The day before the day before Black Friday, my brother went shopping and came home with a 50-inch HD TV for $400. He was not alone in getting in early on the holiday spirit. After they spent the day being thankful, millions of Americans spent the night rushing to stores to join the buying frenzy. Black Friday activity -- or Black Wednesday or Black Thursday – dwarfed that of the Occupy movement. Even in a time of great struggle, Corporate America finds ways to give false comfort to millions of Americans, providing cheaper goods -- like my brother’s $400 TV -- if that is what is required to keep the money flowing in.
I mention all of this because if Mitt Romney ends up as the Republican nominee, we will in some ways be running in 2012 against the force of Black Friday. Mitt Romney has done an excellent job at positioning himself for the general election simply by being corporate. In short, he personifies the corporate worldview.
This is why I am greatly worried about attacking Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. There is no doubt that the charges of being a flip-flopper did great damage to John Kerry. But upon reflection we should note why it was so successful. John Kerry is a dove who in 2004 tried to act like a hawk. The Bush people were able to convince the public that Kerry, in taking hawkish positions, was violating his own core principles and worse, playing politics with life and death decisions. This is less likely to be a successful tact against Romney. When you get to the bottom of his public life, Mitt Romney, like all corporations, doesn’t have core principles. We are not talking about the purity of the free market, we are talking about the ability of corporate leaders and corporate power to shift and be whatever we want it, or need it, to be. Corporations are for free markets when that is good for them, and subsidies and loopholes when that is good for them. They oppose civil rights, until it is time to support them. They do business with the Germans in the 1930s and help our war machine in the 1940s. This sometimes puts corporations ahead of the curve, such as when they offered benefits to same-sex partners before governments or states did. Romney’s movement on social issues or the health-mandate, or really all of his flip-flops, actually feeds into his strength -- Mitt will do whatever it takes to make America great. That is his principle more than any other.
This basic corporate worldview helped make America the richest and most powerful country on the face of the earth. Americans therefore are not as critical of corporate power and influence as perhaps we should be. Consider Wal-mart and the damage it has done to small business, its abysmal record on labor relationships and gender discrimination, its made-in-China goods. Yet, the company still has incredibly high favorabilities among Americans. With Mitt Romney what you get is someone focused like a laser beam on the idea that America is a company and Obama is a failing CEO. Even his foreign policy attacks make the same pitch. Mitt Romney says: Obama doesn’t appreciate how great our company is; Obama isn’t working; believe in America. The great challenge for Democrats, and Obama in particular, is that for the most part, we have accepted much of the corporate worldview, and are stuck with advocating based upon small additions and slight changes. We have too readily admitted that government is in the way, and have tinkered, when letting the corporate grown ups be in charge would seemingly work better. On the facts of course, this is absolute and total hokum, but it is a clear message that is believable and hard to attack. The flip-flopper charge doesn’t do it. Countering this perspective requires a larger narrative than anyone seems to be coming up with. Without a rhetorical alternative to the corporate view, Romney can ride the power of black Friday all the way to the White House.