See commentary by John Haskins below on Ellen Goodman's op-ed in the Boston Globe a few days back. Here's an excerpt from Goodman's column, "Mitt's turnaround" (2-2-07):
... Bay State politicians -- from John Adams to Mike Dukakis -- have long suffered from Potomac Fever. But Steve Crosby, dean of the McCormack Graduate School at the UMass-Boston and a chief honcho for two previous Republican governors, says Romney suffers from "Potomac Ebola Virus." A particularly virulent strain has infected the man running from Massachusetts. Or should I say, running away from Massachusetts. Or against Massachusetts.
Our man Mitt is positioning himself to the right of every Republican candidate except Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. He has famously told audiences that "being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention." He's repeatedly described himself as a lonely figure fighting the values fight against "the Kennedy-apologist, knee-jerk Clinton supporters" and ... you get the idea.
Even "Evangelicals for Mitt" -- yes, there is such a website -- says that "He shares our values, and he's fought for those values in hostile territory."
The idea, the pitch, the shtick is that if Romney can make it as a conservative Republican here, he can make it anywhere. There's only one small problem: He didn't make it here as a conservative. Romney ran and won as the fourth in a direct line of moderate GOP governors....
... you can also regard Romney as the veritable model of the Venture Capitalist as Politician, doing and saying whatever it takes. Indeed, [Steve] Crosby ["dean of the McCormack Graduate School at the UMass-Boston and a chief honcho for two previous Republican governors"] describes Romney's governorship as like "a corporate takeover. . . . He took over the asset, stripped it of what it was worth to leverage him into another asset, the presidency. There's no way to think he has any core beliefs other than leveraging to the next acquisition." ...
John Haskins comments:
Yep. I'm fairly sure Mitt does share the values of "Evangelicals for Mitt." That's why he illegally imposed sodomy-based marriage and claimed the smirking judges "made him do it." Unfortunately for Mitt and the mercenary "lawyers" at "Evangelicals for Mitt," the same judges later admitted to the whole world that they had absolutely no legal power to compel Slick Willard to do anything.
Poor Mitt. Whom can he trust? He goes the extra mile to give "activist judges" more than they ever asked for, even proving that he was willing to violate a constitution, make liars and fools of the Founding Fathers and mock the solemn oath he took. Then what do those unprincipled liberal "activist judges" do? They turn around and stab him in the back by telling everyone that judges can't make governors (or legislators) impose homosexual "marriage."
That was supposed to be Romney's little secret! Even superlawyers "Jay-Jay the Jet Plane" Sekulow, Mr. Bopp and ADF's constitutional-surrender experts, Glen Lavy and David French, were with Mitt on that -- pretending the Court made him do it!
So with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court having humiliated Jay-Jay, Bopp, and the ADF by confirming the supposedly "amateurish and bizarre" (French's words) legal analysis on the Pro-Family Leaders' Letter to Romney, why does Slick Willard Romney still think he can pass himself off as a conservative? Well, because people like French and his wife apparently can continue to pass themselves off as conservatives, merely by calling others "liars" for publicizing the indisputable facts on Mitt.
The great Malcolm Muggeridge observed that we don't believe political lies because they are credible; we believe them because we want to. And that observation explains why the pro-family movement keeps hiring lawyers and decision-makers who shoot those who are "amateurish and bizarre" enough not to collaborate in the permanent surrender.
As for Romney's famous boast -- "being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention" -- well, Mitt, it's great to speculate. Now talk from experience: What's it like to be the Ivy League vegetarian trying to fake it as a cowboy on the big cattle drive? That would seem to be an impossible task, unless you've identified the moles among the cowboys: "pro-family constitutional attorneys" who spend their credibility ignoring or lying about constitutions.
As I've said all along: there are people who will either lose their jobs or they will continue to fake it as "pro-family constitutionalists" and who will continue to destroy the movement from within ... until there's nothing left to destroy.
John Haskins is a frequent contributor to the MassResistance blog.
