Opinion: Mitt Romney, the pro and the con
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When a bunch of candidates vie for their party’s presidential nomination, the overall battle often veers off into specific skirmishes. Mitt Romney’s White House bid is offering a classic illustration of that.
Starting today, radio listeners in Iowa and New Hampshire are hearing the wife of the former Massachusetts governor, Ann Romney, relate their domestic journey together. She begins: ‘We met in high school at a party, and we’ve been going steady ever since.’ She mentions their five sons (‘lovely sons’), 10 grandchildren and that ‘Mitt says his greatest success is being able to say, ‘I’ve been a good father and a good husband.’’
On the surface, about as an innocuous (some cynics might say saccharine) political ad as one can imagine. Except, as Newsday notes in a blog, when one of your main challengers in the Republican race, Rudy Giuliani, has been married three times and has problems getting along with his kids.
Romney’s website also features a daily blog highlighting the lives and campaign activities of his five sons called Five Brothers. Even as Romney seeks to carve out the ‘family values’ niche for himself, however, he increasingly finds himself the target of undisguised broadsides fired off by one of the GOP contenders scrambling to gain a toehold in the contest, Sam Brownback.
Today, for instance, the Kansas senator’s campaign crafted a media release ‘proposing a new word be added to Webster’s Dictionary: ‘Mitt-amorphasis.’’ That would be defined, the release goes on, as, ‘A self-directed and self-contradictory cyclical process, occurring in even-numbered years, by which a Massachusetts politician transforms at will.’ (There’s more, but you get the picture).
This comes two days day after the Brownback campaign sent off the second installment of what it titled ‘Six Mitt-Flops in Six Weeks.’ The latest one spotlights Romney’s ‘flip-flops on taxes’ --- pointing out, for instance, that in his 2002 gubernatorial campaign he refused to sign a no-new-taxes pledge, dismissing it as ‘government by gimmick,’ but this January added his name to just such a promise for the federal budget.
Last week’s inaugural ‘flip-flop’ concerned gun rights; guessing what comes next could become one of the summer’s most popular political parlor games (well, probably not).
Brownback encountered his own credibility problem last month, when he flip-flopped while voting on the controversial immigration bill. Still, Brownback’s continuing criticism of Romney shows that, as he sees the race, his own ascent is tied directly to undermining the gains his rival has made in garnering conservative support.
When it comes to the line of attack Brownback is pursuing, Romney unquestionably is the gift that keeps on giving.
The Massachusetts Democratic Party weighs in with a new video on YouTube that features classic quotes from his ’02 gubernatorial campaign. Running in a heavily Democratic state, Romney was doing his best in these comments to present himself as something less than a hard-core Republican. At the next GOP debate, replaying these clips certainly could make for a fun moment.
The bottom line for Romney, of course, is that he won that governor’s election in one of the bluest of America’s blue states. And as he surveys the current scene, he’s got to feel good about his situation.
He’s very strong in Iowa, as a Politico.com story earlier this week drove home. And he’s leading in New Hampshire’s most recent polls. Win those two states, and Romney could quickly be getting inquiries from Brownback about that veep opening on the general election ticket.
-- Don Frederick