Turning A Corner....

Or perhaps going around the bend? The Corner brings us this fantabulous display of... should we call it "McCain Derangement Syndrome"?

In November, we'll be sending out our most liberal, least trustworthy candidate vs. to take on Hillary Clinton — perhaps not more liberal than Barack Obama, but certainly far less trustworthy.

This is Michael Graham's response to McCain's defeat of Romney?

It Was Nice To Meet You Too, And Don't Let The Door Hit You In The....

Was this the introduction we've been waiting for?

Don't Be Argumentative With The Candidate.

If so....

Will The Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up

Having won Michigan, I believe it is time for Mitt Romney "to introduce the public to the real Mitt Romney". (I'm not expecting that he'll describe himself as "a man of wealth and taste," although I would be amused.)

Free Ad Space For Romney?

Today the New York Times offers an editorial by Dean Barnett, who speaks about how unfair it is to depict Romney as a flip-flopper, and how his wonderful political skills put him head-and-shoulders above every other candidate. Oops - wrong link. I somehow got today's column confused with something Barnett wrote a year ago. That was then:

THE OFT-REPEATED CHARGE AGAINST MITT ROMNEY IS THAT HE’S A FLIP-FLOPPER and an opportunist. As someone who knows him and who is familiar with his character, it annoys me no end to see Romney’s detractors so relentlessly peddle such an inaccurate caricature. ...

The fact is, Mitt Romney will have enough money and enough political skill to define himself when the time is right. The fact that the hostile factions of the press will no longer be relevant when that time comes is a wonderful bonus.

This is now:

I often marvel at how the public perception of Mr. Romney differs so radically from the man I know. The blame for this lies in the campaign he has run.

Early in the presidential race, Mr. Romney perceived a tactical advantage in becoming the campaign’s social conservative. Religious conservatives and other Republicans with socially conservative views found the two early front-runners, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, unacceptable. As someone who shares the beliefs of social conservatives, Mr. Romney saw an opportunity that he could exploit. He made social issues the heart of his candidacy.

This tack rang false with the public because it was false. The problem wasn’t so much the perception of widespread “flip-flopping” on issues like abortion. The public allows its politicians a measure of flexibility. But the public correctly sensed something disingenuous about Mr. Romney’s campaign.

While Barnett now concedes that Romney was running "a campaign that tried to exploit wedge issues rather than focus on the issues that in truth most interested the candidate", he wants to have it both ways. He insists that "Mr. Romney cares passionately about social issues". Not too many people are perceived as phonies when they speak about their passions. With all due respect to the "measure of flexibility" the public may offer a political candidate, Romney's diametric changes of heart on pretty much every major social issue should be explained by more than what comes across to me as "That was then, this is now."

I know few voters will believe this, but Mitt Romney wants to be president out of a sense of duty. He feels our government needs someone with his managerial skills.

Ah yes... he sees our desperate need for an "MBA President".

He also feels that to fight the long war facing us, we need an intellectually curious president who’s willing to learn about an unfamiliar foe and who will fight resolutely to defeat that foe.

I'm sorry... I guess that would be an intellectually curious MBA President.

I love this part:

This past weekend, Romney-distrusting portions of the conservative blogosphere kicked up a fuss over seven words Mr. Romney said to volunteers who were dialing for dollars at a fund-raising event last week: “Make all the promises you have to.”

Without knowing the context, it’s impossible to know precisely what Mr. Romney meant.

Mr. Barnett - Mitt Romney appears to be your friend. You've known him for years. You're one of his biggest supporters. You're defending him in the New York Times.... Did it occur to you to pick up a phone and ask him what he meant?

But for voters who have learned to distrust Mr. Romney, the comment probably sounded a lot like, “Tell whatever lies are necessary.”

The Mitt Romney I know would never say such a thing. But the Mitt Romney I know is sadly unrecognizable to today’s voters.

If I were defending a candidate in a similar context and truly didn't know what he meant, I would probably suggest that it was "wry humor" - where else can you go with a comment like that? Isn't Barnett's "defense" starting to sound a bit like, "Governor, I served with Mitt Romney, I knew Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney was a friend of mine. Governor, you are no Mitt Romney"?

I will concede this - the public perception of Mitt Romney is a caricature. Some aspects of a caricature are inevitably unfair or grossly exaggerated. The problem for Romney, as Barnett now concedes, is that the caricature was built upon a foundation that is true, and thus it sticks and resonates with voters.

A year ago Mr. Barnett opined,

When the press is all punched out, Romney will have $100 million and his own formidable political skills available to make his rebuttal. ... The fact is, Mitt Romney will have enough money and enough political skill to define himself when the time is right.

Today,

I hope Mr. Romney does well enough in Michigan today that he gets the opportunity to introduce the public to the real Mitt Romney.

Not that I want to second-guess his campaign, but perhaps the time for Mr. Romney to introduce himself was yesterday. Or perhaps even earlier.

The Dangerous Religiosity of Romney

What a peculiar day for the New York Times editorial and op/ed pages. First we have a reaction to Mitt Romney's "Religion in the Public Square" speech:

Mr. Romney spoke with an evident passion about the hunger for religious freedom that defined the birth of the nation. He said several times that his faith informs his life, but he would not impose it on the Oval Office.

Still, there was no escaping the reality of the moment. Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

In examining Romney's speech, David Brooks got it right:

[Romney] insisted that the faithful should stick stubbornly to their religions, as he himself sticks to the faith of his fathers. He insisted that God-talk should remain a vibrant force in the public square and that judges should be guided by the foundations of their faith. He lamented the faithlessness of Europe and linked the pro-life movement to abolition and civil rights, just as evangelicals do.

* * *

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.

* * *

In Romney’s account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

Another nearby column, by atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, illustrates the mendacity of Romney's position. Reacting to some (to Western eyes) bizarre and excessive sentences issued against women under the auspices of Shar'ia law, Ali asks,

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Romney, apparently, would have two responses to Ali:

First, she's an atheist, so who cares what she has to say. ("Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.")

Second, judges should be guided by the foundations of their faith. ("Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests.")

How dare you question a judge who applies the letter of the law, as guided by his faith, in advance of your "religion of secularism"?

I expect that if Romney were confronted with this example, he might respond along the lines of, "Islam? Oh, that's different." I'm sure he'd dress up his answer, but I suspect that at it's heart it would boil down to "that's different" - after all, as Brooks pointed out, the only reasonable interpretation of this speech is that he's pandering to a faction of religious conservatives, and they won't be in the least offended by the idea that their religious beliefs should be followed to the letter while those of other religions "are different." If not, I will reconsider my impression that his speech is shameless pandering, but I'm not holding my breath.

Ultimately, that's probably going to keep this speech from having any appreciable impact in Romney's standing in the polls. To much of his target audience, it seems that Mormonism is no closer to Christianity than is Islam.

"Because They'll Run Government Like It's A Business"

Not that I want to beat up on David Brooks yet again, but he just doesn't stop....

The other flash I saw was at a Romney event at the Lincoln Financial Group in Concord. Romney had slipped away from the policy chunks of his stump speech and was talking about his success in business and in running the Olympics. He was talking about how you assemble a team of people with complementary skills. How you use data and analysis to replace opinion. How you set benchmarks and how often you should perform self-evaluation.

It wasn’t impassioned or angry (he doesn’t do anger). But it was Romney losing himself in something he really cares about, and it opened up a vista of how government might operate.

I am far from the first to observe that while Romney is happy to talk himself up as a great businessman, venture capitalist, near-omnipotent being, etc., he actually does have experience which seems directly relevant to how he would operate if he were in charge of a unit of government. Yes, folks, although he seems to have blacked out that portion of his résumé, Romney actually was Governor of Massachusetts. We don't need to look at abstract theories of what he might do, because we can look at his actual track record.

Brooks deems the Republicans as having an "Uphill Struggle", commenting on this and another "flash" in which John McCain expressed frustration that his party isn't deemed credible - "Nobody trusts us to do what we say we’re going to do!".

The McCain and Romney flashes weren’t about policy. They weren’t part of the normal Republican vs. Democratic dynamic. They were about leadership, honor and intelligence. If Republicans are going to have a chance, it’ll be because, by focusing on the state of American politics, they reshape the battleground under everyone’s feet.

To the extent that the McCain "flash" is about intelligence, it is perhaps the type of intelligence that Lincoln recognized. Bush ran on a platform claiming he "trusted" the American voters, yet his every action since has been illustrative of deep distrust of the voters. Much of his conduct in office, and that of his Vice President and advisors, has been contemptuous of the public's right to honest answers from government officials about even the most mundane of government matters. As for running government like a business? Some joke that Bush failed in every business venture in which he participated, save for his exceptionally profitable minor investment in the Texas Rangers, so perhaps taken literally he did run government in the same manner he would have run a business.

To pretend in the manner of Brooks that Romney's presentation shows that he "cares about" issues of organizational efficiency - an implicit argument that he'll "run government like a business" - without directly relating that claim to Romney's actual actions as Governor of Massachusetts, reflects either an astounding ignorance that Romney has been a governor or dishonesty.

The "flashes" were about leadership - the lack of it in the Republican Party and Bush White House. The "flashes" were about honor - again, the lack of it in the Republican Party and Bush White House. And the flashes were about intelligence - in McCain's case, a recognition of the consequence of trying to fool all of the people all of the time, and in the case of Romney and Brooks, the persistent belief that it remains possible.

"Did I Mention That He Walks On Water?"

Robert Moffitt of the Heritage Foundation praises the wondrous Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts who single-handedly brought health insurance to the masses. (Next up for delivery, fish and loaves.) Okay, we get it... he's running for President.