Willard Will Pick the GOP's Pockets

The media continues this new meme that Mitt Romney really is a moderate and would not be so bad as President. Earlier in the week people like David Brooks and Michael Gerson tried to portray Mitt as reassuring and not someone to react impulsively. Gerson suggested that Romney has picked a sterling group of economic advisers, who know what they are doing.

This process of Republicans trying to settle on Romney ignores some basic points that the media has failed to notice. Those great economic advisers were the ones used by George W. Bush and were involved with the great fiscal implosion of 2008. Romney announced his foreign policy team right before his Citadel speech, which called for the 21st century to be another America Century. The only problem are that all the foreign policy advisers are those from George W. Bush and those who advocated in the 1990s a New American Century.

In short, Romney is running on resetting America at 2000 and starting out again on George W. Bush's policies. Take for instance Mitt Romney's pledge to repeal Dodd-Franks bill on re-regulating the financial industry. The result would be the mayhem of the 2007 and 2008. Romney basically thinks everything was fine until the market collapse. So after the bailouts, there is no need to correct anything. You just dust yourself off and begin again. And the George W. advisers will help it along.

Romney's speech at the Citadel was frankly horrifying and dangerous. It ignored the last decade and the limitations that are now on American power. Romney's view that our military needs further increases in spending ignores the basic fact that this year our deficit, some $1.3 trillion is exactly equal to the budget for the entire military-intelligence and terrorist complex. If this spending is to increase, then roughly 40% of the federal government would go to these ventures. The rhetoric he used on whether the United States would cooperate with other countries but opts to go it alone is pure George W. There was no consideration of foreign aid or even the Arab Spring. In fact, Romney is on record that there can be no distance between the United States and Israel,a marked reversal of historical American policy, even George W's.

If you examine Romney economic policies, you basically have Paul Ryan on steroids. The United States would be reduced to being a military power protecting the global interests of our corporations. While he is made to look moderate on things like Social Security because of his rivals, he is nothing of the sort. He is pledged to fundamentally change entitlement programs. And the loopiest idea among many of his is a pledge for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, when his own economic plans would run deficits way into the future.

Mitt Romney lucked out at the Values Summit when the head of the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed Rick Perry and called Mormonism a "cult". This allowed Romney to plead for religious tolerance and appear in the Beltway media to be "moderate".

Romney did not speak about his religion but he did make very specific promises to the social conservatives which went unreported. He pledged t overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision to make abortion legal, a decision passed by 7-2. He pledged to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He pledge to uphold the Hyde Amendment and expand its application to prevent abortion. He pledged to appoint an Attorney General that would fight to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, even though Reagan appointed judges have ruled it was unconstitutional. He also supported amendments in the states to say that life begins at conception. He also would restore DADT.

Those are very specific commitments. Very specific for a man who can't tell you his position on Afghanistan, for instance. Very specific too for a man that has not articulated how America can compete in the world economically. Or a man who can't support refurbishing our infrastructure.

But if Peggy Noonan refers to Ronald Reagan's days as "When Character was King", what is she to make of Mitt Romney?Writing in the Daily Beast, Matt Latimer documents Romney's own strange and unexamined political journey in "Is Romney the Next Kerry?" Surprising to me, at least, Mitt Romney did not vote for President Reagan or Bush the father. Instead, he actually voted for Paul Tsongas in the Democractic primary in 1992 (?). Mitt also has gone by several different first names in his life including Bill. Latimer documents the encyclopedia of all the political positions Romney has changed during his short political career. The man is a cameleon and no one has begun to bring up all of them because they are so numerous. He makes John Kerry look like a Rock of consistent stands.

The bottom line is that Romney is campaigning on the fact he is white and rich. Whatever else you want to make him out to be is OK by him. He's middle-class, he's unemployed, he's a businessman, not a politician.

I still think he's weird and troubling. The last so-called technocrat we elected as President was a man of real capability--Herbert Hoover. Hoover was a great humanitarian, a pioneering engineer, a business titan. And look what happened with him. Romney is running on warmed over George W. Bush platitudes without any re-examing of those flawed assumptions and he has bought into the whole social conservative agenda. Someone called him the Achilles Heel Incarnate.

At this point our corporate media is buying his line. But the Republican base believes he is a phony. because he is. But there, too, it looks like they are demoralized and are flagging to the base that effort is better spent on the Senate elections.

And he is a Mormon. And that is a cult.