Just Who Is Mitt Romney?

Just who is Mitt Romney?

To win his party’s nomination, the Republican candidate was forced to take ultraconservative positions that are at odds with his considerably more moderate convictions and political experience.

“Mitt Romney had a pet rock [when he was a child] which ran away from home because it was starved of affection.” This unkind attack was issued from a center-right columnist called David Brooks, a usually gentle and moderate author of scholarly books on American society. Writing in the New York Times, he went on: “He attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance.” The final blow: “If elected, he promises to bring all Americans together and make them feel inferior.”

The article caused a sensation and Brooks felt obliged to row back on his comments the following week, stating that: “Romney is a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not.” Such is Mitt Romney, the kind-hearted man who pays little tax (13 percent of his earnings) but (discreetly) gives a good deal of money to the charitable causes of his Mormon church; the businessman with a “sterling” career, in the words of none other than Bill Clinton; the Harvard graduate with degrees in business and law; and the savior of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Those who witnessed his first televised duel with Obama will have noticed that he is as capable of good as he is of bad, as when he saw fit to attack the “47 percent of Americans who are dependent upon government, who pay no income tax and who believe that they are victims.”

Bluster and Denials

For much of America, the Republican candidate is still “an enigma wrapped in a mystery,” in the famous words of Winston Churchill. Therein lies the whole problem with Romney.

In order to win the Republican primaries against the likes of Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Newt Gringrich, under the swiveling eyes of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, Romney was forced to reach out to the libertarian and anti-social fringes of his party. Yet he does not belong in this world of tea party reactionaries. Early this century, in 2002, as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was not anti-abortion. How, then, can he today claim to side with a Republican program that would ban any termination of pregnancy, even in the case of incest or rape?

During that same era, he dared to take on the firearm lobby, making it more difficult in his New England state to acquire rifles, the type that the mentally disturbed use to massacre shopping mall cinema-goers. Today, he attempts to sweet-talk the militants of the firearm lobby National Rifle Association, an organization he has never belonged to. And how are we are expected to take seriously this man who, as governor, introduced a system of obligatory universal medical insurance? A system, indeed, that Obama greatly drew on for inspiration when instituting a similar program nationwide.

Were he still alive, Romney’s father would surely be a little ashamed at his son’s backtracking and disavowals. George Romney, a former big boss in the automobile industry elected three times to the governorship of Michigan, denounced, as a moderate Republican, the Democrats’ “destructive centralism” and the “moral decline” of 1960s America, as does his son today. Yet he was in favor of civil rights for black people, and he introduced new taxes and a minimum wage in his state. He was opposed to Barry Goldwater, standard-bearer of the far-right in the presidential election of 1964, and when he himself took part in the Republican primaries of 1968, he refused to compromise with the Santorums and Palins of his day. Incidentally, he performed disastrously.

His son remembers this. Unlike his father, he won his party’s nomination, but only by denying his true self, his true convictions, by blurring his own image to the point of becoming indecipherable. His rhetorical contortions induce pity at times, for they point to his extreme discomfort within the murky cauldron that is the modern Republican Party.