#631 – Dick Bernard: Election 2012 #52. "Romneyesque"

Less than 24 hours from now Debate #2 will be concluded.
Earlier today a good friend sent her contribution to the political vocabulary:
“Sharing with you that I just coined a new word: “Romneyesque,” adjective meaning a desperate turn (flight) toward the center.”
Madeline Simon

Thanks, Madeline, who is, like me, someone who watches what passes for political conversation in this country of ours.
In the early months of this 2012 campaign season, I was really very neutral about Willard “Mitt” Romney.
He was mostly an also-ran in the Republican Primaries, but he seemed like a decent sort of moderate guy, particularly compared with the succession of Republican competitors who won one state, then lost, until Romney was the last potentially viable candidate left standing, (much to the chagrin of leaders of the evangelical religious right who couldn’t come to grips with his religious beliefs).
To me, he seemed pretty reasonable compared with the others.
As time has gone on, it has become impossible to divine where Mitt Romney stands on anything.
There may be some principle or other that he stands on. The sole one I can see is “getting elected”. To vote for him is to take a big gamble.
He has come to be characterized as the most dishonest candidate in most any race, and this characterization comes from people who are media and from people who are not liberal.
He seems willing to say anything for public consumption, depending on his audience at the time, and this will likely be very true Tuesday night. It is likely he will reinvent himself again in these final few weeks before the election on November 6 to pick up a vote here, or there, to get the margin he needs to win.
If he wins, even his core supporters won’t know what they’re getting. They’ll get what they deserve. The rest of us will be stuck, in the worst case with Tea Party domination continuing.
No doubt Romney has skills: rhetorical; and making money for himself and close colleagues come immediately to mind. He is a wealthy financial speculator, more so than businessman.
These are not skills amenable to leading a large and diverse country.
Here’s how David Stockman describes him in October 15 Daily Beast on-line publication of Newsweek. “Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.”
Romney does not impress in his performance on the foreign stage, and in this global world, global relationships are very important, not from a position of dominance, but from a position of being a colleague nation among 192.
Exceptionalists among us tend to dismiss our global neighbors as lesser beings – dummies to be dominated. We adopt this attitude at great peril.
Romney is Romneyesque.
Let the buyer beware.
Directly related posts: here, here, and here.
There will be others, as yet unwritten, between now and election day.
Check back. Put Election 2012 in the search box.