The Case Against Mitt Romney: His Disgraceful Primary Campaign

Note: This post has been carried forward from earlier today.
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This is the final of four posts covering:

• What Mitt Romney did to Massachusetts while he was Bay State governor.
• What he did to the nation while he was governor.
• His risky associations and entanglements. This one has a “surprise.”
• (THIS POST) What he did to the nation, the Republican Party, and John McCain during his GOP primary run.

UPDATE: Though the details below are important, Dick Morris does a nice job this morning (HT Ironman, in the first comment below) describing the essence of Romney’s unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination –

And John McCain rightly did not like Romney’s tactics during the primaries. Using his gigantic money advantage to dominate television, he seized early leads in virtually all of the primary states, only to lose them later on. And, when they started slipping away, he resorted to unfair, distorted, scorched-earth negative ads, betting that his opponents couldn’t afford to spend enough for the truth to catch up to his charges.

John McCain should not forget this, and should pick someone else.

UPDATE 2: From Gregg Jackson and John Haskins this past Sunday (title abbreviated) — “Romney a Better Fit for Obama Than McCain.”

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MITT ROMNEY’S DISGRACEFUL PRIMARY CAMPAIGN

Strategy — Personal Attacks on McCain

Mitt Romney himself violated the GOP’s 11th Commandment (”Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican”) to an extent that, at least in my memory, no other major GOP presidential candidate ever has.

Let’s be clear on this: The 11th Commandment doesn’t say that you can’t criticize your opponents’ proposals, policies, and decisions. As an example, this leaves George Bush the Elder’s criticism of Ronald Reagan’s proposed supply-side tax cuts as “voodoo economics” in the clear. Bush the Elder was harshly criticizing a Reagan proposal, but not Reagan the person.

Mitt Romney himself went after John McCain the person. Here are two illustrations of the best example.

Example 1: Sweetwater, FL (direct YouTube link; major HT to Hot Pres) –

At about the 0:45 mark, the vid’s author demonstrates that John McCain’s assertion that Romney supported a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is accurate (”timetables and milestones”). The we see Romney saying about McCain: “He’s dishonest, he’s being dishonest.” That’s a real, live, 11th Commandment-breaking personal attack on John McCain.

Example 2: From another Florida location

From MSNBC’s First Read:

Informed by a reporter that McCain had made those remarks, Romney responded tersely: “You know, I don’t know why he’s being dishonest. But that’s dishonest. To say that I have a specific date is simply wrong and is dishonest and he should apologize. That is not the case. I’ve never said that.”

I don’t understand why John McCain got over this. Maybe Romney has done the “I was wrong, I am sorry” thing, but I tend to doubt it. But since McCain apparently has gotten over it, and then some, he still needs to recognize the serious damage Democrats could inflict on his campaign by running and re-running Romney’s personal attacks.

Strategy — “McCain Can’t Beat Obama,” and Its Larger Implication

The ABC video link is here.

On the eve of New Hampshire’s primary, clearly sensing a devastating loss, Romney desperately went where no one of the same party should ever go, as he questioned in pretty unequivocal terms his rival’s ability to win the general election over a specific opponent from the other side (Barack Obama).

Romney owed it to the party to stick to how he might enhance turnout in the GOP base and reach out to independents and Democrats frustrated with their party’s radicalization. (Hillary Clinton made a similar mistake in the closing weeks of her campaign.) Again, this is great fodder for Democrats in the final months.

But then again, for Mitt Romney, it has always been about personal ambition. If party loyalty furthers that personal ambition, fine; if not, oh well (yes, I realize that McCain is vulnerable to this charge, but A - He’s the nominee; B - We don’t need two people with the same mindset; C - Romney’s “party be damned” mindset is on steroids compared to McCain’s).

Mitt Romney left the Massachusetts Republican Party in its worst shape in years. He is the first GOP governor in 16 years to hand the keys to the Governor’s mansion over to a Democrat. The GOP’s numbers in the Bay State’s Senate and House are much lower than they were when his term began in 2002. Yet he is a darling of the party elite and the pundit class. It makes no sense.

Other Primary Campaign Strategies and Events

(1) Romney impugned the good names of conveniently-dead others, including Ronald Reagan, Henry Hyde, and his own mother to make his supposed prolife “epiphany” look more credible.

Neither Reagan nor Hyde were ever pro-abortion, let alone “adamantly pro-abortion,” the term Romney used to describe Reagan. This December post proves it.

According to this Boston Globe column, Romney claimed that his own mother was clearly proabortion, but the evidence he submitted to support that contention was at best ambiguous.

Another reason invoking the Gipper in his abortion “epiphany” was so repulsive — It’s way too easy to forget that during his 1994 losing Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy, Romney supported the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act,” whose passage would have meant an expansion of abortion that probably would likely have rendered the Hyde Amendment’s prohibition of federal funding of abortions null and void.

(2) To burnish his 2nd Amendment credibility, Romney said that “I’ve pretty much been a hunter all my life.” As can best be determined, he’s been hunting a total of two or three times in his entire life.

(3) Mitt Romney’s apologists and his acolytes frequently and shamelessly played the “you must be anti_________ (insert name of Romney’s religion here) card when criticisms were directed his way. Of course, there were unfair broadsides aimed at his religious affiliation, but most had nothing to do with his ________ (insert name of Romney’s religion here) faith. The whining was persistent enough, and pervasive enough, that it’s reasonable to believe that this tactical response was recommended by the Romney campaign.

(4) Romney ruthlessly went after those who attempted to expose his unilateral imposition of same-sex marriage.

In November of last year, Christian talker Sandy Rios revealed (go to the long version of Part 7 near the end of the link) that when she asked Romney to explain what he did at a small gathering, he launched into a tirade against her, said she was lying, and invoked his supposedly superior knowledge because of his degree from Harvard Law School. The bottom line of Rios’s reax: “I saw first-hand that this man really, really is duplicitous.”

In December, conservative talk host and author Gregg Jackson (”Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies“) called in to the Howie Carr show at WRKO, where Carr was interviewing Romney. Jackson co-hosts Pundit Review Radio at that station on Sunday nights; thus, he and Carr are colleagues. He also blogs at PunditReview.com. When Jackson asked the candidate why he violated his oath of office, Romney, instead of attempting to answer the question, called Jackson “slightly delusional,” and proceeded to provide a non-answer that had to do with birth certificates instead of marriage certificates. Incredibly, Romney then said that “Everybody in the entire nation knows that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made same-sex marriage legal and that I fought it in every single way I could.” No we don’t, pal, and the pitiful posturing you attempted at fighting it is in grave danger of going by the wayside. Carr didn’t let colleague Jackson speak again.

Romney supporters also engaged in marginalizing those who were attempting to bring his true record in imposing Goodridge on the Bay State to light. One example: In January 2007, Dean Barnett, when he was blogging at Hugh Hewitt’s place, invited his readers to conclude that Mass Resistance’s Brian Camenker was engaging in “homophobia” and “hatred” merely by publishing “The Mitt Romney Deception.”

(5) In response to a question about his sons not serving in the military, Romney claimed, with all sincerity, that his sons serve the country by campaigning for him.

Yes he did. In August 2007:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by “helping me get elected.”

(6) Romney claimed that his father George marched with Martin Luther King in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in 1963, and never backtracked when it was proven otherwise.

Though George Romney strongly supported the 1960s civil-rights movement, and he did march in Grosse Pointe in 1963, he never marched with King. Though is every reason to believe that Mitt Romney and the campaign knew this, on the Friday afternoon before the extended Christmas holiday, they found two people with faulty memories who “remembered” seeing George Romney and MLK marching together. Because of the cynical timing, that “news” stayed out there, unrefuted for days. The Washingotn Post’s Fact Check Blog gave Romney and his campaign “>four Pinocdhios for the deception.

Subsequent investigations into King’s whereabouts at the time proved that he was in New Jersey on the day in question. By then, the false meme had a 4-5 day life.

To my knowledge, neither Romney or the campaign has ever fessed up to “my father marched with MLK” lie.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Mitt Romney Wants What Is Best for Mitt Romney

Let me be very clear about this. This is, of course, “only” a personal take based on Romney’s horrendous track record in Massachusetts and what I’ve observed in the past eight months.

If John McCain picks Mitt Romney as his running mate, Romney will be a loyal servant of John McCain only as long as it is in Mitt Romney’s interest to be a loyal servant of John McCain. If it is no longer worthwhile in Mitt’s view before November because the opposition has what appears to be a big lead, I expect that he will reduce his visibility. If the McCain-Romney ticket wins, and President McCain’s popularity plunges for a sustained period, I expect that Romney’s first instinct will be to distance himself, so he can begin laying a foundation for eventually talking an aging McCain out of attempting a second term.

John McCain needs to ignore the money Mitt Romney has recently helped him raise, and to ignore the additional money Mitt Romney himself may give to the McCain campaign. He, Cindy, and perhaps a few of his closest lifetime advisers need to find a nice, quiet, secluded place, where they can work out the answer to what is the most important question of his political career: If I select Mitt Romney, am I going to get a team player who will stick with me through thick and thin, fight for everything I believe in, and work to advance the fortunes of this nation — or am I going to get a happy-faced version of the person who ruthlessly attacked me and his other opponents and, before that, left the state he governed in a relative shambles while somehow emerging as a hero?

I believe it’s the latter. That is yet another reason why McCain should not select Mitt Romney as his running mate.

So don’t do it, John.