We're all sick of looking at Mitt Romney, so instead here's a CPAC panel where they
pretend to be crabby, pissed off versions of the founding fathers. (
Dave Weigel)
So, Mitt Romney spoke at CPAC today. He didn't have to flee the stage afterwards, so I think it went well enough.
Let's do this thing:
The Republican presidential hopeful, ahead in the delegate race but smarting from losses on Tuesday in three state contests, described himself as a "severely conservative Republican governor" and a businessman whose principles were rooted in his family and his faith.
The "severely conservative" line is, I expect, the takeaway moment from the speech. It wasn't in the
drafted version, which means that during the speech, somewhere in the recesses of Mitt Romney's mind, he decided he needed to come up with a new adjective describing just how gosh-darn conservative he was, something this crowd would like, and the search algorithm came back with "severely." So that's what he went with.
Severely conservative!
(Continue reading below the fold)
Remember George W. Bush? You do? Ha, you must not be at CPAC. But George W. Bush came into office promising compassionate conservativism. As it turns out, it wasn't very compassionate in practice. Oh, and it also was a car wreck. Nobody wants to hear that crap anymore. The conservative crowd does not want to hear about compassionate conservatism, they want to hear, in 2012, about severe conservatism. Sadistic, leather-bound, whip-wielding conservatism is what they want. Rick Santorum can give them that, but Mitt Romney has never been "severely" anything in his life, except perhaps for "severely" rich or "severely" out of touch.
"Severe" is something you associate with a bad illness—you can have a "severe" rash, or a "severe" case of intestinal distress. "Severe" is the Catholic nun you had in Sunday School who never quite got the message that clubbing the children with things was no longer part of God's Great Plan. There are "severe" recessions, but there are never any "severe" recoveries. "Severe" is bad.
So you can see why it's so popular.
There were a few other choice bits of Mitt's speech. CPAC is a place that requires the most conservative rhetoric you can muster, and where the dog whistles have to be very, very loud (after all, you're competing with panels stocked with actual freaking white supremacists). So Mitt's task was to feed them whatever scraps he could:
"I know this president will never get it, but we conservatives aren’t just proud to cling to our guns and to our religion. We are also proud to cling to our Constitution," he said.
I would be happy if they read the instruction manuals for any of the three.
By working to bar out-of-state couples from flooding the state after the ruling, Romney said he "prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage."
I'm not sure Massachusetts could be the Las Vegas of anything, frankly. The state doesn't really do that sort of loud, drunken aggression—well they do, but there's less neon involved. You want to be the Las Vegas of something, the first step is lots of neon, and the second step is to build yourself halfassed versions of world landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or what the pyramids would have looked like if Donald Trump had been an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.
Then maybe you can be the Las Vegas of something.
If elected, Romney said he would "reverse every single Obama regulation that attacks our religious liberty and threatens innocent life."
Including the ones that he supported only a few years beforehand, because that's what you do when you're running for president. It helps if you just pretend everybody in the room has the memory of a fruit fly. Or the lifespan of a fruit fly, which they probably would if conservatives rolled back every regulation that they consider an attack on their religion, freedom, or general right for corporate entities to make a buck.
The full text (minus a "severe" or two) is on Romney's website, if you care. In truth, nobody does.