While Mitt Romney wasn’t my dream candidate, few things more infuriated me last year than the idea that the Ron Paul wing of the GOP robotically chanted – that Romney was the same as Obama.
That noted conservative tool Salon notes that it just isn’t so. The article runs down a hypothetical first 200 days of a Romney administration, based on its own publicly stated (and some privately-stated) plans:
Romney aides wince at the comparison, but their 200-day plans sound like a Bain turn-around for America’s economy: a co-ordinated series of shocks aimed at impressing investors, but likely to startle and anger many ordinary folk. Democrats would have scorned it as a wish-list for bosses and billionaires. But Mr Romney believed his reforms would work, and work fast. Benefits would follow swiftly, in the form of private investment and job creation: persuading the wider public to trust in President Romney’s competence, if not to love him.
I don’t care about “loving” a president. I just care about heading in the right direction.
We are, currently, not.
All “coulda-woulda-shoulda” aside, unless Romney went “Obama-like” on the whole “I don’t need no stinkin’ constitution, I’ma constitutional law professor!!” he wouldn’t get many or any “Radical” ideas through the Democrat Senate. Now he may have been better at playing the game than the woefully incompetent Current Occupant (TM), but do you really think sheep like senators (such as our own) would have done anything other than what Reid and Durbin ordered them to do?
Romney is/was a restructurer (if that’s a word). He looks at an issue and goes through a linear analytic process to get to the outcome he thinks he can reasonably deliver. I can’t imagine that he would have dismantled what is called “Obamacare”. Like the Alec Guiness character in the movie “Bridge Over the River Kwai”, he would have taken over its implementation, improved its ‘deliverables’ then, like in the movie, marveled at what he had built (just as the enemy was about to run more troops, munitions and children age 26 and under over the bridge).
Another note – although it is common in the Conservative blog-o-sphere to note “They told me if I voted for Romney….”, I have yet to see this on ‘t-shirts popular with Conservatives”. Now I realize that when you write for “The Economist” ( a magazine once described as a magazine ‘Smart’ (TM) people subscribe to yet never read), you probably don’t venture beyond the DC Beltway or west of the Hudson River. But I can’t remember any one wearing a t-shirt, let alone one with a saying on it at any gathering of RWNJ’s in recent years. These people really need to stop making things up.
And also – Romney aides? You people couldn’t manage to beat one of the worst presidents in history even when Obama received three million fewer votes than in ’08. Please don’t tell me what “you would have done” when you couldn’t even figure out how to get your own supporters to the polls.
Seflores, Romney not being able to beat one of the worst Presidents ever says more about America than it does about Mitt.
But hey, at least we are getting those free birth control pills.