Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Election 2012 -- Mitt Romney

In the right corner of today’s political boxing ring we have the Republican candidate for President in 2012: Millard Mitt Romney.  Mr. Romney’s father, George, was president of American Motors Company, Governor of Michigan, and unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1968.  Given his father’s financial and political success, Mitt Romney was able to receive an excellent private school education and a good head start on life.  He had a highly successful career in the private investment industry, making him one of the wealthiest candidates ever to run for president.  His public service life includes an unsuccessful U.S. Senate run against Ted Kennedy in 1994; one term as Massachusetts Governor from 2003-2007; an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008; and now this bid in the general election.  But even after all of this public exposure, what are we to make of this man and his candidacy?  Three core issues call out for examination.

1. Core Principles: There is an old anecdote about Hollywood that says, once you strip away its layers upon layers of tinsel and glitter, what you find underneath it all is – simply more tinsel.  Such can be similarly said about Mr. Romney’s apparent lack of any consistent core beliefs.  Over his nearly 20 years of running for public office, he has held almost every conceivable position possible on almost every political and social issue available, shifting as needed to fit the expediency of the office, the campaign, the times, or the audience.  Which is why his own Republican base is so suspicious and un-enamored of him.  I personally admire people who learn lessons from their lifetimes, and who evolve their thinking based upon rational input, personal experience, and thoughtful reflection.  But Mr. Romney’s such evolutions are too conveniently done.  Changes in public statements and positions can occur within months, if not days, with seemingly little regard for past utterances documented on camera or in print.  Watching the subsequent awkward and near-irrational explanation for each new epiphany of thought is torturous to any rational-thinking human being.

Voting for a candidate is the vehicle by which voters express their collective beliefs and goals through their elected surrogate.  When someone thinks so little of his/her personal beliefs that they are unwilling to state and defend them, rather than shift those beliefs from audience to audience, they obviate the whole concept of what a vote stands for.  We should not give away the sacred privilege of our vote so easily.  As with John McCain in 2008, watching a good person throw away their very soul for secular political gain is painfully disheartening to see.  Did not someone once point out to us that, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  The lesson for us all is that when you continually act without your core principles, over time it catches up with you.  Mr. Romney is faltering because all the various versions of him are now colliding, leaving him a man now without definition.

2. Invisible Agenda: In 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon announced that he had a “secret plan for ending the [Viet Nam] war.”  Of course if the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong knew what the plan was, they would maneuver to negate it.  So Nixon cleverly refused to tell the American public what the secret plan was.  Instead, he boldly asked America to simply trust him to do the right thing.  Given how sick Americans were of the war and related domestic turmoil, they voted him into office, trusting for a change of direction.  The result: new secret bombings and ground incursions into Laos and Cambodia; 2/3rds of the nearly 60,000 Americans killed in Viet Nam happened under Nixon, not Lyndon Johnson; we lost the war anyway.

Mr. Romney now seeks to follow the same “secret plan” strategy to revive our economy.  He says he has an economic plan, but he won’t tell us what it is until after the election.  “Just trust me, I’ll make it work,” he seems to say.  He has given us all kinds of endgame markers that sound good (does anyone really believe “12 million new jobs in the next four years”?), but not a word about how he is going to accomplish these.  He intends to cut taxes for everyone and spread more of Reagan’s long discredited “trickle-down prosperity for all.”  He intends to cut many programs he thinks we supposedly do not need in order to reduce the budget deficit, but will not tell us which programs those are.  Similarly, he will cut tax loopholes, but will not tell us which loopholes he is targeting.  He will do all of this cutting while nevertheless increasing our military budget hundreds of billions of dollars over what the Pentagon wants or the nation needs or can afford.  He has muzzled his own Vice Presidential partner and disavowed Paul Ryan’s detailed budget proposals, saying only that he “will have my own budget” – but he will not reveal that to us either.

Just being “against Obama” is not a valid campaign.  At some point, a true leader has to stand and say what s/he would actually DO, in more specifics than just high-school platitudes and clichés.  We do not need a hidden candidate with a “stealth economic program.”  We got taken for our naiveté in 1968.  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

3. Business Experience: Mr. Romney has tried to make the economy his whole focal point against Mr. Obama.  He states his prior business experience at Bain Capital as his credentials for achieving the same wealthy end result for the country.  I do not begrudge for one minute Mr. Romney’s achievement of wealth for himself and his family, which by all accounts he made within the existing rules of the game.  However, while that may be a good track record for his business career, it is an exact DIS-qualification to be President.  A deregulated financial services industry led us into this recession, and has proven itself to be a mindset totally incapable of reforming from the inside.  It is an industry that sees businesses as simply “inventory” to be bought and sold as commodities, not as employers and producers of quality and safe goods and services.  This success is not about actually running a company; it is about selling off its assets and getting out.  Mr. Romney is a product of that industry, an industry that does not think about sharing its success among all those who truly create that wealth regardless of their employment position.  This business background, for an endless list of reasons discussed across several prior blogs, is totally unsuited for one who would be President of this country of widely diverse Americans.

I have no concerns about the personal integrity of Mr. Romney, no fear of a John Edwards-styled skeleton lurking in any closet.  Yet I listen and watch Mr. Romney’s surprisingly amateurish campaign unfold day-to-day; his embarrassingly insensitive forays into international politics; his inanely stupid comments about everyday things one after another; or his attempt to explain away one ill-thought statement after another (“47% victims”?).  It leaves me feeling that I am watching someone who views the Presidency of the United States as simply one more corporate acquisition, the last and biggest “deal” of his career, with the American people just data points on a spreadsheet, from one who has lived his life completely cocooned from the reality of our people’s wide diversity and experience.

This track record is perhaps fine preparation for heading up Bain Capital and making it financially successful for its small cadre of partners.  But the United States of America is not Bain Capital or just another corporation.  So that same track record is a lousy preparation from which to represent and govern all of the people of the country with equal consideration and respect.  Including the simplest and most humble of our people.

“Managerial leadership is not the same as political leadership.  Some of Romney’s business skills might be helpful, but business is not politics, and politics is not business.  Otherwise, we’d have the same word for it.”  (Jody Baumgartner, presidential scholar, East Carolina University)

5 comments:

Vicki Lane said...

Well and thoughtfully said.

Anonymous said...

My favorite personality profiling system could use Romney as the poster boy for the "Achiever" type. He is the chameleon - changes his stance (morality, beliefs and ethics) to "fit" the group he wishes to impress, aiming to rise to the top of the heap, all the while splitting his consciousness into a 'production' piece and a 'feeling' piece. While in production mode, the feelings projected are artificial (whatever works). If the success of the production piece is seriously threatened, the feeling side can take over and virtually cripple the person for a time. At the level I see Romney operating, I'd say he is currently low average in psychological health.

There's also the intriguing line which posits his attempts to COMPLETE the work his father wasn't able to do - make a run for the top office. He is reported to have not been as close to his father as to his mother. So could this be father issues? Proving he he is the worthy son? Fascinating stuff, this.

Anonymous said...

Romney needs to be called out on this stuff and I can only hope that the President will do a better job of this than he did last night.

Anonymous said...

I like this blog's articulate expressions of concern about Mr. Romney.

Ken said...

.... someone who views the Presidency of the United States as simply one more corporate acquisition, the last and biggest “deal” of his career, with the American people just data points on a spreadsheet, from one who has lived his life completely cocooned from the reality of our people’s wide diversity and experience....

Such a clear, and I believe accurate, summation of Romney's political motivations. These words need to picked-up by the national media as they dovetail nicely with his 47 percent comment in revealing just how he sees people outside the bubble he lives in.