Down to one
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
So it’s Romney.
Yes, the debates between the Republican presidential contenders left in the race – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Huntsman – are still taking place at a dizzying pace. In part as a result of the debates, but for other reasons as well, it has become increasingly clear that, while Romney is not well liked by the multitude of extremists in the GOP, he is the only one that looks like he would have a chance to beat Barack Obama. And beating Obama is the top priority of all sectors of the GOP.
The contest for the Republican nomination, aside from being a circus that gave the late-night comedians more material than they could use, has been like a marathon race in which one runner is always at the head of the pack or near it, enduring many challengers that catch up with him or briefly take the lead only to fall back out of contention.
Romney critics say that 75 percent of Republicans don’t want him as their party’s nominee. Indeed, whether you look at the polls or the Iowa caucus, Romney has never been able to surpass a ceiling of about 25 percent of the Republican electorate. There is no mystery as to the reason. Romney, during his political career, has been in nearly as many positions as are described in the Kama Sutra, whether you are talking about gay rights, abortion, or health care. His reinvention as a hard-core rightist has obviously failed to convince many Republican voters who fear there is a hidden moderate streak in Romney while others see in his flip-flopping a character flaw: opportunism.
So how has Romney become the odds-on favorite to take-on Barack Obama? Money obviously helped. Romney has much more of it than other candidates. He can afford an organization and obviously knows how to build one, unlike all the other candidates with the partial exception of Ron Paul. He can pay for vicious television ads against his opponents, as he did in Iowa to destroy Newt Gingrich.
Unlike Cain and Gingrich, Romney has no skeletons in his closet, at least not sexual ones, although the things he did as a businessman hurt many more people than Cain, Gingrich, and all the other Republicans and Democrats caught with their pants down combined. But that doesn’t count for the Republican electorate, the religious right or even to the mass media. And Romney is not only richer but more handsome than any of the other candidates, and it is also claimed that he has a presidential bearing.
Romney has also benefitted from the dismal quality of the other candidates, who have: put forth crazy tax schemes or even vowed to shut down the IRS; shown ignorance of basic facts about American history and institutions; have not even been able to identify entire government departments they plan to eliminate; and have shown gross ignorance about foreign policy. And that’s the short list.
Yet there is still the fact of that 75 percent of Republicans who can’t stomach Mitt Romney, finding him not only ideologically unreliable but also insincere, lacking in passion, robotic. So now there is a new great white hope for such voters. Enter Rick Santorum. He virtually tied Romney in Iowa and is hoping to trounce him in the upcoming South Carolina primary.
Santorum is the kind of conservative Catholic that makes the last two Popes sound like radical reformers. He favors ideas such as a personhood amendment, which would be a backdoor way to ban an unknown but significant number of contraception techniques. His extreme conservatism on such “social issues” is one of the reasons that he lost his U.S. Senate seat representing Pennsylvania. Is this American ayatollah ready to win a general election? Many Republicans are bound to conclude soon enough that nominating Santorum would be an excellent belated Christmas gift for the president.
That leaves the chameleonic Romney, who boasts of his business background to portray himself as a non-politician and someone who knows how to create jobs. The claim is a lie through and through, as many reporters have noted. The latest zinger about the consequences of Romney’s much-touted work for the firm Bain Capital comes from no ordinary journalist; it comes from Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and a Princeton economist with a Nobel Prize to his credit:
“The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.
“At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is. The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.
“When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized – or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt – total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.”
Krugman concludes that Romney’s boasts about being a job creator are outright dishonest, and his claim that Obama has been a job destroyer is “deeply misleading.
What, then, should we expect from a Romney presidency, aside from the mendacity George W. Bush accustomed us to and that Romney has already shown on the campaign trail? George W. Bush on steroids. Policies that would create even more economic inequality, shrink the middle class even more, and maybe even trigger a world economic crisis.
On foreign policy, Romney has done some serious saber-rattling on Iran; even Bush didn’t go there. And he found the president’s actions on Libya insufficiently forceful. It’s a small miracle he didn’t criticize Obama for not having U.S. forces torture Osama Bin Laden before killing him.
Barack Obama surely has disappointed many a progressive, including this one. But when the real campaign comes along, we need to ask ourselves whether we would rather have Mitt Romney, the ruthless capitalist straight from central casting, occupying the White House instead.
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