Which Mitt Romney do you trust most?
Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a rally in Fishersville, Va., Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012. / AP Photo/Steve Helber
This post originally appeared on Slate.
Three weeks ago Mitt Romney was confronted with a secretly recorded video in which he dismissed President Obama's supporters--the now famous 47 percent--as congenital moochers who were addicted to government because they took no personal responsibility for themselves. Now he disavows the remarks. "I was completely wrong," he told Fox News on Thursday.
So, in the wake of his impressive debate performance and barely a month before the election, undecided voters are asked to play another round of "Where's Willard?" Is Mitt Romney the man in that secret video, who thinks ill of almost half the country he hopes to govern? Or is he the man we met in Colorado, an agile master of facts, policies, and economics who seems perfectly personable and maybe even friendly? Or is he someone else altogether?
The president's aides say, "Look at the secret video! There he is!" They want you to find the real Romney among the chafing dishes, clinking cutlery, and pricey suits. (A new Obama video says "He said it, he meant it.") Don't be fooled by the man on the debate stage, they say. That's just a mask. To make this case, the president must rely on a conceit that often gets applied to him. Conservatives have argued since 2004 that Obama's essential liberal desires are always roiling beneath a careful facade. These Republicans sit at the border on night watch, waiting for the moment when a window opens exposing Obama's inner radical. When they see it, they sound the alarm. Last week, that meant pointing to a video of Obama alternating the intonation of his voice during a speech in front of a predominantly black audience in 2007.
Romney's allies argue that the debate, not the video, revealed the real man. "He has finally shed the duct tape of the primaries," says GOP strategist Mike Murphy of Romney's debate performance. Romney took the stage more like the man who won the governorship in the blue state of Massachusetts than the man who won the GOP nomination.
But finding the essential Romney isn't so simple. The experiment itself is flawed. Voters are being asked to detect the truth from two different acts of artifice. One is a set-piece performance recorded by the television networks. The other was a set-piece performance captured by a member of the catering staff. Both are performances. Like all politicians, Romney was playing to the crowd in both cases. The question is not which one represents the true Romney, but which crowd will he play to when he's in office.
The essential character of Mitt Romney matters because we can never have a policy debate detailed enough to see exactly how his values will play out when the hard choices need to be made. Both candidates agree that the federal government must be rebalanced between the services people expect and the taxes they are willing to pay for those services. So who do you trust?
We can certainly try to look at policies. In the debate, Romney and Obama traded accusations about their Medicare ideas. Romney believes the free market can lower costs and retain quality. President Obama believes that costs can be cut through government nudges of the free market.
How do we know who has the better policy? We can look at studies and try to follow their reasoning. Sometimes there aren't enough studies or the candidates don't want to answer our follow-up questions. With Mitt Romney, in particular, on the questions of taxes and Medicare, his goals are so grand as to be either fantastical or untestable. If they don't work out as planned, his aides say, he'll tweak them. So even when we want to talk about policy, we find ourselves circling back to the same place: Trust me.
Since President Obama has been in office we've seen how "trust me" works in practice. Voters can make their own individual assessment of whether President Obama has kept their trust or not. They don't have to look for secret windows into his soul. But with Mitt Romney it's not so easy. It would be nice if we could force the challenger to offer a budget as a qualification for running for president (perhaps the Commission on Presidential Debates could get on that?), but until we do, the essential question is how will Mitt Romney behave when he's staring at the hard choices in the Oval Office. Will he be a moderate of the center-right as he appeared to be on the debate stage or will he be the ruthless realist of that video? It depends on which Willard Mitt Romney shows up.
More from Slate:
Romney Shows Softer Side While Campaigning in Florida, Attacks Obama on Taxes
Obama's Drone Dilemma
No, Romney Didn't Use a Cheat Sheet at Wednesday's Debate
Popular in Politics
- For GOP, scandals could be an electoral plus - or minus 155 Comments
- Officials on Benghazi: "We made mistakes, but without malice" 298 Comments
- Where is the Benghazi cover-up Republicans promised? 381 Comments
- FBI seeks anonymous source behind Menendez allegations
- Ousted IRS chief: "I did not mislead" the American people 258 Comments
- IRS targeting overlooked biggest soft money groups
- Republicans use IRS scandal to tar Obamacare
- Why Obama should worry that current scandals might impact 2016 226 Comments
So when he starts making nice, beware. You're next. His vision to create jobs is that factory in China with bunkhouses and barbed-wire fences with armed guard towers that he mentioned in the same speech as his infamous dig at the 47%ers. Instead of making things better, we compete with China by going back to the 1890 Guilded Age of Robber Barons and child labor.
Higher education and healthcare will be priveledges for the rich. After being converted from middle class to working poor, the loss of upward mobility will be institutionalized thru laws getting rid of unions.
When he gave his 47%er speech, he was in front of the people who were already all on his side and from the demographic he truly cares about. The rest of us are "marks" to be conned. So the real Mitt was in the 47% speech, the debate was lies to con the masses into handing over the reigns of power to him. "Trust me. I've never had the stance of large tax cuts to the rich on the backs of the middle class. I care about 100% of the people. I like many items in Obamacare and will reinstate them once we repeal it all. I care about Social Security. Just trust me."
And if he wins and gets the House, Senate and then further skews the Supreme Court, he can have the laws changed to institutionalize all this new "government for the highest bidder" and the rest of us are left with bleak futures. If you think it is already this way, crank it up 100 times worse.
The Romney that said he'll give $ 5 trillion in tax-cuts that favor the wealthy, or the one on the stage last Wednesday evening who said he never made such a claim ?
The Mitt Romney who said we don't need any more teachers in our classrooms, or the one who said we need more ?
The Mitt Romney who invested in companies that were the inventors of out-sourcing American jobs to foreign countries, or the one who said he wasn't aware of the problem ?
The "new" Mitt Romney doesn't want to be held accountable for what he's believed in for years, and been telling anyone who'll listen for the last year....the only way to keep up with what he "thinks" is to be damn sure you read the paper everyday, twice a day if you can. This country and this world does not need someone as opportunistic and indecisive and delusional as Mitt Romney obviously is. He thinks the United States is still locked in the cold-war struggle with Russia that ended several decades ago, this is why he calls Russia our "number one foe." I guess he's never heard of a little thing called terrorism, but that's okay, keep pretending it's 1960, and Khrushchev just slammed his shoe on the podium at the U.N. No respected foreign policy expert knows what the hell Romney is talking about when it comes to his take on foreign policy matters, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. The people who are advising him
on foreign policy are the same people who handled that task for Bush....you remember those days don't you ? Those good old days when America was actually DESPISED by most of the planet....not because we stood by honorable and worthy principles and intentions, but because those policies were so damn stupid, divisive and destructive. Yeah, let's go back to those days when the WORLD hated our guts...."you bet'cha."
The United States can no longer afford to police the entire planet and use our military each and every time to convince countries to think otherwise when they disagree with our vision of what THEIR country should be. Not only is that dangerous, but it is costly in terms of lives lost and treasure wasted that we no longer have.....and when you couple that with reducing taxes by trillions of dollars as Romney proposes, leaving everyone in this country to face a nightmare vision of what these extremist right-wingers have created, while the entire military-industrial complex burns thru what's left of OUR resources, and more and more of OUR Children (not theirs), have to die or see their lives destroyed to defend their greed and insanity, it's time to say....NO MORE.
The Karl Roves and Adelsons and Grover Norquists and Ralph Reeds and Koch Brothers and the chicken-**** politicians who are paid extremely well to do their bidding DO NOT call the shots in this country if the PEOPLE of this country do not let them. DO NOT support these modern-day Carpetbaggers and Robber-Barons whose only interest is their own. Vote them down, and throw what's left of them out of office before it truly is too-late to do anything about it.
I think we can trust that romney will do his best to start wars and NOT ONE of his children or grandchildren will be going to fight them!
Wouldn't it be More Productive if Our Elected Leaders Started Working Together as AMERICANS for AMERICANS and AMERICA, instead of just bickering, stalling and posturing for the next election as democrats and republicans! The American People have had it with this unproductive BS! The sad thing is that both parties stink! Neither party is really looking out for the best interest of the US citizens who elect them and who they're supposed to represent.
YouTube - Giant Sucking Sound - Ross Perot 1992 Presidential Debate.flv
And this something that most of us already knew at that time, because it was just common sense!
You may want to check this site out: economyincrisis.org
economyincrisis.org/content/protectionism-matter-self-survival#comment-6632
economyincrisis.org/content/unethical-predatory-practices
Too bad we'll never see these types of articles in the mainstream media
It's appears that the foreign interests are influencing our media as well, just watch the ABC Nightline special on Apple's iPhone and iPad products being made in China that ends with the dramatic biased comment "That you can be the nation that lines up to make these products or the nation the lines up to buy them, but it's impossible to be both". What BS propaganda! ABC has direct ties to Apple and Foxconn.
Seems in previous elections that both parties were always able to distract and polarize voters with insignificant peripheral issues, which ended up getting most of them so caught up in the BS that they lost sight of the bigger picture.
OBAMA/BIDEN 2012 : )
Face it the man just isn't consistent! He's NOT reliable!
that now Obama wants to steal your 401k. I thought he was the antichrist, no wait, he's a Muslim, err no he's a socialist marxist communist. Yeah that's it. Come on people, quit listening to Rush Limbaugh. Nothing he says is the truth. Remember when he said all addicts should be thrown in jail and the key thrown away? A month later everyone finds out he's an opiate addict? It's just shameful. You can talk about Obama's failed policies all day long but the simple fact is that the Republicans are all Anti American Obstructionists. They've had a 4 year plan to obstruct every singe thing Obama tries to do just so they can win. You can't judge a man in those circumstances. We ARE better off today than four years ago and would be a helluva lot better off if they would quit obstructing everything he does. Trickle down economics do not work when everyone's money is in offshore accounts.
Did everyone forget the 47% comments? How about Mittens dog riding on the roof for hours. I say you can truly judge a man by how he treats animals and Mittens is one cruel Narcissit. He's arrogant, greedy and feels that he's entitled to be Presient because gosh darn he's just so great. He and Ann Romney care NOTHING for the midle class or any class that is not the 1% but in your blind Limbaugh zombie hatred of Obama you all pretend to ignore that. Just because he's a business man doesn't mean he can run the country. Wen businesses are going under they sell them to the highest bidder just like Bain did with all the smaller businesses they bought and then pocketed everyones 401k and Insurance all the while usng Federal funds to do it. He is a hypocrite plaine and simple
Here is what you Republicans support:
http://thelastofthemillenniums.wordpress.com/tag/republican-obstruction/
AMEN!