Alex Pareene, Salon: George Romney: Braver than Mitt

[highplainsdem]

This is a brilliant piece explaining not just how much braver George Romney was than Mitt, but also the political setbacks in his father's career that probably led to Mitt's deliberate vagueness and apparent lack of belief in anything. Pareene refers not just to George Romney's comment that he'd been "brainwashed" -- which destroyed his campaign for the presidency, when he probably had the best chance of beating Nixon for the Republican nomination -- but to George Romney's liberal goal of racial integration when he ran HUD being undercut by Nixon, until Romney finally resigned and told a friend, "I don’t know what the president believes in. Maybe he doesn’t believe in anything." So Mitt, at an impressionable age, would have "noticed that his father, a dedicated public servant with a passion for social justice, lost the nation’s top job to a notoriously unprincipled paranoiac whose main qualification for the presidency was an unchecked willingness to do literally anything to reach it. The guy who didn’t believe in anything won."

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/26/george_romney_braver_than_mitt/singleton/

What would the George Romney who walked out on the convention that nominated Barry Goldwater — and who then sent Goldwater a letter accusing him of racism — say about Mitt Romney’s desperate machinations to win the favor of a party now run by Goldwater’s spiritual heirs?

The idea that anti-war, pro-integration upper-Midwest Republican George Romney would even be a Republican in 2012 is preposterous. The man who was too liberal for the Nixon administration would find no room in today’s GOP, where what passes for “moderate” is acknowledging the existence of evolution. (Until his 1994 run, Mitt Romney himself was a registered independent who voted for Democratic Sen. Paul Tsongas.)

Mexican-born George Romney would cringe to see his son promise to veto legislation offering a (still challenging) path to citizenship for people who illegally entered the country as children and went on to graduate from college or serve in the military. The George Romney who fought his own church on civil rights legislation would be appalled to see Mitt Romney accept the endorsement of and make campaign appearances with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, whose life’s work is crafting legislation designed to make it easier for law enforcement to racially profile Latinos and harass and detain suspected “illegals.” Anti-war George Romney would surely have some qualms with Mitt’s plan to “double Guantanamo.” Hell, George Romney even released 12 years’ worth of his tax returns when a magazine asked him for his most recent one. The full 1040s were made available to the press — at the time, an unprecedented move by a presidential candidates. Mitt Romney, predictably, ignored calls to make public his own tax returns for as long as he could, before releasing only his most recent return.

Whether and where the Romneys differ on specific matters of policy is up for debate and largely a matter for speculation. But there’s no denying that they are very different kinds of politicians. One Romney was on the wrong side of an intraparty war and on the right side of history. He may have been grandstanding and self-righteous — a man with, in the cynical appraisal of the editors of the New Republic in 1964, “an oversimplified, horse-opera sense of morality” — but he was dedicated to his ideals. The other Romney has no obvious ideals, or at least no permanent ones.

[sofa king]

1. He learned a lot more from Nixon than from his Mexican father.

He's a "Nixican."