So the Boston headquarters of Mitt Romney’s campaign is mad at the press for the coverage their candidate has received over the past two weeks. Philadelphia-area blogger BooMan, as he often does, gets to the heart of the matter:
“…the main problem is that Mitt Romney is simply lying almost every time he opens his mouth and he isn’t supplementing those lies with any substance. Literally, the only thing to discuss after Romney speaks is whether what he just said was fair or accurate, and it never is. He isn’t even offering a theory about how his tax cuts would help the middle class or how his Medicare voucher plan would save the program. He won’t talk about any of it in any kind of detail. If he won’t even defend his own platform, how can he expect the press to do it for him.”
There’s still a decent chance Mitt Romney will be the next president of the United States. But if he loses, there will be countless post-mortems seeking to identify the primary reason for his defeat. To the extent (admittedly limited) that the candidate himself can influence the outcome of an election, it will be hard to top Charlie Pierce’s Esquire article about “Life Under Romneycare”.
Pierce tells the story of the greatest accomplishment of Mitt Romney’s public life: the creation of “Romneycare”—a conservative, market-based law that has allowed Massachusetts to provide near-universal access to health care for all its citizens. It is a law that exists because Mitt Romney made it happen. He made it happen, in part, because he wanted a platform on which he could run for president, a platform on which his party would nominate him and the citizenry would elect him. And in 2006 when he signed Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006: an Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care, he thought he had a ticket that would enable him to become George W. Bush’s successor, the next “compassionate conservative” to sit in the Oval Office. Instead Romney has spent the past six years seeking an office that, the oddsmakers say today, he will not occupy.
After telling the story of how Mitt Romney brought universal health care coverage to Massachusetts, and of the hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents—Charlie Pierce included—who have benefited from Romney’s greatest public accomplishment, Pierce concludes,
“So I wonder now how he has come to this unprecedented pass. How much is the presidency really worth to the man? How deeply do you have to scour your soul to eliminate the good you did for the people who elected you? How much of your conscience do you have to excise before there’s not enough left to remind you that, once, you helped people? What kind of a man plays his own virtue for laughs and turns the better angels of his nature into carnival bozos above a dunk tank for the amusement of the rubes?
That is the place whence springs the fundamental dishonesty of the Romney campaign — the place where he somehow made the decision that the best thing he ever did in public life was the thing that would keep him from being president, and that the latter ambition was worth more than all the work that went into the former, and all the benefits that work produced. It is a fearsome, dead-hearted gamble with the soul….”
crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/