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I want to make sure I understand you. Your argument rests on the belief that a conservative Congress can mitigate against Obama while it will not be able to do so against Romney?

Yes. Remember--we don't have a conservative Congress and probably won't after the election. We have a Republican House and hopefully Senate after November. However, my argument goes like this:

When Clinton was in office, the Republican Congress from 1994 - 2000 was able to move forward on a whole bunch of issues and kept spending under control. As a result, the Republican party got credit and G. W. Bush was able to defeat Al Gore in 2000.

From 2000-2006, the Republican Congress was little more than a rubber stamp for George W. Bush whose policies were mixed at best, left-leaning at worst. He increased the public debt, made big entitlements even bigger, made the housing bubble worse (granted, that wasn't completely his fault), kept awful Clinton-era appointees in place, failed to curb entitlement spending, and advanced an insane pro-amnesty policy on illegal immigration. The result of all this was the loss of Congress in 2006 and a catastrophic defeat for Republicans in 2008.

Now, in my view, Romney is an order of magnitude worse than Bush in every respect. A Republican Congress will not check him as they didn't check Bush when he wanted to go left. A Democrat Congress will only push him farther to the left. Either scenario is disastrous for the country and will lead to a cataclysmic Republican defeat in 2014/2016.

But Obama faced with a Republican Congress equals gridlock and gives us a fighting chance to tread water and come back stronger in 2014/2016. And that, sir, in my opinion, is the best we can hope for at this point.