[Emphasis mine]
Article published Dec 22, 2007
Editorial
Romney should not be the next president
Monitor staff
——————————————————————————–
Dec 22, 2007
If you were building a Republican presidential candidate from a kit, imagine what pieces you might use: an athletic build, ramrod posture, Reaganesque hair, a charismatic speaking style and a crisp dark suit. You’d add a beautiful wife and family, a wildly successful business career and just enough executive government experience. You’d pour in some old GOP bromides – spending cuts and lower taxes – plus some new positions for 2008: anti-immigrant rhetoric and a focus on faith.
Add it all up and you get Mitt Romney, a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped.
(UPDATE: NYT picks up the story and comments here. – Bob)
Romney’s main business experience is as a management consultant, a field in which smart, fast-moving specialists often advise corporations on how to reinvent themselves. His memoir is called Turnaround – the story of his successful rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City – but the most stunning turnaround he has engineered is his own political career.
If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you’d swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you’re left to wonder if there’s anything at all at his core.
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he boasted that he would be a stronger advocate of gay rights than his opponent, Ted Kennedy. These days, he makes a point of his opposition to gay marriage and adoption.
There was a time that he said he wanted to make contraception more available – and a time that he vetoed a bill to sell it over-the-counter.
The old Romney assured voters he was pro-choice on abortion. “You will not see me wavering on that,” he said in 1994, and he cited the tragedy of a relative’s botched illegal abortion as the reason to keep abortions safe and legal. These days, he describes himself as pro-life.
There was a time that he supported stem-cell research and cited his own wife’s multiple sclerosis in explaining his thinking; such research, he reasoned, could help families like his. These days, he largely opposes it. As a candidate for governor, Romney dismissed an anti-tax pledge as a gimmick. In this race, he was the first to sign.
People can change, and intransigence is not necessarily a virtue. But Romney has yet to explain this particular set of turnarounds in a way that convinces voters they are based on anything other than his own ambition.
In the 2008 campaign for president, there are numerous issues on which Romney has no record, and so voters must take him at his word. On these issues, those words are often chilling. While other candidates of both parties speak of restoring America’s moral leadership in the world, Romney has said he’d like to “double” the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, where inmates have been held for years without formal charge or access to the courts. He dodges the issue of torture – unable to say, simply, that waterboarding is torture and America won’t do it.
When New Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the state’s first-in-the-nation primary, we talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we’ll know it.
Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.
Discuss
15 Comments . Leave a comment below.You know, I suppose it was a small price to pay to have Mitt as Governor of Mass., if it prevents him from being President. Remember how his "people" were hedging their bets and positioning him for a run in either Utah or Massachusetts? (As I recall, he had to jump through some hoops before the MA Gov's race to prove that he had always maintained Mass. as his permanent residence after registering to vote in Utah.)
If he hadn't run in Massachusetts, he might never have exposed his hollow core with issue positions that now contradict the positions of Republican primary voters. He would not have had such a strange legacy of flip-flops and blatant dishonesty.
So we had a numbskull for Governor, but (let's hope) we won't have him for President. It was worth it.
I have to say that even I am surprised at how much time, effort and front page space is being devoted to attacking Mitt Romney around here lately. You guys really really hate him huh?
I'm used to seeing a predominantly negative and sarcastic tone from the hard left but somehow I thought that BMG'ers might have more positive things to talk about than to spend half their site attacking and attacking and attacking. I think it makes you guys look mean.
Out of curiosity, who do you hate more, Romney or W?
The official date and time of the death of irony.
We'll attack others when they attract our attention. We're not singling out Mitt for anything more or less than he has earned.
Cry me a river, baby.
Somehow I have a feeling you'll come to regret saying that!
David are you so cynical already?
Sometimes I wonder if the stages of liberalism aren't something like:
1. wide eyed bushy tailed do-gooder idealism 2. confusion 3. bitter disappointment accompanied by biting sarcasm and cynicism 4. crochety old man
David, there's still good in you, I can sense it!
Remember that Romney is a sensitive guy. No jokes about crying around him. You might hurt his feelings.
I dislike both Mitt Romney and George W. Bush equally. They both know little or nothing about running things or mamagement, and Mitt Romney was a disaster as governor of the Bay State, and he'd be an even bigger disaster as president, imo.
First, Romney does know about running things and management. Saying the opposite is just plain stupid. Compared to Bush, whose business career is a long list of failures and hand-me-downs, Romney was quite successful in his non-political dealings.
Second, Romney was not such a big disaster here in Mass, especically in the first half of his term, when he was actually doing something here. Yes, we could do better, but we could do much worse, too.
Third, as much as a phony he is, Romney strikes me as a pragmatic. He will do anything to get elected - but then he will be doing anything to leave a good memory. Therefore, as much as he's supporting the Bush's Middle Eastern policy, I don't think President Romney will bomb Iran - just because his pragmatic side will not let him get involved in a war he can't win. President Guiliani is a much, much more dangerous proposition.
Fourth, Bush achieved what seemed not possible. On 9/12/01 the rest of the world (excluding Islamic countries) was on our side. He managed to destroy that. Romney has no fuckups of Bush's proportions.
So, of these two liars Bush is much, much, more hateable.
I agree that
A) Giuliani, as a president, would be just as dangerous, if not more so than President G. W. Bush.
B) Bush, as president, has had numerous mess-ups in businesses, he's wrecked the environment, he's gotten us into at least 2 unwinnable wars and hopes to get us into Iran, and he's put Israel, our closes ally in the mideast, in greater danger because of his hands-off policies over there, thus making the I/P conflict a great deal worse.
C) G. W. Bush squandered the goodwill of the rest of the world, including the Islamic countries, with his arrogance and hubris.
However, I beg to differ in some respects:
A) Romney craftily ran as a moderate in order to get himself elected governor of the Bay State, and went right back Conservative. Inotherwords, he's a wolf in sheep's clothing.
B) Because of this kind of sneakiness that Romney displayed in order to get elected, there's really no telling if/when he'd feel called upon to involve us in an unnecessary war, the way Presidents have had a history of doing for the past half-century.
C) Romney knew nothing about the Big Dig. He chose to monitor it himself instead of choosing someone who knew more than he did on this matter, and it resulted in a fatality--the death of a J. P. woman when a poorly-glued in ceiling panel in a big Dig Tunnel hit their car.
D) The Republicans are very dangerous, and Romney's no exception.
!
The angry men in charge of Fox News and the Republican Party, and the type of guy who would strap his loyal dog in a box on the top of his car and drive him to the point of bowel failure on a superhighway are the forces of hate in this country. We're trying to restore decency, civility, and the Christmas spirit, as in eggnog, to the political debate here.
You have a fine mind and a noble spirit, demolisher. Your New Years resolution should be to vote for Obama. There, now doesn't that feel better.
I've read plenty of newspaper endorsements over the years...but, this was a first...the Concord Monitor actually editorializing AGAINST electing a specific candidate.
It restores my faith. Mitt has been the master of deception and I wondered when and if any media outlet would finally pull the curtain on the wizard...it took a NH paper to do it..they see clearer than the mega-press in Boston, NY and DC apparently and were not afraid to say so.
HLPeary, the above-mentioned quote from your post says it all in a nutshell. Moreover, Willard Mitt Romney has been a lot sleeker and smoother about it than Dubya was, because Romney ran on a moderate platform to get himself elected as Governor of the Bay State, which he managed to do through that--deception. The Bay State electorate was caught off guard and unaware, they voted Romney into office as governor, and realized too late that they'd been truly snookered by him. This kind of deception is exactly the kind of platform that today's Republicans have been campaigning on, including Dubya. The thing with Dubya, however, is that people began to see through him pretty much immediately, which wasn't the case with Romney, or for that matter, Giuliani.
...and it won't give Mitt any comfort. In the late 70's the Patriot Ledger never endorsed (many owners ago), but they did a "first ever" (for them) of telling readers not to vote for an indicted (or soon to be indicted...it was many brain cells ago) County Treasurer.
So that is the kind of political company Mitt is keeping.
« Blue Mass Group Front Page
Fri 24 May 9:01 AM