Home Field

In my next column for my local newspaper I'll be writing about Mitt Romney; how there's a Mitt for everyone. Turns out, his spiritual home town paper wrote the same thing, in endorsing Barack Obama for president. Salt Lake City, that is, saying pretty much exactly what I've said about The Rominee here, many, many times:

Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state. 

But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal, and his oversight of the most successful Winter Games on record, that make him the Beehive State’s favorite adopted son. ...

In short, this is the Mitt Romney we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us.
Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?" 

... Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear...

"Shameless." "Servile." "Shape-shifting." It's as if they read this blog.

For anyone with half a brain, there is simply no reason to vote for Mitt Romney. Other than mindless teabaggers, who don't seem to understand anything, the only justification to do so is to vote against Barack Obama. I'd be okay with that if I thought such a vote was based on what he actually has and hasn't done. The fact is, those with the strongest reality-based arguments against the president are hard-core liberals: his maintaining of Bush's questionable anti-terror policies, his abandoning of climate change legislation, disinterest in gun control, his failure to support single payer health care reform. And more. All this, and still the RWS™ would have you believe he's soft on terror, gonna take your guns, and is a far-left socialist gay Marxist Kenyan Nazi communist anti-capitalist America-hater.

What galls me to my core (unlike Mitt, I have one) is that those who'll be voting for Mitt are doing so despite his lying and pandering, his changing of every position he's ever held. They'll be voting for a guy whose policies are impossible to know, other than the fact that based on what he's said about his budget plans, the math simply doesn't add up. They're voting for not-Obama. And in doing that, it seems most of them are doing it based on a version of Barack Obama that has never existed. Ignoring reality, they mouth the crap they've been fed by their favorite right-wing screamer, believe the latest conspiracy theory, accept the views they ingest without chewing, from Fox "news." I wonder why.

Sure, since Mitt Romney has taken every possible position on every possible issue, there's at least one statement on everything to which supporters can point. But can they honestly say they have a clue which position is the one he'd abide if elected? Based on comments here, before I kiboshed them, his supporters are able to repeat the talking points they've been fed, but have no clue what Obama really has or hasn't done, and are unwilling to specify what it is to which they object, beyond vague generalities.

I don't think newspaper endorsements mean much. When Judy, my wife, ran for the school board here, the paper for which I now write endorsed her opponent. Then, after receiving tons of pushback from people who knew what they were talking about, perhaps for the first time in the history of endorsements, they reversed themselves after actually committing journalism. She won, but I don't think voters paid much attention to the paper either way.

But Salt Lake City? Rejecting their most favored of favorite sons? For the very reasons I've been writing about for months? Allow me to consider that significant. Influential? Probably not: teabaggers are teabaggers, after all. But significant. Add to that the fact that he trails in the state he governed by nearly twenty points! Those who know Mitt Romney best like and trust him the least. Very, very, significant....


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