Some had bet on Mitt Romney as the only adult in the room, but this has turned out to be untrue. All we see is hubrus and ambition and a man willing to say anything to win the brass ring. John Huntsman possesses the gravitas Romney lacks in so many areas, but his candidacy is going nowhere. It should be added that both Romney, Huntsman, and Gingrich repeat the same false claims about Barack Obama's economic policies, and all three are clearly intelligent enough to know better. In the former Speaker's case, one has to wonder about intellectual honesty.
Romney is taking on the aspect of inevitability but neither the mainstream press nor his opponents are adequately vetting him. Unchallenged by an energetic press and opponents to offer powerful criticisms, the man has been able to diet on the pablum of stock and simplistic talking points. The process should be forcing a potential president to learn more and refine knowledge in many areas. With Romney there are no signs of growth and a great deal of evidence that he will stoop to any stupidity to win votes. He has travelled a great distance in trying to win the support of the extremists in his party, the all too numerous Tea Baggers. It seems so craven, but the fact that one in four Americans have favorable views of these people is weighing on his mind.
Romney has become reckless with facts and shows none of the seriousness one would expect from a potential President of the United States. In foreign affairs, he shows neither understanding nor gravitas. He has been running for presiedent for six years, but like Sarah Palin, he appears to have only very simplistic notions about foreign policy. Here, he is in the league of Donald Trump, who seems to repeat the wisdom he picked up in a golf club locker room. Romney has promised to rubber stamp whatever Israel wants in the Middle East, and he has all but promised a trade war with China.
Recently, Romney insisted that Obama threw Israel under the bus. He does not explain what that means. The fact is that that the administration has been forced by Congress and the Israeli political machine here to surrender on the matter of settlements and to even promise to veto Palestinian statehood—a move that will do even more damage to the US in the Arab and Islamic worlds. There is no substance to his claim, but no one asks him to explain himself.
The only thing one can be certain of is that this man wants desperately to be president. Romney has reversed himself on many positions to please the far right. How can they believe his claims to be anti-choice when he was a pro-choice Republican for so long? Recently, Mitt Romney has gone from distancing himself from RomneyCare in Massachusetts to praising and defending it.
His opponents gently attack him on this front, but they avoid doing real damage—perhaps because he is becoming the inevitable nominee. Rick Perry broached the subject but lost his nerve and footing, perhaps because he was fearful of the criticism he would get if he drew blood here.
Of course, it is hard to take the Republican “debates” seriously. They handle each other with kid gloves and all sing from the same hymnal. The all-too-numerous debates are essentially Republican infomercials in which eight people compete in denouncing Barack Obama and repeat the same misinformation, which the moderators fail to question. CNN has sponsored so many of them that one must question the network's jourbalistic ethics.
Romney endlessly points to his success in the private sector, which should be an invitation for people to take a close look at what he actually did in the business world. Republican opponents and the media do not talk about how Romney closed factories in the United States and exported jobs. He was in the business of leveraged take-overs. He would take over a firm by loading it with debt. Then it was often necessary to sell off some assets. Often the profess left the firms weak, burdened with debt, and unable to compete.
Like the other Republican presidential contenders, Romney insists that Obama 2009 jobs bill created no jobs, and he claims that the present situation is all Obama's doing. Some of Romney's colleagues may be too dim to realize that these talking points are dishonest, but Romney has had enough training to know that this is economic nonsense.
Romney is also sharp enough to know that all of these distorted claims go a long way toward damaging public confidence, which is the key ingredient in economic recovery. He and other Republicans talk down the economy. Like the Republicans in Congress he is working to depress confidence so that growth will be frustrated and he and his party will benefit in November, 2012. He and his colleagues are safe in pursuing this course.
Romney, the cynical and power-hungry Eric Cantor, and others peddle the myth that cutting spending and firing people will bring about recovery. This approach only has some value when a nation is facing raging inflation. Our problem mow is the threat of deflation, which is why the Fed has had QE1 and QE2 and now the so-called “twist.” Cantor and Romney are both intelligent men and must know that cutting spending cuts gross ability to consume on goods and services. In the present circumstances, the poloicy will take 2 or 3% off the GDP, swell the unemployment lines, and perhaps create another recession.
Almost no one in the media will raise the possibility that blocking job creation and talking down the economy is a winning political strategy. It clearly is and worked in 2010. The Democrats remain in a state of shock after the nation voted to return to the very policies that nearly wrecked out economy in 2007-and 2008. Most of them seem afraid to say much of anything.
It is hard for the mainstream media to act as fact checkers and truth sayers with respect to all these political fantasies. They are so deeply believed by so many people and become parts of their identities. Any truth-telling can be seen as partisanship, so the MSM has had to treat each fantasy as a position that is just as legitimate as a view rooted in facts and reality. The problem is that so many citizens are information-challenged, and many others deeply believe all sorts of nonsense.
Romney nororious for his flip-flopping, but the press makes little of it. Remember what the scribes did when John Kerry mad one serious slip of the tongue. Still the mainstream Republicans cling to his candidacy because he alone seems to have a very good chance of unseating Barack Obama. The Economist rightly describes him as “a centrist who everyone knows is only masquerading as a conservative.” There is no way of knowing what he will do as president. He has given so many hostages to the Tea Party that it will probably be impossible for him to come back to the center if elected. When it becomes clear to most that the “cut to grow” just makes things worse, he may have no choice but to go after very deep cuts in entitlements just to make up for the great loss of of income tax and FICA revenue that disappears in bad times.