In 2012, Jennifer Rubin supported Mitt Romney for president, so much so that Politico suggested she should be labelled Romney’s spokesperson. When he was elected senator in 2018, she still had high hopes for him. No more. The sky has well and truly fallen:
Sorry, Mitt Romney. Denial is not an equal-opportunity offense.
Alas, Romney engages in his own brand of disappointing rhetoric by equating right-wing denial on the 2020 election and climate change (he could have added covid-19 and gun violence) with Democrats’ supposed denial about the debt and illegal immigration. Aside from the fact that deficits are projected to fall substantially in 2022 and Democrats have repeatedly offered comprehensive immigration reform, including border security measures, Romney’s lamentation of both parties smacks of, well, denialism.
Disenchantment complete.
Romney would do well to acknowledge that the primary threat to democracy and the belief in objective reality is his own party. To the extent he advocates its return to power and refuses to denounce its most insidious elements, he contributes to the problem. Like too many in the mainstream media, his reflexive retreat to moral equivalence winds up normalizing his own party, thereby disguising its authoritarian impulses.
Well, perhaps she is not completely disenchanted. She holds out some hope that Romney might see the light:
Romney, instead of passively hoping for “a president who can rise above the din to unite us behind the truth,” can help lead a movement that deprives the GOP of supporters who see no alternative to the status quo.
She sees in Romney’s essay in The Atlantic the possibility that he may be moving away from the “decrepit” Republican party. After all, his seat is safe and he would pay little if any political price for doing the right thing. So this morning’s op-ed might be a goad more than a dismissal.
If so, I don’t think it will work. Romney is too wedded to the expedient. What just might work is appealing to Romney’s Mormonism — both the Catholic fanatics and the fundamentalist fanatics hate the Mormons, and if they get (even more) power, Romney’s own faith will be in danger.