A Moment In Romney History

I guess I should have tied some of this into my prior post about how the Repugs are telling Hispanics in this country to take a hike based on their confrontational position on immigration and so-called “sanctuary cities,” but it seems that Willard Mitt was chanting this mantra recently (and gosh golly, Mitt, it sounds like your whole “down-home” thing plays just oh so well with the voting demographic of this country that is shrinking faster than any other).

Well, it turns out that I overlooked the 40th anniversary last Friday of the self-destruction of the presidential hopes of Mitt’s father, George (here).

As Boston Globe columnist Neil Swidey wrote last August...

On August 31, 1967, George Romney, the voluble, vigorous three-term governor of Michigan and former automotive executive, walked into a Detroit TV station to be interviewed by a local broadcaster with a lousy hairpiece. For more than a year, Romney had been talked about as the Republicans' best chance for winning the White House in 1968. But the national campaign trail, at first welcoming, had become bumpy. Reporters pressed Romney repeatedly to explain his ever-evolving and often confusing position on military involvement in Vietnam, which he had strongly supported after a visit to South Vietnam in 1965 but later declared a tragic mistake. Polls showed his lead fading.

So, during that August interview, when he was asked to explain his inconsistent position on the war, Romney replied, "Well, you know, when I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get."

The word brainwashing conjured up powerful images at that time, with an America perceiving a threat of Communist indoctrination and the realization of our captured military facing torture (including John McCain, of course – though his “little jerk” remark was typically brittle and showed why he’ll never be president, I thought student William Sleaster showed even worse conduct here). Also, movies such as “The Manchurian Candidate” were getting churned out frequently to dramatize the dangers of the conflicting ideologies at that time.

The only comparison I can think of for today would be if a candidate were to say that he (or she, though Hillary would be too smart) was temporarily addled because he’d been to Iraq and survived an IED attack (though it’s hard to say how our corporate media would spin something like that; a remark like that would be devastating to a candidate, as it should be).

Is it fair to evaluate someone’s entire candidacy based on one misstep? Probably not, depending on how big a misstep it was. But it does give an indication as to that person’s judgment (and it would have been nice, by the way, if this little faux pas by a one-time candidate had made its way through our media as fast as George Romney’s did – who’s to say how it would have affected the outcome in 2000 had our corporate media reported that Dubya had mocked Karla Faye Tucker, who was about to be executed as a result of his signature on the warrant as Texas governor?).