So this morning the Washington Post runs a story detailing what kind of a jerk Mitt Romney was in high school. This is a surprise, right? A high school kid being a jerk. This has never ever happened before. Why, you might well ask, would the Washington Post devote valuable time and space to writing about this event? And why, you might well follow up, is this worth posting about when everyone should be talking about the environment? The answer is easy. It builds a meme and it translates Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage from a liability into a perceived strength. If you missed this is the graf that has the left exercised: BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled. A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. Of course the story gets much sadder with Romney presumably responsible for the guy’s failed life and death from cancer. He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. After an extreme fit of temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan. Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq. His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December. He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.” There are unanswered questions here, like what this has to do with anything, how a high school dropout bummed around Europe taking dressage lessons and, my favorite, how getting an “embalmer’s license” led to a culinary career? But the Post doesn’t address them. The main source for this vignette is a former classmate of Romney’s named Stu White. According to the Washington Post: “I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.” But ABC News reports “White was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.” From this it is pretty clear that the Lauber incident did not unfold in the way the Washington Post describes, if, indeed, it happened at all. ( h/t to the Daily Caller ) Why this and why now? As we’ve mentioned before this is all part of a process to brand Romney as a vicious, thoughtless, out-of-touch rich guy. It is really Obama’s only hope as he can’t possibly win if he runs on his objective accomplishments. This story has obviously been in the works for a while but the news value of it is questionable. It is the basic oppo dump material that the Washington Post obediently churns out on Republicans. As Major Garrett reports in National Journal , the whole Biden-evolving postion idea was a scam to allow Obama to support gay marriage: Did Obama sacrifice huge swaths of swing voters? Probably not. The polls have shifted to net favorable on the question of same-sex marriage and independents are unlikely to punish Obama for a policy position consistent with everything else he’s done on gay issues. Social conservatives will, of course, be aggrieved. But they were already. Also, consider this on the gay-marriage pronouncements: Biden was first, Obama second. That the two happily reversed the common order of things ought to tell you something about their relationship (solid), their understanding of tactics (advanced), and how they can play Washington’s chattering class for fools (easily). But suddenly, the nothingburger story developed by the Post had a hook. In fact it had a hook that could effectively frame the entire story to fit into the overarching Obama campaign. Obama was against gay marriage, but then he met parents of friends of his daughters who were gay and the subject was discussed at family dinners and he changed his mind. Another “gutsy call” in which he took an unpopular position after carefully weighing everything, and, of course, consulting his deeply held Christian faith. Romney, on the other hand, when he went to an elite private school for elite rich kids relentlessly bullied a kid who was gay and continues his bullying and homophobia to this day by not supporting homosexual marriage. It all fit. And the Post was able to make good on its investment. The ABC story makes it clear that there are other Romney classmates lining up to dish on him, presumably after they sign with a literary agent: One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s – who refused to be identified by name – said there are “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook who have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as “evil” and “like Lord of the Flies.” The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember it. “It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?” the former classmate said.
Having listed a group of long-shots for Mitt Romney to consider as his running mate, we hereby continue a multi-column analysis of who Romney should pick, and how, and why. This column will examine those last two questions — the “how” and the “why.” First, let it be understood just how important it is that the vice-presidential candidate be qualified and prepared to be president on Day One of the administration. This isn’t just a pro forma, substance-less requirement; it’s crucial. Being president is an incredibly difficult job — or, at least, doing a reasonably decent job as president is very, very hard. It’s far more than mere instinct or mere belief in the right principles. High-level politics, like the top rungs in just about any other field, requires a highly developed skill set and a deep reservoir of knowledge of policy, history, personnel, and procedural rules, among other things. It is absurd to the point of stupidity to think that high-level experience doesn’t matter. It is absurd to the point of stupidity to think that familiarity with the ways of Washington is completely unimportant. And it shows a lack of understanding of both history and of human nature to think that just a year or two as a conservative reformer is an indicator that a potential candidate really will be a conservative reformer over the long haul. If Mitt Romney is inaugurated on January 20 but, Lord forbid, dies of a heart attack on January 21, will his vice president be ready to assume the office? Here’s my rule: Everybody without at least two full years in a relevant position should be ruled out. Period. The political graveyard is littered with the bodies of people who looked for two full years to be hugely successful reformers, only to lose either their political touch, their moral compass, or their commitment to political principle, once the bad-old-gang who had been temporarily vanquished by the would-be reformer has had a chance to regroup, re-plan, reload, and counter-attack. Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer is a case in point: a good man and decent governor who bombed badly in his re-election campaign and in every subsequent run for office. Another was former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, being touted as the nation’s best governor one year and effectively in oblivion the next. Just about anybody with moderate political skills can look good during a honeymoon period in office; what really tests the mettle is how one behaves, and fares, once the honeymoon has worn off. (Christ Christie fans: Take note.) Remember, too, that the two-year rule is a bare minimum, not an automatic qualifier. Nearly four years as governor of a homogenous state like Idaho might be far less relevant to the presidency than two full years as speaker of the state House in, say, Michigan — not that the latter would necessarily be a qualifier, either, but just that it might require better political skills and an admirably thicker political skin. The question then becomes, what experience is indeed valuable? Other than my hard-and-fast two-year bare minimum, what are the criteria? Alas, it’s a sliding scale, requiring a somewhat subjective analysis rather than arithmetical precision. But common sense, combined with experienced understanding of politics, should make this subjective task more clear than opaque. One thing to reject is the current vogue that insists there is some sort of magic in executive experience, combined with a denigration of a legislative background. We should also reject the “Washington is bad, elsewhere is good” school of thought. Case in point for both: Jimmy Carter. Governor, business executive, Navy officer. Never in Washington. Yet utterly inept. Was Bill Clinton any more adept at presidential leadership in his first few years because he had been governor for 12 years? No; in fact, the early years of his presidency were an utter amateur hour. Harry Truman, on the other hand, assumed the presidency just a few months after leaving his perch in the Senate — the legislative arena where, by virtue of chairing a key committee that provided essential oversight of military procurement during World War II, he developed highly valuable knowledge and experience. Yet despite often moving in the wrong direction philosophically (according to conservative tastes), Truman quite clearly had a skill set that allowed him to assert vigorous leadership and to navigate the shoals of the lawmaking process. Much of this, of course, is a measure not of experience but of personal characteristics — but that’s my point exactly: Once someone has inhabited the realm of high leadership for enough time, what matters is more the leadership than the forum: legislative leadership can be as valuable as executive leadership; Washington leadership as valuable as outside-the-Beltway bona fides . And vice versa. In theory, I would take a 14-year House veteran who has led the Budget Committee just about any day over a 20-month governor of Wyoming, if the adherence to conservative principle had continued with only a few apostasies during those 14 years. It is the totality and quality of the experience, not just the title, that matters. Which leaves us, in terms of the requirements of experience… where, exactly? Well, to use names sometimes mentioned, it would leave South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley somewhat beneath Florida’s U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. Why? Haley has had a decidedly bumpy ride in less than two years as governor of a barely mid-sized state, before which she served just six years in the state legislature, including as a majority whip. Rubio too has served less than two years in his current post — but, as a U.S. Senator from a mega-state, his involvement with larger national issues is a bonus, plus he served eight full years in Florida’s legislature, including a full term as Speaker of the House. Being House Speaker in a large and diverse and intensely competitive state outpoints being whip in a smaller, much more overwhelmingly conservative state. Anybody who doesn’t understand that legislative leadership is a major proving ground of political skills, and who doesn’t understand that legislative chairmanships are often de facto executive positions, has no real sense of how republican (small ‘r’), American governments work. Likewise, major business leadership or military leadership or civic leadership, if it required a relevant set of personal skills, could also serve as significant training. In short, again, the totality and quality of experience matters. OKAY, LET’S MOVE ON. Romney could probably compile a list of as many as 30 people who have the requisite combination of experience, personal and leadership characteristics, political smarts, attractiveness, and political principles strong and conservative enough to at least be considered as president-in-waiting-at-a-moment’s-notice. The hard part comes in winnowing down that list to a final five or six who offer the best of all of that plus a high ratio of political upside to political detriments. The reality is that, once the baseline requirements have been met, every single other consideration will be, and should be, purely political. Chris Christie might float your boat more than Tim Pawlenty does; Michele Bachmann might be more ideologically pure than Rudy Giuliani — but that doesn’t matter. Once it comes down to the final choice, politics should rule. Again, this applies only after winnowing the field to a select few. But once that has been done, the only relevant criterion is, who will best help Romney beat Barack Obama? Conservatives should not let minor differences obscure major goals. To determine this, Romney should use every tool in the political handbag. This should not be a bunch of insiders — the Washington conventional-wisdom cognoscenti who so often wouldn’t really recognize middle America if Dorothy’s cyclone set them down in front of a large-block signpost saying “Welcome to Middle America” — sitting around opining on who might help Romney win Ohio while not costing him Missouri, or on who they think will help attract single women without turning off blue collar men. Instead, this should involve serious, costly, comprehensive polling and focus-group testing, primarily in a group of about 21 states that might conceivably be competitive. Specifically ask respondents to rate a Romney-plus-X ticket versus an Obama-plus-Biden ticket. Also, do focus groups with voters from the key states. Give them brief biographies of the five or six top contenders and show them video of them speaking in public settings. Then feed them negative information about the candidates, as the Obama team will do, and see how their reactions change. And while the Romney camp should try to keep its polling and group interviewing quiet, it shouldn’t worry too much if the fact of its poll-testing gets out, as it certainly will. It is far better to get it right than to miss something because you are so worried about secrecy that you leave some homework undone. If this testing shows, for instance, that U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey boosts the Romney ticket so much in Pennsylvania that he makes the state a dead heat, while not costing Romney anywhere else, that should be a huge consideration. If focus groups outside of Ohio get turned off by a mock attack against U.S. Sen. Rob Portman for being born wealthy and being tied to both presidential Bushes, it almost doesn’t matter that Portman could help nail down Ohio because the overall drag on the ticket would be too big. (Again, these are purely hypothetical examples.) Now, keep this in mind: Polling in, say, Massachusetts or Utah is useless in this regard. No vice-presidential choice is going to move the former to Romney’s column or the latter to Obama’s. So too with Vermont, Maryland, Nebraska, Mississippi, and probably New York. The key thing is to help with the electoral map, not to help with overall opinion polls. The rest of us in the public will never know all the polling and group-testing results, but the Romney inner circle should know, and it certainly has plenty of time to find out, every single aspect of all of this. Finally, even after the choice has tentatively been made, the Romney camp should move heaven and Earth to prepare the new candidate for the madhouse that will ensue when the choice is announced. Sarah Palin, for example, never had a prayer of avoiding a horrid backlash because the McCain team did not have its, or her, ducks in a row. Now this part of it, unlike the fact of the polling, should be done in secret. The way to do it is to hold over any of the finalists who interview with Romney: Lock them in a room with Romney aides; grill them for hours; tell them what to expect and what to expect to be forced to answer, if they are chosen. Obviously, word of the meetings with Romney will leak out anyway; the key thing is to do all this prep work behind closed doors in conjunction with the meetings, and then tell the potential candidates that any loose lips on their end will automatically disqualify them from consideration. All of which is to say that, if the Romney folks do their jobs right, not a single bit of speculation or informed analysis from any of us on the outside, myself included, should matter. The Romney team, unlike McCain’s, should know exactly what they are getting and why. On the other hand, every single bit of public analysis has the potential to help Romney’s folks do their job better — because some new argument, some new consideration, might arise from these analyses that the Romney team otherwise would miss, but that they really ought to plug into their polling and interviewing and strategizing. That’s why, for example, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was dead wrong last week to tell all the outside analysts, in effect, to shut up. Barbour’s message was to let the insiders do all the work — ignoring how often the insiders get things wrong in large part because they ignore outside considerations and so don’t even put those considerations into their equations in the first place. So… to review: First, make a long list of about 30, based on both experience and political principles. Second, cut the list to five or six by rigorously combining those qualifications with overtly political considerations. Third, constantly reconsider the process and all available information, including from pundits that might otherwise be morons. Fourth, use sophisticated and targeted political tools, adjudging results on an almost brutally and purely political level, to make the final choice. Fifth, painstakingly prepare the nominee for the “roll-out” of the announcement. With that framework in mind, then, my next column on this topic will start naming names. First up: the qualified mid-range potential choices. After that, the semi-short list of those who should be in the top ten. Then two more columns, assessing five or six truly short-listers, any of whom should ably fill the bill for Romney. Stay tuned.
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Veep, Veep: The How and the Why
Most characteristic of this preaching [of the Great Leap Forward] was its utopianism, the promise of a bright future just in the offing, “three years of suffering leading to a thousand years of happiness.” — Franz Schurmann writing in Ideology and Organization in Communist China Forward! Comrades, you can’t make it up. Can you say “campaign blunder”? Or is it a blunder? Is it deliberate? The socialist mind at work in campaign mode? The Obama campaign has picked a portion of one of the most infamous socialist slogans of 20 th century history to use as its own new campaign slogan. “Forward” is the new Obama slogan, Team Obama borrowing boldly from none other than the late Communist Party of China leader Chairman Mao. Mao’s slogan? “The Great Leap Forward.” Rather than describing this myself, let’s take a tour of various descriptions of this wonderful, Communist slogan. Here’s Wikipedia :
Romney Has Looked Better Under The Spotlight Than I Initially Feared…. Did you know that the GOP held five Presidential primaries yesterday? Maybe; maybe not. However, given that data point, you all can tell me exactly who won all five of them. Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee. My five or so constant readers know well that I’m not turning handsprings over this final outcome. After deciding Mitt wouldn’t fit, I had to commit. Hence I endorsed the unsuccessful candidacy of Rick Santorum. Needless to say, I was vaguely resigned to four more years of Obamocracy after Santorum failed to break through in Michigan and Ohio. Yet somewhere out on the trail Romney’s sensory perception broke through the smug cloud of his obnoxious coterie of condescending online strap-hangers. It’s like he actually listened as he shook hands and kissed babies. He’s pleasantly surprised me by learning a thing or two from being challenged in the 2012 primary. He gets partial credit for the speech he gave last night to celebrate his five cake-walk victories. “Is it easier to make ends meet? Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one?” he said, as the crowd cheered “NO!” “Have you saved what you needed for retirement? Are you making more AT your job? Do you have a better chance to get a better job? Are you paying less at the pump?” “It’s still about the economy,” Romney added, bluntly. “And we’re not stupid.” The positive here is the recognition that a lot of us are just no longer included in anything good that happens in America. People get priced out of credit, home ownership, college and even the basic necessities of life such as food and gasoline. This provokes the Obama to describe how “unlike some people” he and Michelle were not to the manor born. They were just regular folks who both had to work outside the home and scrimp and save to get by on $450,000 per year. This brings us to an argument that Mitt Romney has unfortunately not yet made. The United States truly is becoming a 1% society. (Even #OWS occasionally has a point). He gets close to this reality when he excoriates Barack Obama’s Government-Centered Society. The “moderate” right which apparently objects only moderately to injustice, was quick to criticize Romney for being such a Big, Red Meany. I hereby criticize Mitt for not jamming this concept further down Barack Obama’s throat. A government-centered society could actually manage to be decent and fair in its bureaucratic ineptitude. What we have today is a Post-Modern Feudalism. Senator Scott Brown, in his reelection campaign against Elizabeth Warren – to the Hahvad Manor born, properly calls the baronial arrogance of the 1% Left. Here he decries Elizabeth Warren’s interest free loans from Harvard “Let me get this straight: struggling students and families pay more, so multi-millionaire Warren can pay nothing? This sweetheart deal adds insult to injury for the students whose high tuition costs have already made Warren a wealthy one-percenter, and reveals yet again Professor Warren’s hypocritical idea of fairness,” wrote Brown’s campaign manager Jim Barnett (HT: Boston Herald) Every time we hear about Bain Capital, we need to hear back about Barack Obama’s Swiss Bank financial backing. All us plain-Jane, Roll-up-the-sleeves working class Americans have the head of UBS out beating the bushes to send us piles of money. It’s as easy as having a relative give us an eight year free ride through The Punahou Academy. In conclusion, Mitt Romney has shown a pleasantly surprising willingness to go after Barack Obama on the over expansion of central government. I went into this season thinking Romney would welcome just such an activist government. What Romney has missed on has been the proper approbation of the hypocrisy that our elite Leftist Ruling Class has shown in taking liberties that stop just short of Prima Noctem in every area of their lives. Emperor Barack I has not only expanded government, but he has also used it to fuel a Visigoth Holiday for his friends and pet interests. Mitt Romney will have to drive that point home if he wants to unseat our corrupt and dishonest incumbent President.
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The Plusses, Minuses and Pleasant Surprises From Mitt Romney
Social conservatives who may be dispirited by Sen. Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the GOP primary race need to stop and appreciate the opportunity that remains. They especially need to consider the extent to which Gov. Mitt Romney’s seemingly narrow economic focus could in fact undermine much of the liberal cultural agenda. Consider how the fiscal reform of many states and localities (which do not have Washington’s luxury of printing money) has already advanced policies long favored by social conservatives. Louisiana, for example, has attracted national attention for adopting legislation that would make an estimated 380,000 poor and minority children eligible for private and parochial school scholarships. The rationale for this reform may be economic — at $4,500, the average scholarship in a New Orleans pilot program costs roughly half the state’s current per pupil expenditure — but the policy outcome, combined with recent voucher victories in Virginia, Florida, and Indiana, represents an enormous victory for the Right side of the culture war. Even in states that continue to resist breaking up the expensive public school monopoly on K-12 education, the need for fiscal discipline has resulted in less money for sex education, gay rights advocacy, drug education programs, and other curriculum add-ons typically opposed by social conservatives. When it comes to higher education, limited state budgets have resulted in tuition increases at public college and universities. These increases, in turn, have rebalanced the undergraduate enrollment away from majors dominated by liberal faculty — sociology, gender studies, environmental science — and toward more practical, ideologically neutral subjects, such as finance, engineering, and computer science. In a complete reversal from the early 1970s, according to John Agresto, former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, business administration, health care, and teacher preparation now account for more than a third of all undergraduate majors. The fiscal pressure on states and counties has also forced politicians to push responsibly for mental health care, juvenile rehabilitation, and other social services down to the local level of towns and cities, which themselves are broke. This has opened the way for churches and religious cooperatives, such as food banks, counseling centers, nursing facilities, employment programs, and homeless shelters, to play a much greater role in the lives of their communities. The Big Reach Center of Hope, a non-profit ministry of Ohio’s Greenford Christian Church which serves 70,000 people in five counties, is just one of an estimated 5,000 low-cost grocery and dry goods suppliers that, with contributions from chains like Wal-Mart, are picking up the government slack. Dr. Warren Bird, Director of Research and Intellectual Capital at the Leadership Network, says that churches “all over the country, are literally adopting (run-down) public schools,” quietly re-building their libraries, fixing their gyms, contributing supplies, and even putting down carpeting. At the same time that state and municipal budget cutting has elevated the grass roots profile of organized religion, it has also reduced or eliminated the number of politically correct commissions on human rights, the arts, day care, education, and family welfare, which have long operated as taxpayer-funded propagandists for secular causes. In very blue Connecticut, first term Gov. Daniel Malloy (D) has recently proposed eliminating 25 state boards to help balance the books. Even the successful 2011 effort in Rhode Island and six other states to control runaway pension costs, turning defined benefit programs into self-administered 401-Ks, represents a victory of sorts for social conservatism. Any policy that makes a public employee personally responsible for the size of his post-retirement nest egg cannot help but increase his sympathy for the kind of civil, moral, and educational values that support a healthy, growth-oriented economy. Spokespersons for government unions, such as Doug Pratt of the Michigan Education Association, may lament the prospect of public workers investing their own retirement dollars instead of depending on “a pension system back up by structure and employers.” Yet the maturity and judgment required to run a 401-K can only be welcomed by social conservatives as a positive development. The election of a fiscal reformer president next November would guarantee at the very least that blue state politicians will not be able to escape current financial pressures by borrowing from the national treasury. Beyond that, Governor Romney’s clear desire to trim discretionary spending means that the kind of socially conservative fiscal reforms advancing through the states will finally surface at the federal level. Subsidies for Planned Parenthood, the Public Broadcasting Service, and other culturally liberal groups would become the new endangered species. The almost certain nomination of Mitt Romney as the GOP standard bearer provides social conservatives with an historic opportunity to advance their agenda, not in grueling culture war battles unfairly framed by hostile media outlets, but by simply endorsing what most level-headed economists believe will revive our sluggish economy. Enact the fiscally sound policies that by their nature promote accountability, personal responsibility, and self-reliance; and the country will be more open to the rest of the argument. [1] Dr. Andrews is the Senior Policy Scholar at the Yankee Institute in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Fix the Economy and Conservative Values Will Follow
