever reason. Moralizing laws outweigh occupying other countries in a perpetual war machine while defrauding the plebs by debasing the currency? You're fighting for surface issues whose immediate importance is being constantly emphasized to deflect attention away from any problems that would actually require the establishment to change.
And your highlighted issues are certainly lesser than the associated meta issues that frame the debate, push government into more areas, and cause your issues to even be up for debate. The possibility of a theocratic law banning pornography wouldn't matter as much if Internet traffic weren't tapped and recorded in the first place.
