MITT ROMNEY

Romney’s claim to presidential qualification was based on his success as a venture capitalist and his creation of jobs. However, his firm in many cases acquired firms, withdrew cash from the company, weakening the it, and then loading it with debt that it could not sustain, causing large layoffs or bankruptcy where Romney’s firm made big money,

He was particularly criticizing Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney who was strongly advocating a policy of spending austerity as Europe had done in recent years. But the austerity policy curtailed growth and Europe was worse off. Governments were being changed in many countries of Europe and the austerity policies were being rethought. Romney and the conservative Republicans argued that with austerity, the markets would feel better about investment and invest more which would theoretically create jobs and improve the economy. However, it did not work in Europe and the austerity actually impaired the economies and really limited growth.

Governor Romney, had a weakness of getting many his “facts” about the past wrong and had been criticized for it. When he stated some “facts” that the President thought wrong, Obama countered with this quotation. Fact checkers later corroborated the President’s judgment.

In the Republican Presidential Primary Election of 2012, Mitt Romney was one of 9 candidates. After a very bitter campaign Romney won, but he could never appeal sufficiently to his own party to get close to 50 percent of the Republicans to support him. However, that was more than any of the other 8 candidates. Hence he was the Republican Nominee despite the fact that he never obtained majority support. Thus Turner called him the Republican “Default Candidate”.

Romney was known for changing political positions and postures depending on the particular office he was running for and the time.

A few days before Romney was calling the Lybian Consulate in Bengazi our Embassy when Embassies are only on capital cities.

Romney who was typically well spoken, very frequently in his campaign speeches and appearances, made statements that were clearly untrue, and even worse statements which reinforced the negative stereotype of a disconnected rich man. Hence the joke about the muzzle.

After this statement was issued by the embassy, a mob stormed the embassy as shown in the graphic. The reason that this statement is an important quotation is that that Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for President took the situation as an opportunity to attack the President. Specifically he claimed that this statement was an “apology” and it was terrible for America to apologize. The administration and most media fact checkers could not find anything in the statement that was an apology as opposed to as statement of United States policy and practice. Romney and his supporters insisted it was an apology. So the statement itself has become a major historical quotation where people can judge for themselves if indeed it was an apology. There are many who believed that under the circumstances an apology might not have been a bad idea. A few years earlier when a Danish magazine had published some insulting cartoons of The Prophet, riots broke out around the world and dozens of people were killed.

Reference to the comparison of candidates Barack Obama andMitt Romney.

Romney, the Republican Presidential Candidate, was advocating budgets to cut the Federal expenditures for Collage Student Grants and Loans.

Romney had a reputation for changing his political position and trying to straddle positions. After losing this race, Romney improved as a candidate and did not try and straddle as much. He won the governorship in the next election.

Romney, a very wealthy businessman running for President as a Republican, had owned and controlled companies that had outsourced jobs abroad. In addition, he personally maintained large bank accounts in Switzerland and Caribbean tax havens and kept his tax returns secret to minimize his exposure. Ironically, there was nothing illegal in his maintaining such accounts, and most very wealthy people did. However, Romney, never secure in his own skin, didn’t want his opponents to focus on the fact that he did what rich people did and what most middle class and poor people rarely did and considered somewhat unpatriotic. So this insult was very effective as most people thought that when the American banks were in danger of collapsing in the Meltdown of 2008, and had to be bailed out by the taxpayers, he would not keep much of his money in the American banking system—easy to understand for a wealthy investor, but not so good for a politician claiming to have the nation’s interest as a first priority. Many conservatives argued that it was patriotic for a citizen to maximize his personal wealth and economic security and Romney should have defended his actions so Romney was caught in the middle, hence a good target for his opponents.

It has been a common tactic to appeal to the extreme base of a party to win the primary election and tack back to the center for the general election. And this statement in most elections would not have been important or noteworthy. However, in 2012 the Republican party had become very extreme and ideologically conservative whereas when it was founded it was a liberal—even radical party. Romney, in his second try for the nomination, had changed almost all of his previously moderate positions and flip flopped many positions to assure the party base that he was very conservative. But many conservatives were not sure of Romney’s sincerity and suspected that he was just pandering to the base of the party and would reverse himself in the general election. As a result, Fehrnstrom’s statement set off a firestorm among the base and forced Romney into assuring them that he would not again flip flop back. This had the effect of denying Romney a traditional strategy to appeal to the middle in the general election as most of the undecided voters were in the middle. At the same time, the Democratic opponents used this quotation to accuse Romney of being deceptive and pandering to anywhere he could obtain votes. The political comedians all appeared on TV with Etch A Sketch devices. So the quotation had a major effect on the tactics and direction of the campaign.

Ryan told the national audience that President Obama had come to a factory in his district that as rumored to be closed. Obama had told the workers that the Federal government could assist and keep the factory open for many years. Then as Ryan explained, the factory closed the following year. He gave this as an example of Obama not keeping his word. However what Ryan did not say was that Obama had made the speech at the factory when he was a candidate for the Presidency, and then the factory was closed while George W. Bush was President and by the time he took office, the closure was done and the factory machines gone. And when Obama took office, our national economy was within days of complete bank and finance collapse. Obama saved most of the banks and then the American automobile industry. To suggest that Obama could have or should have done something for the factory that closed was shockingly misleading. It would have been a minor issue if some party hack had lied and made the same accusation. But this was the Vice Presidential Candidate whose acceptance speech was assumedly vetted by the Presidential Candidate’s staff. That is why the quotation was so memorable.

Romney and his surrogates had more than usual difficulty with getting their facts right. Fact checking organizations would call them on this and in April of 2012, Romney ran a TV ad that was grossly wrong and misleading. When asked about the expose of the falsehood of the ad, Newhouse made this classic response. The reason this is an important quotation is that the statement drew much more critical attention than the false had or its classification as untrue did. Even President Obama made fun of it in his campaign speeches. See Martin Amis {631017} for a serious critique of the meaning of the quotation.

Amis did not get the quotation exactly right but it was close enough for his analysis. For the actual quotation, see {631016}.

The Repubican primary contest weakened Mitt Romney, the eventual primary winner and Presidential Candidate, by forcing him to the right to satisfy the conservative Republicans. This made him very unappealing not only to some moderate republicans but also to independents and especially to minorities and women who very much resented the conservative Republican culture clash which they saw as attacks on them. Democrat Barack Obama won the General Election handily.

Romney was notorious about changing his positions depending on what public office he was seeking. He had installed the basis of the ObamaCare health reform system as Governor of Massachusetts, but then appealing to the Republican right wing for the Presidential nomination by repudiating his health care reform approach. He also flip-flopped on other major positions such as abortion.

April 2012 Speech

Romney was then running for the Republican Presidential nomination, and was taking a shot at President Obama.

This is an example of a totally absurd intellectual position that the dynamics of a modern political campaign into which candidate can by pushed. In his primary campaign for the nomination, Romney had been castigated by other Republicans for changing his political positions to suite the conservative wing of the party. He was labeled a “flip-flopper with no consistent views principles. In this quotation, he had distanced himself from a campaign plan created by a rich Republican that would attack President Obama for the fact that before the Presidency, he had attended a church with a radical pastor. The plan was to tie Obama to the radical views of the pastor, despite the fact that Obama himself had castigated the views of the pastor. A reporter tried to remind Romney that months before, he had appeared on a TV show and himself said that Obama was not a good President because he had attended the church of the radical pastor. The reporter specifically asked Romney if he still stood by what he had said on the radio in the light of his current position which was the opposite, Romney had changed his mind. However, even though he could not remember what he had even said, and fearful that he would be again accused of being a flip-flopper, he felt it was necessary for him to tell the reporter and the public that whatever he had said, he stood by it. There are few fields or situations where any intelligent human being would take the position that whatever he/she had said in the past, was still their current view. However politics is often the exception and this quotation illustrates that.