Has
there ever been a candidate for President as brazenly, transparently
dishonest as Willard Romney? Here is a guy who treats complex
political views as commodities to be traded on the International
President of the United States Market, and who seems to have no
conviction in life aside from his own success. Sure George W. Bush
was a risible fuck who grinned and guffawed as he used racist campaign tactics to beat his political foes and had
more contempt for the democratic and judicial process than any
President in US post-war history, but at the very least Dubya had the
decency to not insult his electorate's intelligence by changing his
stance on virtually every issue he'd ever held. George W. Bush
thought that Americans would know a stinking rat when they saw one - Romney hopes you'll think the smell is just your fridge
malfunctioning. The media, meanwhile, are more than happy to go along with it.
Let's
backtrack a little bit. I know what I'm about to say is hardly news
to anyone but it's important for contextual reasons. In a
now-infamous video from a 1994 debate against Ted Kennedy, Romney
outlined a bunch of views which he now disowns. I won't recount them in full here, but on abortion in particular, he was pro-choice, and took
the view that it should be 'safe and legal' in America. This isn't
new information – Romney is well-known for being the master of what
in the UK we call a U-Turn and the Americans call a flip-flop, but
what gets reported less often is what Romney gave as his motivation
for his pro-choice belief - he said that it was because he had a
friend who passed away from an illegal abortion. After writing that
previous sentence, I had to step back from my laptop for a minute,
because I not only found the notion of a woman dying from an illegal
abortion distressing, but I also realised that giving such a reason
as a motivation for your belief in the legalisation of something
which you personally find repugnant (which Romney was key to
reiterate) is a sign of intellectual and emotional maturity –
something which Governor Romney has been sincerely lacking in this
campaign. What's even more impressive is that this story is true. Nowadays, Romney is well-known for being a pro-life candidate who publicly
disavows Roe v Wade,
making it a central issue of his
campaign. However, when asked by Bill O'Reilly last year, he said the
reason for his change in position was because he realised that Roe
v Wade
should not be sustained as the law and required opposition because of
his commitment to the sanctity of life, or something. No mention of
his dead friend.
That
Romney has never been asked about this is an indication of the
complicity of the US media in the rise of this paragon of dishonesty
to be an apparently worthy contender to the highest office in the
land. Whenever Romney is quizzed on his changes of positions, he's
simply given the benefit of the doubt that someone is entitled to
change their views and sure, they are, but they're not entitled to
change their identity. Romney tried to out-liberal Kennedy in 1994,
ran as a moderate Republican when Massachusets required it, ran as a
social conservative in 2008 when he spotted a gap in the market and
now runs as a kind of non-entity that insists on 'talking about' the
economy whilst doing nothing of the sort (platitudes are not
conversation, Governor).
Hunter
S. Thompson said of Richard Nixon that his ascendancy was aided by
the adherence to so-called objective journalism, depite some
situations requiring the subjective examination of a person's
character - '[h]e
looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight
unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that
he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You
had to get Subjective to see [him] clearly, and the shock of
recognition was often painful'.
Equally so, does anyone really expect us to believe that Romney spent
the years between 2008 and 2012 soul-searching and undergoing a
spiritual and ideological transformation which would make Saint Paul
wince? Why is it that he's allowed to give self-serving interviews in
which he spouts awkward non-answers about the Greatness of America,
yet he's never quizzed on his changes of position?
The
only possible answer is that the mainstream media has become cynical
in both definitions of the word. They both facilitate the rise of non-people like Romney for their own selfish reasons, as
well as accept the premise that politicians and politics in general
are irreparably dishonest and that efforts to hold Presidential
candidates accountable for their dishonesty are fruitless since
that's just what they do. It's long been known that Romney lacks
substance on a variety of issues, even by GOP standards, yet the only
people who've called him out on it so far are people who aren't in
the same room as him. When Fox News of all places called him out on his lack of consistency, a visibly uncomfortable Romney used the
fall-back line that he was taken out of context: 'this is an unusual
interview', said the Governor. Yet why is being asked obvious
questions about ideological inconsistency unusual? The only thing
which is unusual is that he isn't asked it more often.
(Image: Mitt Romney in Colorado. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
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