The New New Romney Is a New Kind of Mendacious Liar

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

10 October 12

eaving aside for the moment the audacity of Josh, we must leave it to the fanzine reporters from Tiger Beat on the Potomac to explain in-depth how the heroic intervention of the plucky Romney family forced the transition from the previously unsuccessful campaign of sheer mendacity to the campaign of sheer mendacity that seems to be on something of a roll at the moment. The basic Politico analytical technique - buying whatever magic beans are being sold, as long as the beans are sold anonymously - is perfectly suited to the fairy tale of how Ann and the boys convinced the paterfamilias to drop all this Beltway wiseguy nonsense and get back into the comfy, well-worn, three-piece, double-breasted bullshit suit he used to wear when he was governor of whatever that state was he once was governor of. Let's break down The New New Romney, shall we?

The family pushed for a new message, putting an emphasis on a softer and more moderate image for the GOP nominee - a "let Mitt be Mitt" approach they believed more accurately reflected the looser, generous and more approachable man they knew.

And, after Ann waved her magic wand, and the children all prayed really, really hard.

When the history of this campaign is written, the family intervention will be among the most important turning points in the Romney saga. Until the weeks before the first presidential debate, the candidate sided with Stevens over his family's skepticism, accepting the strategist's view that the best way to win was to point out President Barack Obama's flaws and articulate generic promises to do better.

(We interrupt Afternoon Story Hour to bring you this important announcement from the blog's Emergency Hogwash System: Is the argument here really that Romney has abandoned "generic promises to do better"? Really? More on this as events warrant.)

And for what purpose was this Very Special Columbus Day Family Special wrought?

In public and private, Ann Romney made no secret of her frustrations. Candidates' spouses often think the husband or wife is getting a raw deal, and that they are better than the political caricature being drawn. But Ann Romney's agitation was palpable: She felt the Obama campaign had dishonestly made her husband out to be something he is not, and was eager to see a more forceful response, especially one that played up his humanity. She wanted to humanize her husband; play up his charity; and showcase how in politics, business and life, he has tried to do the right thing, even when it was not popular.

Forcefully played-up humanity. The basic Romney family sales pitch since Dad decided to run for president 30 seconds after he was elected governor of whatever state that was that elected him governor that time.

That's enough of all this. Read the whole saga of Ann Romney, Political Wizard if you care to do so. (However, I tend to discount any story that depends on people's bragging anonymously about how smart they are.) Nevertheless, it has become apparent that the various sheeplings and scooplettes of our elite political media are buying this wholesale and, if the polls are any indication of it (and that's still an if), they are doing a very good job selling it out in the country. There is now an actual election going on, and we should accept that, and we should be quite amazed by the campaign being waged by the Republican candidate because, frankly, I've never seen its like before and, should it succeed, our national political handbasket will have drifted past a serious mile marker on the River Styx.

That Willard Romney is a preposterous candidate for either party to run three years after his general social and economic class nearly burned down the world economy always was a given. That, in the intervening years between his two presidential campaigns, Willard Romney really has become quite a remarkable liar is something to which we all should have become accustomed by now. (It certainly shouldn't have startled the president as much as it obviously did last week.) That he would attempt to "pivot" away from the stances he took to win the Republican primaries was as inevitable as the dawn, especially given the previous two factors we've mentioned. When it is argued that he is running a "post-truth" campaign, this should surprise approximately nobody. However, I am rather stunned that the quote from the primary debates that seems to be most revelatory of the Romney campaign was the answer he gave when poor, unfortunate Rick Perry asked him about the undocumented immigrants who once trimmed the hedges at the Romney family manse.

"I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals."

This is not just lying or fudging or flip-flopping, although it contains elements of all of these. It is the same impulse that has fueled his (apparently successful) refusal to disclose fully his tax returns. It is the same impulse that led him to say what he did in the debate about his health-care plan and pre-existing conditions, and then have his campaign dispatch Eric Fehrnstrom to the spin room to declare precisely the opposite. And it is the same impulse that led Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, to declare on Sunday that...

I'll say it right now. Every sector in town, moderates, liberals, everybody says here is the problem, you guys won't give him any credit for closing loopholes because like you guys he won't name all the loopholes while you attack him for doing it. You are attacking him for not giving the target and then you're attacking when you get the target.

This is altogether stunning. All candidates soft-pedal positions that they feel might cost them votes. (Romney's running mate is something of a past master at it.) All candidates lie, or fudge, or flip-flop with something like abandon in order to win an election. But what Willard Romney is saying to the electorate here is so deeply, profoundly cynical that it seems to me to be unprecedented. In essence, this is what he's selling to the country.

"I'm not giving you specifics because I might lose the election, and I'm telling you that right up front so you can make it part of your calculation about voting for me. If I tell you what I'm going to do, you will vote against me. I know that. You know that. We are in agreement that, if I lay out my policies in clear and unambiguous language, you will not vote for me. If I tell you explicitly that, yes, your mortgage-interest deduction is going up the spout so I can shovel a few zillion more quatloos toward the Pentagon, nobody who owns only one house ever will vote for me. So, no, I'm not going to tell you what loopholes will be closed. For that reason, and that reason alone, I am declining to tell you what I will do as your president.

"I am not refusing to do this because circumstances in office may make me go back on what I have promised. I am not George H.W. Bush. I am not refusing to do this because I have to clue what I will do if I win. I am not George W. Bush, either. I am doing this because my policy ideas will make me unpopular and therefore, I am not going to share them because the opposition may use them to say mean things about me and help me lose the election. We all are in agreement on that. I am not required to do anything that might jeopardize my chances, and that includes telling you people what I will do if you elect me, because I'm running for office, for Pete's sake."

(We should have seen this coming when newly-minted, Politico-endorsed political genius Ann Romney made pretty much the same point about the campaign's now-apparently-successful refusal to release any more of the candidate's tax returns, saying that they'd given "you people" all we needed to know, and that there would be nothing else released because to so so would provide "more material for attack." And, my dear young man, that simply is not done.)

Fehrnstrom's famous "Etch-A-Sketch" moment was of a piece with this, too. Yes, everything we've said is to truckle to our crazy-ass base, and everybody knows that is the case, so, when we completely reverse our positions two or three times before November, we will be engaging in clever campaign tactics that you should all applaud, being basically a nation of Politico reporters. Apparently, announcing your dishonesty in advance is now the highest form of political integrity. I have to stop missing so many meetings.

I've lived through two Nixon campaigns, and Reagan's image-only 1984 re-election extravaganza, and Lee Atwater's race-baiting efforts on behalf of Poppy Bush, and the two Karl Rove-scripted rodeos that elected C-Plus Augustus, and I can honestly say I've never seen the profound combination of blatant mendacity and obvious cynicism that is the Romney campaign at this particular historical moment. If it succeeds, to hell with it. Let's just have a swimsuit competition in 2016.

Also, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXmeBUZtdI8

How the Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

10 October 12

ell, it's over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative - a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it's not so much the result that matters - it's the quiet.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.

Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected. For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next. And any person who's been subjected to 720 consecutive days of propaganda is not likely to take the news well if he gets the wrong result, whether it's a victory for Obama or for Romney. By that point, the networks have spent two years finding new ways each day to convince him that the world is going to disintegrate into some commie or Hitlerian version of Mad Max, to keep him coming back and watching ads.

The campaign should start and finish in six weeks, and there should be free TV access to both candidates. And it should be illegal to publish poll numbers. This isn't as crazy as it sounds - they actually had such a law in Russia while I lived there, and people were much happier. (Well, they were still miserable, because they were Russian, but at least they weren't stressing about poll numbers.) Think about it: Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story - I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. Can you imagine if your favorite news network had to do stories like, "What is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation up to, and what do each of the candidates think about it?" That would be like asking Nineties-era baseball players to take the field without popping greenies - what, you mean play the game sober? Half the on-air talent would have to resign, or do ad work hawking reverse mortgages.

It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself. In every race there are now not two but three dominating figures - the Democrat, the Republican and The Process, and we're raising whole generations who hate The Process far more than they like either of the candidates. Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote. If The Process is so clearly wrong, how right can the candidates be?

If we did this right, people would come out of presidential elections exhilarated, maybe even stoked to get involved in their local races for county sheriff or D.A. (Such races would likely have more of an impact on their day-to-day lives: For the most part, when it comes to our daily routines, the president might as well be on Mars.) Instead, most of us come out of the election exhausted, in desperate need of a couple of Ambiens and determined to spend the next two years buried in Hulu reruns, afraid to even pass a news channel while couch-surfing our way to Storage Wars or a Lifetime movie.

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington. And that's a shame, because feeling optimistic shouldn't require turning off the TV or tuning out The Process. What we are witnessing, after all, is the world's greatest contest for power, an amazing fairy tale full of iconic moments that we'll watch no matter how much Sean Hannity or Chris Matthews screams at us. But it would be awesome, next time, if we could find a way to turn down the volume.