The mainstream press really wants to believe that Mitt Romney is going to start being a nice, safe right-centrist any day now — but if so, that transformation isn’t going to begin for at least another three and a half weeks, if it ever begins at all:
Mitt Romney will deliver the commencement address at the evangelical Christian university led by Jerry Falwell, Jr., Liberty University said in a Thursday post to their website.
The school, located in Lynchburg, Virginia, will host the likely GOP nominee for their May 12 graduation….
The press will continue to be obtuse about this. Paradoxically, this and every other example of Romney kissing up to the far right is going to described in the press as a sign that Romney shouldn’t be regarded as a real right-winger. To you and me, he’s pledging his allegiance to the far right and Christian right (don’t expect any Sister Souljah moments in the commencement address); to the press — or at least this is how I assume the reports will go — his presence at the school will be treated as a sign of how much ground he has to make up to win the loyalty of the fundies. And when he picks a fundy-friendly running mate, that will be treated as a sign of how much ground he has to make up with the fundies. And when he fails to modify any of the far-right positions he took on social issues in the primaries, that will be treated as a sign … etc., etc., ad nauseam. Everything he does to become just like one of them will be deemed a sign that he’s not one of them. He really might have to win the White House and nominate the Supreme Court justices who overturn Roe before the press starts to say, Gee, ya know, maybe he really wasn’t just doing all that outreach just for show.
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AND…: The New York Times responds just as I expected:
… for Mr. Romney, this invitation offers a chance to shore up one of his weaknesses within his base, as many evangelicals remain wary of his Mormon faith.
The more he wraps his arms around these people, the more we’re going to hear about how far apart they are.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
Booman:
You left an < IT > tag unclosed.
thanks. it’s fixed now.
It is true that the media assumes the real Romney is the guy who ran in 2002 not 2008 or 2012. But what is the basic for that?
The basis is the press’s need to believe that there’s nothing really wrong with the GOP, that any apparent craziness in the Republican Party is the work of a few outliers and will all be over and done with after the next election cycle.
If you had a relative who was anorexic or a pedophile or an alcoholic, you might be similarly in denial, just because you’d want to think you didn’t have an obligation to intervene. Much easier to look for signs that no effort on your part is needed. That’s how the Beltway press is now regarding the GOP. Mitt winning the nomination is a sign that they can just ignore all the craziness.
yes. Except it is increasingly an impossible game to play because people like Bachmann, Palin, Allen West, Ted Nugent, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert keep opening their mouths and saying crazy-ass shit.
Sorry about that tag.
No problem. I do it all the time.
What happens when you leave an italic tag open in a front-page story is that it italicizes the rest of the stories on the front-page.
It’s an annoying glitch.
The cynic in me says that if Romney won’t move to the center, the press will just move the center to Romney.
Well put. That’s what I expect too.
he can’t move to the center, his party won’t allow it. he may well have, ipso facto secured the nomination, but if the caucus in colorado last weekend…where he secured less than half the delegates… is any indication of the mood within the ratpublican party there’s going to be continuing pressure for him to move even further to the right all the way to the convention. the floor fight over the platform should be ver interesting.
indeed, imo, there is no “center” for him to tack to.
Right.
I expect Romney’s speech here to be filled with references to “faith”, “relgious freedom in America” generic sort of rhetoric– to avoid the large gap between evangelical Christianity and Mormonism.
Yup — and full of all kinds of references to how evil and horrible Obama is (especially to “people of faith,” but not limited to them either, because Obama is, of course, history’s greatest monster).
People don’t understand how Romney won despite right-wing distrust of him. Well, it helps that he sure sounds as if he really loathes Obama with every fiber of his being, just like the base.
He’s much more of a firebrand than I expected. He’s easier to hate than McCain. He’s even getting closer to W. levels circa 2001 for me.
How do you find where the center of an amorphous blob is, in order to determine whether it has moved to the center? Watch a video of an amoeba sometime and try to decide when it’s at the center. So of course that is what the “journalist” yappers devote all their time and space to. Never mind that we are on the verge of the most clear cut election on economic policy in decades. Lets keep yammering about “center”, “left”, and “right” and forget the substance. That’s what gets eyeballs.
Left to their own devices, I suspect that the press would “notice” it sometime around March 2013. Now, if there were some opposition party or some such that would make an issue of it, then we’d probably push that back to Dec 2012 or so.