The best tweet of a night of billions of ‘em came from Jamelle Bouie: “This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.” Sad-funny, and not just for Clint. It’s a sad-funny rather than tragic observation, at least so far, but it’s not sad-funny just for Clint and the Rs. The seemingly random mistake, putting him up there to speak off his decidedly frayed cuff, becomes typical not just for the Romney campaign, but for the epoch as the campaign embodies it. The R message, the message of R and R, is the ludicrous and insane notion that we can and should want to pretend that our Clint-nation can start all over again as a bunch of young singing cowboys looking for a break. Being aware that there is no easy answer, and that acting as though there might be might makes things much worse, is not the same as actually possessing the answer or even a good answer.