on mitt and hypocrisy

            OK, I’m back.

            I can’t say that my gmail account has been flooded with questions about why this blog hasn’t been updated in a while, but it’s a question that appears with some regularity; of late, that regularity itself has increased. 

            For those who are interested, it went away for a couple reasons.  For one, I shot a movie last July and August, and getting ready for that started six or seven months earlier.  Actually, if you include writing the script, it started nearly a year earlier.

            The bigger reason however was that I simply became frustrated with the political state of this country.  With the exception of health care (a big exception, granted) the Democrats were doing their best to turn the other cheek every time the GOP said no—which was essentially every time it had an opportunity to speak.   I could find lots to complain about regarding Republican behavior, but, to my consternation, the Democrats were doing next to nothing to combat that behavior except whining.  That seemed especially true of the President.

            All of which begs the question—What’s changed?  At base, probably not that much.  There are a couple things however that make me think all of us need to re-engage if, like me, they had withdrawn, engage more strongly if they’ve been at it all along, and get engaged if they’ve had their heads fully in the sand.

            The most obvious of those things is that we have an election coming up.  Like most intelligent people, I watched the Republican primaries with an uneasy mixture of  amusement and horror.  The possibility of a Herman Cain or a Michelle Bachman or a Rick Perry becoming the Republican nominee boggled the mind, but in a bemused way.  Not even this country could elect idiots like those.

            When it finally boiled down to Newt, Rick or Mitt, I felt as though the Republicans were about to choose an egomaniac, a scary Christian or a cipher.  Of the three, the cipher struck me as least objectionable.

            I no longer think that.  In fact, the thought of a Romney presidency almost scares me more than, say, a return to George W.   I found the policies the W stood for heinous, but at least I knew what they were, and I knew that what he would advocate tomorrow would have a sequential link to what he advocated yesterday.  Same with Newt and Rick.

            What it seems to me has come clear about Mitt is that he has no core belief—that, as several pundits have opined, his only bedrock principle is that he thinks he deserves to be president.  And he appears willing to say or do whatever today’s issue demands toward that end.

            That he’s a flip-flopper is no longer even debated.  Late night comics have great fun with his flips, and partisan Democrats delight in them because they make great talking points.  What I fear those partisans neglect to consider is that they may be delivering those talking points only to the choir.

            What scares me about the flip-flops isn’t that they have happened; what scares me is what they say about the man executing them.  It concerns me deeply that someone who was for abortion rights, cap-and-trade, global warming abatement, gay rights, a health insurance mandate—the list could go on—before he was against them is someone who literally has no moral compass.  The possibility of having a president who could be counted on only to do whatever struck him as best for himself at any given moment, I find terrifying.

            Mitt’s behavior since securing the Rebublican nomination has been totally consistent with the image of him as a moral and intellectual cipher.  On immigration, for example, he doesn’t talk any more about “self-deportation” or describe Arizona’s immigration law as a “national model.”  Instead, he goes in front of  an Hispanic group and talks about the importance of a “fair” immigration policy.  When the group attempted to press him about what that meant, he left the podium and his reps said unfortunately there wasn’t time for him to take questions.

            He seizes every opportunity to insist that he will “repeal Obamacare” on day one of his presidency.  (That’s actually one item on a growing list of things he would do on day one.  To do them all, he might have to switch over to the Christian bible and make day one a Genesis-length day.)  What he doesn’t mention, in fact refuses to mention, is what he’d put in its place.

            He also says he’s going to cut all taxes significantly AND increase the defense budget exponentially AND reduce the deficit, but he won’t talk about how he’ll make the arithmetic work on that.  Actually, he said he’d be happy to talk about it, but not until after he’s elected.

            And that seems to me to be the kicker.  For Mitt, it’s all about being elected—and saying, or not saying as the case may be—whatever it takes to accomplish that.  There are those, mostly conservatives, who call this behavior sound strategic politics—do what it takes to get elected, then worry about governing.  My worry is about that second part.  So far, in my view, Mitt has plainly indicated that  in any conflict between what is best for the country and what is best for Mitt, he would choose the latter.  And that’s not governing; it’s ruling.

            One can argue or course that Obama has suffered from a surfeit of promises made during the 2008 campaign.  He promised a single payer health care system; didn’t deliver.  He promised to close Gitmo; hasn’t delivered. He promised to end the Bush tax cuts; didn’t deliver. He promised a whole battery of environmental reforms; record here is spotty at best.  There are other disappointments if you are a liberal.

            On the other hand, he delivered on middle class tax cuts—not perhaps at the level he suggested during the campaign, but something at least.  He has gotten us out of Iraq (and is getting us out of Afghanistan).  He has acted to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  Though admittedly grudgingly, he has supported gay marriage. 

            The point is that Obama at least in his campaign gave us a sense of his moral compass—the things he thought important—and he was specific about them.  He hasn’t delivered on all of them, and should be faulted for not even trying very hard on some—but at least he has shown a consistency of thought and purpose. 

            Logic is, as we know, a process of establishing probability from observation.  If we observe the sun rising in the east every day, logic tells us it’s likely it will do so again tomorrow.  What we have been able to observe about Mitt is that his thinking was liberal when he wanted to unseat Ted Kennedy, moderate when he wanted to be governor of Massachusetts, radically conservative when he wanted the Republican nomination, and is now a little less radically conservative since he wants to be President.  Logic, based on that pattern, can only tell us that, if elected president, there is no way to know what to expect. 

            Perhaps more frightening, it tells us to expect Mitt to do—as he apparently did at Bain Capital—whatever it takes to insure the greatest benefit to Mitt.  And I find that a little scary.

            The other thing that has brought the blog back is the growing—and frightening—number of hypocrisies I’m seeing in Republican behavior.  Those will the subject of future blogs, but for now, let me just mention one I find particularly appalling.

            It’s clear, and has been for two years at least, that too many people in this country aren’t working.  The GOP wastes no opportunity to blame that on Obama, and, to be fair, I think it’s a legitimate criticism that Obama and the Democrats waited way too long to fully address the unemployment situation.  But the fact is, they did address it; the President introduced a jobs bill which addressed the unemployment situation by proposing two things that would both  put people to work and benefit the country in other ways as well.  Part of the jobs bill was a substantial block of money for states that would enable them to put back to work the countless teachers, police and firefighters that have been let go; how the country benefits from that is obvious.  An even bigger part of the jobs bill was a major investment in infrastructure, that, likewise, would benefit the country both by putting people to work and by insuring that bridges, dams and highways don’t collapse.

            The Republicans could have responded to the jobs bill by identifying the parts of it they thought shouldn’t have been there, suggesting things not in the bill that perhaps should be, and seriously negotiating with the White House and Democrats to produce a bill that would ameliorate if not eliminate the unemployment problem.

            What they did was simply say no.  They have made no effort to offer an alternative.  They have simply said no.  Then they make “The president has no jobs bill” one of their consistent talking points.  When pressed, they tap dance around the fact that they have offered nothing to the debate by arguing that Obama wants to pay for his bill by, in part, raising taxes on the wealthy.  That may be a point they could have debated with the Democrats, but it isn’t a reason for simply saying no.

            To complain about unemployment while refusing to even talk about a jobs bill can only be characterized as hypocrisy.  The reason for that hypocrisy?  It might be found in Mitch McConnell’s famous line from the day after Obama was sworn in—that the number one Republican priority was to make him a one term president. 

            Where the country fits into that priority is a little hard to see.