An Opportunist Candidate.
It’s not subtle, it’s stark. Rarely has a major party candidate for President so positioned himself to ride any and all prevailing currents, regardless of the facts, the way that Mitt Romney has during this presidential run. His is a full spectrum candidacy, a self proclaimed “severe conservative” now waxing poetic on bi-partisan rule; a man who swore fidelity to Grover Norquist on taxes now pledging to end gridlock in Washington by “reaching out” to Democrats.
Not in living memory has any Party in Congress pursued such an obstructionist agenda as have Republicans against the current President. Obama took office with a strong popular mandate during a near catastrophic national economic crisis, while our nation was fighting two foreign wars. His political honeymoon wasn’t short, it was nonexistent. On the same day Obama was inaugurated, Republican leaders secretly gathered in D.C. plotting how to best sabotage his presidency. Not just this or that aspect of it, but how to thwart everything Obama might attempt to accomplish, calculating that the President’s failure was the surest path to a Republican return to power. This isn’t a matter of conjecture; it has all been fully documented. You can ask Paul Ryan, he was there.
By choosing Paul Ryan, a key member of the Republican Congressional leadership, as his Vice Presidential choice Mitt Romney not only wed himself to Ryan’s economic budget, but to Congressional Republican obstructionism as well. While the Republican House of Representatives kept busy holding dozens of symbolic votes to repeal Obamacare, Republicans in the Senate easily smashed all previous records for use of the filibuster to block Obama’s agenda.
Romney’s current homage to the spirit of bi-partisanship is just the latest of his efforts to reap the benefits of voter dissatisfaction caused by Republican Party actions, and as such it is illustrative of his opportunistic nature. It is hardly the most significant example though. For that just look to the economy: The current misleading ads that Romney is airing regarding Jeep moving production to China captures his methodology in a Mitt shell. Chrysler’s Jeep division actually just invested over 1.7 billion dollars to expand U.S. production, with 1,000 new jobs slated for Toledo Ohio and another 1,000 workers already added producing new Jeeps in Detroit.
Romney conveniently leaves all that out with his latest disinformation campaign, focusing instead on the fact that Jeep is increasing production in China also, to keep up with rising demand there.. Romney used one piece of data pointing to an international economic recovery, which is beneficial to Americans,, and twisted it around to play to voter fears about outsourcing American jobs to China. This coming from the man who founded Bain Capital which pioneered the actual outsourcing of American jobs to China.
Outsourcing American jobs was beneficial to Mitt Romney then, but blaming it on the President is politically expedient for Romney now, even while he continues to reap political rewards from outsourcing today.. How you might ask? Simple; just look at Mitt Romney’s political campaign contributions (to the extent that today’s Republican Supreme Court’s bastardized campaign contribution laws allow you to anyway). The same corporate order that reaped huge profits from the outsourcing American jobs is the one financing Mitt Romney today. They now which side their bread is buttered.
But controversy over one misleading Romney campaign ad barely hints at the full opportunistic nature of his entire Presidential campaign. Romney used a national Presidential debate to warn the American people that:
"If you re-elect President Obama, you know what you’re going to get. You're going to get a repeat of the last four years”.
In so doing either Romney was predicting another catastrophic global financial system meltdown, or he was expecting the electorate to develop amnesia. Count on it being the latter. The Great Recession, the greatest international economic crisis in over 80 years, happened on the last Republican watch, and was aided and abetted by Republican economic and regulatory policies virtually indistinguishable from the ones that Mitt Romney now champions. But America’s suffering produced a political opportunity for Mitt Romney.
Yes, he says, it’s been a rough four years, but don’t dwell on why it happened. Instead blame it on the man who inherited the crisis from day one, faced it to a stand still, and then turned the tide toward a full recovery with precious little help from Republicans, and constant gale force opposition from the Congressional G.O.P. leadership. Almost all current economic indicators now are looking up, but Mitt Romney will never acknowledge that while another man remains President. Right on cue, for now all good news for America stays stubbornly “disappointing”.
Which is only what should be expected from a presidential candidate whose much self proclaimed business success was, literally, firmly rooted in opportunism. Bain capital didn’t make products, they made “strategic investments”, and the strategy employed was always the same, to take advantage of whatever opportunity presented itself, to advance the financial interests of the principals. If that meant taking control of an undervalued asset to expand on and profit from, fine. If that meant bleeding another asset dry, bankrupting it, shedding “liabilities” like worker pension funds, and then dismantling it for parts, that too was fine. So long as Mitt Romney and his fellow travelers profited from the deed., it made no difference. Money could be made betting against America just as easily as it could by betting on it.
Mitt Romney can changes his positions on issues weekly, and the public tone he takes hourly, but one thing does not change. He stays an opportunist.
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