Obama vs. the Chameleon

Mitt Romney is the favorite in the Republican primary election. His problem: Not even his own party likes him.

The voice is booming and persistent. Mitt Romney has been fervently singing “America the Beautiful,” telling his compatriots how much he loves liberty and warning against the greatest danger America faces: the reelection of Barack Obama and his European-style “welfare bureaucracy.”

One asks oneself why that always seems to work. But anyone who doubts that Romney has the best chance of getting the Republican nomination needs to take a look at his rallies. Just a week or so ago, you couldn’t find his audience in the vastness of the hall; his staff busily folded up empty chairs and scurried about setting up movable partitions to make the room smaller — embarrassing images that Romney tried to laugh off. But on this evening, about a thousand people crowd a school in Exeter, New Hampshire, waving little American flags. Success is attractive.

Romney is in the lead after the first two rounds in Iowa and New Hampshire, he has more money than his opposition, his campaign machine is present in all 50 states, and his opponents are committing ritual suicide. According to the latest opinion polls, only he — the businessman and ex-governor of Massachusetts — has a chance of beating Barack Obama in the general election. That has attracted many prominent party leaders into his corner, including John McCain, the man who eliminated him from the 2008 race and has had little flattering to say about him since. At one of Romney’s New Hampshire appearances, McCain looked at his watch as if bored while Romney gave a speech. But as soon as it was over, he hurried to the microphone and lauded Romney as a capable leader who, unlike Obama, had what was necessary to be a great leader. Mitt Romney is the favorite, but he’s a favorite no one really likes very much.

Anyone closely observing Romney can quickly see why that is. There’s more than one Mitt Romney, they’re all competing with one another, and voters are asking themselves which one they’ll see tomorrow.

Businessman Romney

Romney shows up in the Derry, New Hampshire, gymnasium to play the role of the common man whose biography showed signs of the hard times he has lived through. He walks around the stage with short, choppy steps, almost stiff-legged like a tin soldier as he tells the story of his “grandpa” who went bankrupt several times. He confesses that he has also had to worry about getting a pink slip on occasion. The audience, meanwhile, wonders when that might have been for the son of a millionaire automobile executive.

Two days later, Romney the businessman made his entrance at the Nashua Chamber of Commerce — a businessman who made his estimated $150 million fortune as CEO of the private equity firm Bain Capital, which specialized in buying up decaying companies, refurbishing them and then selling them off at a profit. With waving arms, he boasts of his achievements in creating jobs during his tenure at Bain, rattling off his successes and appearing considerably more eloquent than he had in Derry.

But The Wall Street Journal, of all sources, put a few scratches in his image of being “Mister Fix-it” the following morning with an article revealing that he not only created jobs, but had also destroyed many jobs as well. His record didn’t show that he was necessarily best-suited to get America’s suffering economy back on track again. And he committed another verbal gaffe when he said, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

Romney’s flip-flops seem clumsy

He actually meant that everyone should have the right to get rid of their health insurance provider if the service is unacceptable, but taking quotes out of context is part and parcel of business as usual in American political campaigns. His opponents grabbed onto that immediately and began characterizing Romney as an unscrupulous, avaricious businessman. Romney’s wife, Ann, accompanied by two of their sons, immediately tried to control the damage with anecdotes of Mitt as a husband and father who spent five consecutive weekends working in their garden at home. Mitt, the handyman: a guy who gets his hands dirty, too.

Every four years, American primary elections offer up this mixture of bad theater and freak show — mainly from the Republican side recently. Then, on prime time television, high-strung men or women appear demanding the closure of various governmental agencies, an end to all taxation, the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from foreign locations — or the raising of troop levels in the same places. The more moderate and therefore more promising candidates play the same song, just with a bit less volume. In doing so, they may unabashedly contradict the political and philosophical positions they held sacred before the election campaign, whereupon they’re then accused of opportunism. This ritual, as transparent as it may be, often contains messages and concessions to specific groups that can be redeemed if they’re fortunate enough to be elected.

Mitt Romney’s problem is that he — unlike quick-change artist Bill Clinton — changes positions clumsily and is unable to explain the flip-flops away, either with rhetoric or with vision. Phoniness isn’t a means to an end for him — it’s actually his trademark. The only exception was his defense of Mormonism made five years ago. Many Americans are of the opinion that Mormonism is a cult; everything else is apparently negotiable for him.

When he ran against ultra-liberal Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, he boasted he was a moderate Republican with a progressive outlook. He was previously in favor of stronger environmental protection laws, abortion rights and gay marriage. He now condemns all three as vehemently as he does Obama’s health care reforms, the basis for which was the Massachusetts health care reforms he himself enacted when he was governor.

One might make allowances for Romney based on the fact that he has to resist the rightward drift of his party due to the tea party movement. While not a majority movement, he knows that without at least some tea party support, he has no chance of beating Obama. His backers say there is nothing to worry about; he will soon moderate his position.

But there will be no turning back from many of his promises. If the “new” Romney wins, he has said he will immediately nullify Obama’s health care program, make radical cuts to social programs and dramatically increase military spending because he believes it imperative that the U.S. have the capability of fighting two major wars simultaneously. These promises received thunderous applause in New Hampshire. His foreign policy advisers include many true neoconservatives. Romney promises to confront China, and in a departure from time-honored tradition, he says his first foreign visit as newly elected president will be to “our friend, our ally,” Israel, instead of Canada.

When a persistent audience member asked at the end of his speech whether there was any chance of reviving the old Mitt Romney, campaign workers turned up the volume on the background music playing in the auditorium.