Tag: Romney

Rick Santorum quits a race he wasn’t going to win

Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president. He doesn’t have the delegates yet, but everyone knows he is the candidate and everyone has known he would be the candidate for months.

And yet, the GOP primary race continues, a freak show of remarkable proportions that has done little more than succeed in damaging what little credibility Romney had.

Today’s big news, that Rick Santorum has “suspended his campaign,” really isn’t news at all. Santorum was never going to be the nominee and never should have been taken serious as a candidate. Santorum is a right-wing nut, a religious conservative with 16th-century views on women, sex and patriotism. His success in the primary — carrying the most rabid and backward voters imaginable — only proved the existence of the dark heart of the GOP.

Santorum was only the latest in a long list of the kind of candidates that Hunter S. Thompson would have loved to write about. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — all of them were varying shades of dangerous and weird.

Only Ron Paul, who had his own nasty baggage, offered any kind of alternative (criticism of crony capitalism and imperialism), and he was dismissed by the commentariat from the outset.

To capture the nomination, Romney — nominally a centrist/moderate in his past — has sprinted to the far corner of right-wing lunacy, with few among the mainstream press batting an eye. It was just something he needed to do, they say, and now he can tack back to the center and run the campaign he’s always wanted to run.

In this kind of atmosphere, one in which the strategy of the campaign is all that’s worth discussing, we are unlikely to get the kind of conversation about issues we need, or any honesty about the corporate-centered policies both parties push.

The difference between Romney and Barack Obama is one of degrees, not one of major substance. Both are beholden to the corporate order and tied to (different wings of) the foreign policy establishment. At least Obama doesn’t have to cowtow to the lunatic fringe. That, in and of itself, may be earn him a second term.

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A back-handed endorsement

Barack Obama has been a disappointment — but a fairly normative president. The problem with the presidency and American politics in general is that it rewards caution and moderation, especially when it is a supposedly liberal politician being overly cautious.

And yet, given the options, he probably should be re-elected. Robert Scheer offers a good explanation of why in what I will call the great back-handed compliment. A vote for Obama this time, unlike last time for many, is not so much to continue the status quo, but a preventative measure against elevating a confirmed liar and opportunist to the nation’s highest office.

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Romney’s weak sweeps

The mainstream media is portraying tonight’s Romney win in New Hampshire as a big one and saying he swept the first two contests. Technically both are true. He won by double digits and won in Iowa.

But let’s be real here. Romney won Iowa by 8 votes over a guy — Santorum — who was polling in the low single digits just a couple of months ago and appears not to have cracked 40 percent in a state that was a foregone conclusion (he lives there and was governor next door, has huge name recognition and a massive organization).

Rather than showing his strength, the results demonstrate that Romney still has not won over his party and is likely vulnerable to a unified effort by the anyone-but-Romney group. Ron Paul, who is a special case, is at around 24 percent, but John Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum totaled 37 percent together — almost exactly the same figure Romney collected.

If Romney was going to be a real presidential contender, wouldn’t have had distinguished himself better from the pack than he has? Especially when his opponents have been Mo, Larry and Curly Joe.

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Tin ears of the Romney-bot

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George H.W. Bush (i.e, 41) professed amazement at supermarket scanners during a trip to a food store to attempt to show how much of a regular guy he was. The fallout badly damaged what little credibility he had left, proving to an electorate weary of recession that he was tone deaf on economic matters. End result: Bill Clinton wins the presidency.

Examples of presidential candidates failing to understand the tenor of the times are legion — Nixon on the beach in dress pants, Dukakis in the tank, Kerry windsurfing, McCain suspending his campaign — and they almost always end badly for the candidate.

Enter Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor already had credibility problems due to his every evolving positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and he has on more than one occasion proven that he has a tin ear worthy of the first President Bush (offering to make a $10,000 wager as though that were normal behavior, chanting “Who Let the Dogs Out” at a Martin Luther King Day parade in Florida).

And yet, he somehow found a way to top himself Monday:

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney stumbled down the homestretch of the New Hampshire primary on Monday, declaring, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” as his rivals intensified already fierce criticism.

Romney has attempted to defend himself, saying the full context of the comment would show that he did not mean he likes to fire people but that he likes having the ability to jettison service workers who do a bad job. And while everyone of us takes this ability for granted — fire the plumber if he can’t fix the leak — it’s not like we enjoy doing it. It was a foolish comment, a tone deaf one that underscores that Romney is the scion of a very wealthy family and has little in common with the average voter — and everything in common with the 1 percent at the top of the economic heap.

Romney is the elite the Tea Party and Occupy movements have warned you about, and it is going to be difficult for him to portray himself as anything else.

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  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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On religious chauvinism

Joe Conason offers a succinct and on-target take on the dust-up over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and the GOP evangelical base’s antipathy toward him.

The issue is not whether a Mormon should be elected or could be elected, but why we should allow those who wish to impose their sense of faith on the American public. Romney, after all, offered this comment as part of his speech:

“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom … Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

As Conason writes, however,

This statement is so patently false that it scarcely deserves refutation. If Romney has studied the bloody history of his own church, then he knows that the religious fervor of its adversaries drove them to deprive the Mormons not only of their freedom but their lives, and that the Mormons reacted in kind. If he has studied the bloody history of the world’s older religions, then he knows that the most devout Christians of all sects have not hesitated to suppress, torture and murder “heretics” throughout history. Only the strictest separation of church and state has permitted the establishment of societies where freedom of conscience prevails — and those freedoms are firmly rooted in societies where organized religion has long been in decline.

That’s what makes the discussion about Romney important; it’s not the electoral math, but the constitutional implications of connecting religion and government.

And it is the implied religious chauvinism of Romney and former Arkansas Go. Mike Huckabee that should worry us all.

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.

I couldn’t agree more.

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