Howard Fineman has an interesting opinion piece on the fake campaign of Mitt Romney.
I have covered a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can't think of one that so lost its way-so expensively-as that of the former governor of Massachusetts. A board room and business favorite, a man with a Midas managerial touch, he was widely admired and even beloved. But he was a Republican of an old moderate school-that of his own father-and, like George W. Bush, Romney the Younger decided that he had to jettison all that he was to become something that he was not.
And so it was that this square peg spent perhaps $80 million-including at least $30 million of his own money-trying to pound himself into a round hole. It didn't work. The irony of his failed campaign: if he had just stuck to selling his managerial mettle, he might well have won the nomination, given the way the country's economic anxieties have become voters' number one concern.
Even as conservative radio talk-show hosts reluctantly settled on him as their savior, they were uneasy about it and about his previous record of social moderation and fiscal flexibility. They sold him hard in the last few weeks, but to no avail. Romney won his home state and the states in the West where Mormonism was familiar, but not much else.
The quality of being genuine is hard to convey, and deciding who should be president based solely on that basis can lead to disaster; you need brains and an ability to go with the flow as well. But voters know a phony above all and Romney came off as one from the get-go. Over the last decade he had changed his views in a rightward direction on so many issues to suit what he thought he needed to win the GOP nomination that he ended up standing for nothing but his own ambition.
I think that's as good an explanation for what had bothered me about Mitt Romney as anything. For me, he seemed fake. His recent (within the past decade) conversions seemed calculated to appeal to social conservatives with whom he might not have had much in common. It's not that it was impossible for him to have changed his mind about a variety of social issues--I swung from liberal to conservative over the course of a decade--but his reasons for doing so didn't ring true.
I always tell people that I gave up on Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party the day I heard that Clinton had told a group that perhaps his 1993 tax hikes had been too big. By that point, I'd spent the better part of five years defending those tax hikes in my very conservative family. It felt like a betrayal. Childish, I know.
My swing from pro-choice to pro-life was more complicated than that. I'd been pro-choice as a young woman when it was more likely I might want an abortion and at a time I was unwilling to really think about what abortion was or what it did. Like the Pandagon commenter who talked about it as just a 20-minute procedure, I didn't bother thinking about the longer term implications of abortion decisions.
What changed my mind about abortion was the partial birth abortion debate. It took place shortly after the birth of my son. My doctor had induced labor when he was 38 weeks along because he was just a big baby. Somewhere, I heard that they were doing abortions on babies at 38 weeks. So, the difference between a baby (like my son) and a "clump of cells" was the fact I gave birth. Not the gestation of the baby, nor anything else. Whether a baby was a person depended on two factors: luck and having a mother who decided to go through labor.
Once I started pondering that condundrum, it forced me to rethink everything else I'd thought about abortion. If a baby at 38 weeks of gestation wasn't ok to kill, what about 30 weeks? Or 20 weeks? Or 10 weeks? Was it ever ok to kill the baby? The life of the mother seemed to be the only reasonable exception. What about rape or incest? What about poor women?
That set of questions lead me to what I consider to be a core conservative value: personal responsibility and consequences. Liberals hate the word "consequence" because they think it is a synonym for "punishment," particularly where the abortion debate is concerned. They think stating up front that women should be extremely careful about whom they choose to have sex with because killing the baby because of its inconvenience is immoral is, in and of itself, immoral. They don't see having sex as a choice; like animals, humans simply mate without thinking in that rationale. Go visit any feminist site and you'll see the "people are gonna have sex" argument brought up quickly.
That's a rambling way of explaining my swing from liberal to conservative, but the point is that Romney never seemed to have a crisis of conscience like that to explain his own conversion. He belongs to a denomination with a history of racism, yet he seemingly never struggled with that (yeah, I know, he cried when they changed the rules). I never heard anything to explain his change from pro-choice to pro-life, nor many of his other changes such as on gay marriage.
In short, it never seemed plausible to me that Mitt Romney could change so dramatically on so many issues for any reason other than the political. It was as though there was a vacuum on the right, so Mitt went to fill it. Otherwise, he was just one of three guys who were center-left guys, which is what he always seemed more like to me, anyway.
Perhaps more than anything, that's why I couldn't understand the adoration Romney received by talk radio hosts that I considered smart enough to see through pandering. I guess if you are really determined to see a person a particular way, there are all kinds of hoops one is willing to jump through to do it.
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