So long as everyone's piling on Mitt Romney, I'd thought it would be sweeter to let a conservative have at him. And, for the third month in a row, David Frum gets the nod as the featured writer of this piece. Not that I'm looking for residuals, mind you, but, suffice to say, I've been doing an awful lot of plugging for the guy who used to be W's speechwriter.
When I make it to the top, I hope he repays the compliment.
When I make it to the top, I hope he repays the compliment.
Romney: Too Weak?
I’m not sure how many people watching this
spectacle even remember that it’s nominally about whether Romney is responsible
for outsourcing Bain did post-February 1999 or its investment in a company that
serviced abortion clinics. I barely remember it myself. What’s driving this now
is that the Obama camp has backed Romney into a position in which he looks
ridiculous — something much more lethal for presidential candidates than most
people appreciate.
Romney had absolutely nothing to do with
Bain after 1999, no responsibility for anything it did, barely even knew what
it did. Only he was the owner, the Chairman of the Board and the CEO. At least
according to all the official documents, many of which he signed. Only he
wasn’t any of those things, says Romney.
Marshall's column
is titled "Weak, weak, weak," and it puts its finger on a core
weakness of Romney as a candidate. It's not just his arguments that are weak.
For the past year, we have watched him be pushed around by the radical GOP
fringe. He's been forced to abjure his most important achievement as governor,
his healthcare plan. In December, he was compelled to sign onto the Ryan budget
plan after months of squirming to avoid it.
Last fall he
released an elaborate economic plan. On the eve of the Michigan primary, he
ripped it up and instead accepted a huge new tax cut - to a top rate of 28% -
that has never been costed (and that he now tries to avoid mentioning whenever
he can). Romney has acknowledged in interviews that he understands that big
rapid cuts in government spending could push the US economy back into recession.
Yet he campaigns anyway on the Tea Party's false promise that it's the deficit
that causes the depression, rather than (as he well knows) the other way
around.
A big majority of
this country is rightly frightened and appalled by what the congressional
Republican party has become over the past four years: a radical cadre willing
to push the nation over the cliff into utterly unnecessary national default in
order to score a political point.
The hope for many
of us was that a Republican president could do a better job constraining them
than Barack Obama has been able to do - especially if (as I personally also
hoped) the very act of electing such a president would deflate the radicalism
of the congressional GOP and revive a more constructive spirit.
But at every
point, Romney has surrendered to the fringe of his party. Weak. And now in his
first tough encounter with Barack Obama, Romney is being shoved around again.
This is not what a president looks like - anyway, not a successful president.
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