They say, Oh, we were just funnin’ around.
Now comes Mitt Romney with this non-apology apology:
“Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that…. I participated in a lot of high jinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize.”
What hijinks? According to the Washington Post:
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students….
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
“He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.
The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.
Holy Lord of the Flies! Just hijinks. Lauber died in 2004, but in the 1990s, decades later, said
“It was horrible… It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”
And Romney?
“Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”
That’s what bullies do.
That is beyond bullying.
When Scott Brown bullied high schoolers, he was an adult state senator.
I think we can all agree that dropping a few f-bombs, however distasteful, does not approach the level of bullying that Romney apparently engaged in, which involved holding a fellow student down and physically assaulting him with a pair of scissors.
Mitt Romney’s bullying appears to have included cruel physical assault. No question a much more severe level of bullying.
Just noting that Brown’s intimidation of high-schoolers occurred when Brown was an adult who should have unquestionably known better and exercised better judgment as an adult, an elected official, and an authority figure.
He was LEADING the effort.
This guy makes me shudder on a personal level. We knew he had NO empathy or ability to relate to others, but this…just makes me cringe.
is such classic abuser language. The abuser often then portrays the victim as a poor sport, overly sensitive, no sense of humor, etc. OMG, I hate abusive people, and the problem with it happening at school is that the child can’t remove themselves from the situation and as a parent you have to send your children into that environment every single day. Ugghhh. I don’t want to think about abuse of children by children right now.
Bush’s long twilight of alcoholism, replete with arrest record, was “youthful indiscretion”.
In 2016, the GOP will be running a convicted murderer for president, who speaks of “premature bullet ejection” as a reason for his sordid past.
Newt Gingrich is just an ongoing indiscretion.
When Romney was governor, he had no problem surrounding himself with the “God hates F@Gs” crowd. He must have felt right at home. Just like the good old days.
Sorry, but this doesn’t impress me if the implication is that it is at all relevant to this year’s campaign. Sure, they probably shouldn’t have done what they did, but it was ages ago, they were kids, and attitudes have rightfully changed since then. I also am satisfied with the quoted apology.
The problem is he a) lied about it, saying he didn’t remember it, only later to issue a non-apology apology and emphatically demand that the motive, behind what he still said he couldn’t remember, had nothing to do with anti-gay prejudice. Either he remembers it or doesn’t.
b) This isn’t just one isolated incident. He has a *history* of sociopathic behavior, from this incident, to other ‘pranks,’ (including another instance of forcibly removing someone’s hair!), to his disorderly conduct charge as an adult, to the literal torture he put his family dog through.
And that’s to say nothing of his professionally sociopathic behavior, enjoying firing people so much that he created an entire company solely dedicated to it, buying companies out, loading them with debt, gutting unions and decent wages/benefits and shipping jobs overseas.
So, yeah, if it was just one idiotic incident in K-12 that was the problem, and he admitted to it, felt remorseful and apologized, this would have amounted to nothing. But there’s a systemic problem here and it’s not going away.
Saved me from typing the same thing. Christopher, take a second look at what you wrote – you’re “satisfied” with Mitt’s nopology, the “if anyone was offended” bullshit? Give me a break…
(again can’t reply directly – thanks IE)
…I can’t get worked up over high school meanness for someone now in his 60s. Not only should there be a statute of limitations on such behavoir being relevant, but like it or not attitudes were different then. I’ve also never gotten why some people get so upset over how an apology is worded. He claims not to remember the incident and I can’t read his mind to prove otherwise. Romney has another almost 50 years under his belt since then and I’ve also been known to apologize for something even if I don’t understand the offense just to clear the air. I was raised with the idea that that is the right thing to do andI believe he did the best he could. I stand by my previous comment.
n/t
and even laughed about it.
He’s not sorry, he’s embarrassed he got caught and is being asked about it. He has NO remorse. That much was plain from the radio and TV interviews he did on this issue.
…because he was once served dog meat when he was six years old, but we on the left should set a “statute of limitations” on Romney’s clearly sociopathic behavior when he was 18? You don’t bring a feather pillow to a gun fight, Chris…
No reasonable person is going to forget an incident such as this unless they did this kind of thing so often they can’t remember a particular incident. It is crystal clear that he remembers this just fine and is just too cowardly to come out and admit it directly, otherwise I would have expected him to deny it ever happened. I agree that transgressions in one’s youth should not necessarily stick to you for life, and yet you can’t just pretend they never happened either. I am willing to accept genuine apologies, but not fake ones.
The problem for Romney is that this just feeds into the continuing narrative of his selfishness and lack of human empathy.
Exactly right. Part of what’s so disturbing about this story, aside from the brutality of the actual incident, is that Romney’s claim that he doesn’t remember it simply beggars belief. Either the guy is lying, or he has a particular precise form of amnesia, or he did this kind of thing a whole lot and all the incidents have run together in his mind. None of those speaks well of him.
…over at DailyKos! I’ve submitted the word to UrbanDictionary.com – anyone up for a Google Bomb when it gets published?
You mean it was okay to pin someone down, physically assault them and cut off their hair?
It was a expel-able offense then, from a school notorious for expelling people for the slightest infractions. They just weren’t willing to expel the Governor’s son, or people weren’t willing to rat on the Governor’s son. He didn’t avoid trouble because what he did was excusable, he avoided trouble because of his family name. Pure and simple.
Additionally, if you read the WashPo article, you would have realized just how guilty the other perpetrators felt back then. They knew it was wrong. It wasn’t any more excusable then than it is now. At least one of the men who helped Romney later apologized to the kid.
PS. If Romney is a sociopath — and that seems quite likely, at this point — it’s not something that “50 years under his belt” will help. Adult psychopathy isn’t considered treatable, as I understand it.
Please see my subsequent post.
Battering a person and forcibly taking scissors to him would be assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. G.L. c. 265, s 15A. That’s a felony.
I was in high school (in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC) between 1967 and 1970. Variants of the behavior described in this episode happened all too often to me and my friends. In Mr. Romney’s case, they were “The Posse”. In my school, they were “The Lettermen”. Both had the implicit endorsement of the school administration, and both knew it.
Nobody with any sort of moral backbone acted like “The Posse” or “The Lettermen” at 18. In my experiences, spines develop rather earlier in life — folks who are fearful spineless cowards at 18 are generally that way throughout life. Most bullies (especially those who congregate in packs like Mr. Romney’s “Posse”) are fearful spineless cowards.
However we choose to react, if this incident is true (and multiple independent sources confirm it) then it gives us insight into the real Mitt Romney. It provides a lens through which to evaluate his current behavior, for better or worse. Mr. Romney shaped a company culture at Bain Capital (he was, after all, one of only three co-founders). For some people, there are still ambiguities about the value system that governed Bain Capital’s treatment of the companies it invested in.
It looks to me as though there is very little difference between the value system embodied by “The Posse” of 1965 and by “Bain Capital” a few decades later.
How many of us want the man whose value system produced The Posse and Bain Capital sitting in the Oval Office?
Yes.
I suggest the majority of likely voters view “The Posse” episode, if true, as bad but not so a Bain Capital “value system,” irrespective of what you mean it to mean. As a matter of fact, I think more voters will look on Romney’s private sector experience more favorably than on Barack Obama’s life experience.
What does using a Native American self-description then say about Elizabeth Warren’s value system? Check any race box to get ahead?
A recent tell-all book about Barack Obama by a former girlfriend (I haven’t read it, just reports about this episode) describes a relationship where she apparently was more enthusiastic about him than vice versa. She says “Every time I said ‘I love you’, he said ‘thank you'”.
That sounds like the Barack Obama I voted for. He struggled to find a way to remain faithful to what he knew was true in himself while avoiding unneeded polarization. While his response was not what she sought, it was honest and non-confrontational.
I don’t think it’s any surprise that you and I have a different view of American voters. I don’t doubt that some view Mr. Romney’s “private sector experience” as positive.
As I’ve written several times here, the right wing (apparently including you) communicates contempt for the American voter and traditional American value systems (the traditional American value system does not elevate self-serving greed above all else, that is an invention of the post-Reagan right wing) in the campaigns it mounts.
Value systems evolve gradually, and generally in a consistent direction. Mitt Romney displayed his value system at 18 in “The Posse” and showed us its evolution in Bain Capital. Barack Obama displayed his value system at a similar age in his responses to an over-enthusiastic girlfriend, showed us its evolution in the Oval Office.
I’ll take Barack Obama and the value system that he exemplifies. You, apparently, prefer Mitt Romney.
Hey, look at that – she didn’t. But don’t let the facts get in the way of an awesome smear.
which he is, he will have this turned around into an act of self-defense in no time.
This kind of reprehensible %$#@ cuts deep and shows a lot about inner character.
Isn’t that what Bain Capital was about?
Preying on the weak? Can you come up with a more worn-out cliche?
Cliche or not, “preying on the weak” precisely describes the strategy of Bain Capital.
… It’s been used so much with respect to Rmoney?
… whether the cliche is apt, not old.
So is “you should get out more“.
Since that time I have married and have 5 children – all boys – and they have children and on and on…
The whole experience seems to have invigoated the “job procreator’s” libido.
Just sayin’
By itself, high school stuff is hard to sell to the public as relevant. But I would love to see an ad stringing together these headlines, to the cash picture from Bain, to headlines of its companies closing, to some of Romney’s recent callous, clueless statements about household finances. It’s such a clear pattern, and tilts his image from successful businessman to rapacious robber baron. That’s a character type that everyone recognizes. Painting that picture reads less like class warfare than character analysis.
Isn’t this the Obama campaign’s only hope? Are they already running these ads? I’m sure there are lots of Staples employees, among many others across Bain-financed companies, who will be willing to tape glowing testimonials for Romney, and deservedly so.
And clueless statements are plentiful from Obama so I trust you won’t cry “racism!” when the clip about shovel-ready jobs not being so shovel-ready is aired over and over and over.
Mitt Romney did not “create jobs” — anywhere. He did not run Staples. He did not work in a store.
It doesn’t sound like you’ve spent much time actually creating, launching, or running a business — especially a small business. Your accolades of Mitt Romney and his corner of the investment community have more in common with fans cheering their chosen team than anything happening on the field.
I cannot see retail workers from Staples heaping praise on Mitt for their jobs, sorry. If you had ever worked retail in your life, you’d know why.
As for the “only hope” part of your argument, you’re deluded. Obama is crushing Romney in the swing states, and he’s adding to the number of swing states as well, up by 10 in Iowa and in a dead heat in Arizona, home of SB 1070 and Joe Arpaio. Romney is a horrible candidate, and he needs to sweep the swing states – not gonna happen.
I love the idea of regular folks who owe their jobs to Mitt Romney taping glowing testimonials to his awesome job-creating prowess. In fact, it’s such a good idea that I wonder why they haven’t done anything like that yet. Now, what could possibly be the explanation for that…?
I believe there was a campaign commercial in the U. K. in which a humble clerk from ScroogeBank, parent of a crippled child, rapturously acclaimed his employer (“good old Ebb”) when that master job-creator and all-around philanthropist
(( baincappin’ in progress ))
decided to stand for Parliament in the Tory interest.
Happy daze.
financial or otherwise in his life. Job creators of his ilk want it gift-wrapped.
I draw a sharp line between a person as a high school student and an adult. I’ve had too many students visit me just to show me how they’d grown up and regretted their behavior in school. I don’t see how it’s fair to hold someone’s youth against them.
That said, I make no judgments about Romney’s high school behavior, particularly given the time, place, and his age. Politically, however, this hurts because it reinforces his candidacy’s empathy deficit
I appreciate and value your experience and insight as a high school teacher.
I guess that I’m having a hard time separating my own old hurt and outrage that I suffered from similar bullying from a dispassionate response to something that happened nearly five decades ago. My son, who is a high school senior, experiences the same bullying behavior today that I suffered from at his age.
While on one hand, I’m sympathetic to your observation that almost all of us did things in our youth that we would never do today. On the other hand, I see precisely the same pattern displayed in the behavior of Mitt Romney while setting the strategy and tactics of Bain Capital that he demonstrated in 1965. Bullies are bullies — the bullies in Jack’s high school seem to be cast in the same mold as the 1965 Mitt Romney and the Mitt Romney of Bain Capital.
The bullies in today’s GOP are cast in that same mold — I suspect that this old episode helps rather than hurts his standing with that crowd. Preying on weakened companies and the entrepreneurs who struggle to keep them afloat is more socially acceptable in some circles than forcibly hacking the hair off another student while a mob restrains the victim — but the underlying attitude is the same.
I think this is more than an “empathy deficit”. I think it’s a character issue, and a significant one.
the phrase “empathy deficit.” While I wouldn’t hold high school behavior against a former student, I wouldn’t criticize anyone else for doing so and I would recognize a pattern if it carried into adulthood.
Romney’s behavior fits right in with what you cite as well as the weird treatment of Seamus and his willingness to take just about any stand necessary to get elected. There’s a lack of moral imagination in the man.
I’m sorry that you and your son have been bullied. In your day and my day, bullying was par for the course. So was sexual harassment. It still happens today, but my school and my daughters’ school (which is not in my school system), it is handled much better than it was.
My son tells me that his school handles the bullies much better than mine did. They exist, but are not celebrated and encouraged by school authorities as they were in my day.
I may write a separate post on this, because I think the episodes in the sixties had less to do with homophobia and gay-bashing and more to do with jingoism and nationalism. The Vietnam conflict was rapidly escalating, and my school administration viewed the bullying behavior as a “normal” expression of the rah-rah “school spirit” “we’re number 1” culture that it worked hard to encourage in my school.
My friends and I learned to avoid “pep rallies” and similar administration-sponsored assemblies because they were always followed by gangs of thugs (much like Mr. Romney’s “Posse”) roaming the halls and schoolgrounds looking for “hippies”.
The sexual harassment was similarly celebrated — our high school football team voted for which JV cheerleaders were promoted to the varsity squad. We can all imagine the criteria by which the girls were judged.
It appears to me that Mitt Romney and Scott Brown embrace and celebrate all that was so dreadfully wrong in those times, and hearken to return to those “traditional values”.
I think it’s wonderful that you’ve had the opportunity to see the change in some of your former students and if Romney had shown ANY remorse about the incident this would be an entirely different conversation. He did not (laughing and saying you don’t remember physically assaulting someone is not an apology in my opinion.)
…I think at some point we have to be better than the opposition. The righties jumping on Obama for eating dogmeat as a child is hardly an excuse for us to go after Romney for what he did as a student. Instead we should jump on those doing the criticizing. That is starting to sound like a common circumstance when I substitute teach when I witness one kid hit or insult another and when I ask why he says, “He did it to me first!” I make it very clear that I’m not the least bit impressed with that excuse.
Somerville Tom, I would be interested in your elaboration on what you see as school-sanctioned bullying. With your pep rally example, I would expect kids to present their feelings of superiority toward their rival school, not toward other students within their own school, and I especially don’t see why adults would encourage it as you seem to suggest.
The “pep rallies” in my school were only peripherally about other schools or even athletics. They were, instead, about flag-waving, swaggering assertions of the primacy of whoever was “in” and thinly-veiled suggestions to squash whoever was not. Short hair, conservative clothes, and “America” was “in”. Long hair, jeans, and “hippies” were not. Being in favor of the war was in, being opposed was not. “Soul music” (in my school) was in, Hendrix and the Doors were out.
Every student was expected to jump up and down, yell and scream about how great the “in crowd” was (including, of course, the team that played whatever sport was in season). Those who did not (for whatever reason) express sufficient enthusiasm were “noticed” and subsequently harassed.
In my school, in my lilly-white middle-class Maryland suburb of Washington DC, gender preference was so far off the radar screen that it only came up in the occasional “homo” or “queer” epithet. Those were, however, chosen only because it didn’t take much imagination to associate long hair (“looks like a girl”) with effeminate. Bear in mind that the Beatles were held up as men who “looked liked girls”. I think anybody who looks at a long-haired George Harrison and thinks he looks like a girl hasn’t seen many girls.
The animus was, I think, not homophobia but instead old-fashioned xenophobia and “tribal” stuff. My friends and I were harassed and bullied because we were non-conformist, not because anybody seriously thought we were homosexual.
The adults (the administration in particular) encouraged these thugs because they seemed to be threatened by everything we said and did. We rejected the bulwarks of what the administration felt was important. We enthusiastically embraced casual (and loving) enjoyment of sex. We rejected God and religion. We openly used marijuana and hash. Our music was “different”, and symbolized everything that we were and that the administration was not.
The “adults” therefore viewed the harassers and bullies as stalwart “defenders of the faith” who might occasionally be “overly enthusiastic”, but who were by and large viewed as “good kids” who were attempting to “do the right thing”.
The dynamic is sickeningly similar to the way today’s GOP views the Tea Party.
I just realized that you might appreciate an analog to pep rallies in my school.
I wonder if you are familiar with the “Passion Plays” that were popular in Christian Europe (especially Germany) during the run-up to Hitler’s ascendancy. While ostensibly about re-enacting the passion story, Jews in the area knew that they were really about something much darker. Jews were viewed as the cause of much of the economic distress that Germans suffered from, and Passion Plays in Germany often were followed by mobs roaming the streets assaulting Jews and vandalizing Jewish property.
The pep rallies in my school were much like those pre-war “passion plays”.
The Passion Play I know about is the one in Oberammagau. Story goes that the village prayed to be spared the Black Death and promised God to put on the play every ten years from that point forward. They were indeed spared and they kept their end of the bargain. My grandparents saw the 1990 production on a trip over there.
Your pep rallies were apparently different from mine. Mine were almost entirely about the team and we saved our “venom” for our rivals. I wasn’t sure of the point of them being during the school day and didn’t care much for sports either, but was never harassed for it.
than the opposition. Our values are better, our means less destructive.
As far as Romney’s bullying goes, discussing stuff like that is the currency of political campaigns. It’s not going to stop if we unilaterally disarm because we decide we’re above all that.
To really understand what Tom is talking about, you have to realize he’s at least old enough to be your father, and his experience occurred 20 or 25 years before you were born. It was the height of the Sixties. It was a different world.
….that Tom is a generation ahead of me. The different world point is what I’m getting it. That is, I’m reluctant to judge attitudes or incidents of that era by the standards of ours.
Sometimes I truly fail to understand what you are about, even after years of corresponding with you here. You seem aware and sensitive about Christianity, spirituality, and religiosity. Yet you consistently avoid “judgement” (except when it comes to commenting on my perceived anti-Catholic or anti-religious bias).
Judgment comes with morality. It is meaningless to bother even thinking about right and wrong, moral and immoral, if we are not prepared to then decide about where particular acts and behavior fit.
I don’t care whether you judge the “attitudes or incidents” of my era by yours our not. I’m telling you that I made my judgments then just as I make them now, and Mitt Romney falls woefully short in both.
That behavior was not acceptable then and it isn’t acceptable now. The principal of my high school should have been dismissed. He wasn’t. The fact that he wasn’t doesn’t mean the standards were any different — it means only that he had more supporters than detractors. The actions of Jim Crow officials in the deep south during the fifties and early sixties were awful. They were awful by any meaningful standard.
Mitt Romney and the GOP seek to return us to the “traditional values” of the fifties and early sixties. This episode demonstrates precisely what they mean. I have no reluctance in judging that behavior. Your mileage may vary.
As Somervile Tom says:
That behavior was not acceptable then and it isn’t acceptable now.
I remember very clearly forming a little secret recess club in the 4th grade, created solely for the purposes of isolating a new girl in town. She was a brown foster child too. I got scolded by my Mother and ordered to disband that club and start another one and include her and a couple of others we had decided were not cool enough. I am cringing in embarrassment as I type this, recalling every minute of those two days. What a little bully I was.
middle school that we would now call sexual harassment. Neither my friends nor I nor the girls (who were also friends that we hung out with) would have recognized our behavior as being anything but annoying. In high school, I also remember picking on a kid until he left the room. We thought we were funny at the time. I was actually a good kid and with noted exceptions. I was particularly nice to kids that were marginalized. The fact was I didn’t, we didn’t, know any better.
What Tom refers to in his old school is teaching people to hate. That was a lesson that didn’t need to happen.
I’m reminded of Cardinal Law, who whined as his administration’s relentless efforts to protect flagrant sex predators was unfolding: “We didn’t know then what we know now” — as if the insight that a priest having sex with an alter boy (or girl) was repugnant somehow emerged in the last decade or two.
Wrong. These actions were repugnant than and are repugnant now. I totally reject the claim that time somehow makes them less immoral.
…Romney’s actions are cringeworthy, but it is in trying to apply any lesson to a presidential campaign decades later that I’m getting hung up. He may have offered what is for some (not me) a less than acceptable apology and be laughing it off (His chuckle through much of what he says I’m starting to think is his version of GWB’s irritating smirk.), but it’s not as if he is now saying that such was the right thing to do. From a policy standpoint there are plenty of more relevant reasons to not vote for him and politically I don’t imagine most undecideds caring or most supporters abandoning him over this. As for judgement, Christianity teaches me that that is reserved ultimately for God and not for man, just saying since you brought it up.
… but I think the salient point here is that a not-apology indicates a lack of understanding or willingness to admit what was actually wrong here. Given the culture’s current concern about bullying this obliviousness speaks to both his lack of empathy and to an inability to adequately process right from wrong.
and can be applied as another lesson I think for any compassionate person whether or not they are Christian, Jew, Buddhist or Mormon.