Mitt Romney’s campaign is essentially plastic and dishonest, an
insuperable problem Wednesday’s debate in Mesa, Arizona,
underscored yet again for disenchanted primary voters. Romney
bested a rattled Rick Santorum in it, but this victory, like his
others, looked hollow and dispiriting.
One suspects that Romney’s low surrogates paid punks to
enter the debate hall and loudly boo his opponents. Not that
Santorum didn’t deserve a few. He blew it, exposing himself to
repeated strikes from a Ron Paul-Mitt Romney pincer movement.
Seated to Santorum’s right and left, Paul and Romney took turns
needling him. If, as the saying goes, a candidate “who is
explaining is losing,” then Santorum lost very badly. He kept
getting entangled in the weeds of boring disputes from the past in
which he had betrayed this or that conservative
principle.
Romney, at his most hypocritical, labored hard to present
himself as more socially conservative than Santorum, noting that
Rick had voted for Planned Parenthood funding. Astonishingly,
Santorum missed his chance at a return upper cut. Why didn’t he
mention that Romney once gave money to Planned Parenthood from his
own pocket? Why didn’t he mention that Romneycare dollars go to
Planned Parenthood?
Romney’s sudden social conservatism invites an obvious
question: How stupid does he think primary voters are? Romney’s con
job here depends upon the amnesia of his audience. Here’s a
politician who pled fealty to Roe v. Wade, voted for
Democrat Paul Tsongas, and competed with Ted Kennedy as a champion
of “gay rights.” By the way, Romney’s social conservatism didn’t
even last for the whole debate. In the second hour of it, he
indicated his support for women in combat.
Meanwhile, an unmolested Newt Gingrich, freed from the
pressures of “frontrunner status,” resumed his role as the
commanding, Olympian overseer at GOP debates. He told CNN’s John
King off again, demanding to know why he was peppering Republican
candidates with gotcha questions about “birth control” when he and
his pals in the press had never asked Barack Obama about his
support for the killing of infants as a state senator in Illinois.
After that scolding, a rebuffed King didn’t even bother to
recapitulate the dumb question that he had initially teed up to the
candidates.
Newt’s tack here is exactly right. Why let a media of
secularist bigots and the ghoulish party of Planned Parenthood
dictate the terms of this race? Go on offense in the culture war,
GOP. Remind Americans that the Democrats are the party of killing
the unborn, some infants, the annoyingly disabled, and the
inconvenient elderly. Remind Americans that Obama wanted elementary
school students subjected to the sick sex ed propaganda of Planned
Parenthood. Remind Americans that Obama is not at war with radical
Islam but with orthodox Christianity.
Isn’t it telling that the only time the Maureen Dowds
speak of “mullahs” pejoratively is when they affix that label to
Christians like Santorum? They speak darkly of conscientious
Christians as “dangerous fanatics.” Never mind that most of the
violence in America is coming from the abortion mills liberals
champion and finance. Feminists on their second or third abortion
are a lot scarier to me than homeschooling Christians.
But let’s get back to the debate. Even as Romney took his
mittens off and suckerpunched Santorum for earmarks Mitt himself
supported — Romney remains the smarmy apple polisher who likes to
narc on his misbehaving classmates — one could almost see strings
attached to the reinvented Republican’s back. Romney is the
semi-reformed RINO dummy of high-priced ventriloquists — a dummy
whose words and robotic jerks come from the pushing and pulling of
scummy strategists and pollsters who crawl along a corrupt corridor
from Boston to D.C. His “Fortune 500” campaign makes me sick. Is
the GOP really going to nominate this fraud?
The cheapness and inauthenticity of his campaign is too
depressing for words. One small example of this dismal charade came
early in the debate when Romney made an utterly random reference to
“George Costanza.” Apparently, one of Romney’s oh-so-clever
strategists told him to dispel his image as a nerd trapped in the
1950s by spicing up his answers with “hip” references. So what does
Romney do? He cites, for no apparent reason, a character from a
sitcom that went off NBC’s schedule over a decade ago.
