With a bow to reality, Rick Santorum has accepted the fact that Mitt Romney now has the lead and all the momentum and the campaign for the presidency has commenced. It will be a true American classic. The nation is at a cross-road. We can vote for change or to stay the course.

The path the nation is on has been set for a long time. American governments (both state and the federal) have all made very liberal commitments that they can’t meet. They have over promised and under-delivered. The result? Chronic deficits and debt plague all our major states and cities. There are serious days of fiscal reckoning in our future, and no one person or party has the power to stop it overnight. But we can insist that our political leaders act decisively now before it ruins us.

Debt and deficit spending are the coign of the realm for old style politicians; they live as they deliver. Their payoff is re-election. Who can stand up to that logic? It is itself a proof that requires no explanation. That legislators from both political parties have been complicit is a given we don’t need to debate, but it is something we can change.

The purpose of the 2012 election is to chose a leader and follow a course. On the one hand we have President Obama, whose record is, finally, fully known. His course for the nation has been set and we have been at sea with him at the helm for four years.

On the other-hand, we have Mitt Romney; not well known to the nation yet but about to come into focus. The nation and the world will begin to pay attention from now until the election. What they’ll learn is that the course Romney would set will be very different from Obama’s, and they will judge which is more to their liking. President Obama’s world-view, we know, has been shaped by certain schools of thought. These and his personal experience have resulted in policies for the nation. No one questions that he is a man of the left or that he looks favorably upon government intervention and expansion. That’s been his course and will remain so.

In Romney, the nation can chose to follow a different course. His buttoned-up traditionalist character is steeped in schools of thought of a much different lineage. Romney is an old fashioned guy, and the course he’ll set for the nation will reflect the conservative personal values that have shaped his entire life.

In policy, that means Romney favors tax reform; both cuts and simplification, to attain his goal of economic growth. Obama favors higher taxes, not because they will bring about a stronger economy or reduce the debt, but primarily to conform to a notion of “fairness.” The course settings for this and every other policy the nation will adopt will be along similar lines. The Obama side will always favor collectivism and government direction, like the healthcare bill (now on life-support in the Supreme Court). While the Romney side will favor individual initiative, thrift, freedom from overbearing government, and the promotion of growth through free-market capitalism.

Leftists favor government intervention at the expense of all else, including the laws of accounting. Conservatives accept the need for sensible government involvement in the economy and in society, but with two essential caveats; government must show results and be affordable. This difference will not be lost to the non-aligned voters who decide every American election.

The nation is more deeply in debt than ever and getting worse every year. We are economically anemic. No recovery in our history has been this weak. Many people are still without work. Were we to stay on this course, the military’s budget will soon be thoughtlessly cut by sequestration and who, but our enemies, would favor that?

It’s a great irony, of course, that in this election, Romney (the traditionalist) represents change, while Obama and the Democrats have no choice but to be cast as defenders of the status quo. We know Obama won’t change because he can’t. Incumbent leaders become hidebound and politically chained to their record. That the nation is not improving is only proof to Obama of the need to re-double his efforts, not alter course. That makes Obama the leader of the forces of “reaction,” not change.

But ironic political wordplay won’t decide the election. Independent voters will. The uncertainty over national security and the economy reveal the trajectory we now face. Voters will either recognize the danger in the current course and chose a new one, or they will re-elect Obama.

Romney’s conservatism reflects views which our nation was founded on, the wisdom of which lay in seeing that nations, no less than men, need traditional values to survive and thrive. Our nation has never been free of life-and-death challenges, but our early history revealed startling growth, countless innovations, the rise of great cities almost overnight and we became a magnet for Europe’s disenfranchised seeking a better life. Individual initiative, not government, which then had very little control over anything, made this happen. Romney knows that.

With wise leadership America will respond with the same growth that paced our early expansion from a small coastal nation to a continental one. With smart policy, growth will begin here and spread abroad and that is what the world needs to be at peace. When a nation’s peoples are fed and housed because they are working, they are not apt to go to war. Americans can again lead the world.

President Obama had his chance. He failed. To say that it only requires four more years of the same to make things right is to hand the election to Romney. But what other rationale can Obama offer, now that he has a record? Independent voters are not so naive. They need only the time to evaluate the candidates and their policies, and pick a course that looks most promising. The odds stack strongly in Romney’s favor.