Romney as President? He Will Need to Find His Principles First
(This is part of my response to Ken Connor’s article about Mitt Romney’s refusal to sign a pro-life pledge)
A man is only as good as his word, and Romney has changed the meaning and stance of his words too many times for my comfort. I get the feeling there are very few policy positions he would not be wiling to sacrifice if he thought it would guarantee him the Presidency. I will not vote for him in the primaries, although I would hold my nose and vote for him in the election because he is waaaay better than Obama. But Romney, like Harry Ried, is truly a poor excuse of an example for what conservative Christians believe, let alone conservative Mormons, because conservative people of faith do not extol such things as “pragmatism” and make virtues out of compromising ones’ principles. Tell me, if you can, what is left of a man’s character if he be willing to sacrifice his principles on the altar of political expediency? There is nothing foundational left except vices, and for such a man, the office of dogcatcher is placing too much of the public trust in his hands. Ken Conner is right in his premise: Either life begins at conception, or it does not. Either life is sacred, or it is not. Any politician who cannot answer where he or she stands on those two statements in a clear, unambiguous manner, and be willing to sign a pro-life pledge if that is in accord with their answers, does not deserve elective office and the public trust that goes with it. If they are willing to lie and prevaricate on such solemn and weighty issues, nothing will hold them to a fealty for truth in commonplace matters. Or, in other words: they are wolves in sheep’s clothing; from such run away.
Adding more to my displeasure with his heralded lead in the polls is that Romney is a RINO, not an actual Republican conservative. Why in the world would the liberal media be playing lapdog to his presumed “frontrunner” status otherwise, except for the fact that he is the closest to a democrat-lite from a social perspective of the current Republican field, and he likes big government? An easy rule of thumb to live by in assessing media coverage of Republican candidates is the ones receiving the most favorable coverage by the liberal media are either unelectable in a general election, so far left of the conservative Republican base that they really should change their party affiliation (thinking Specter here, although that did not save him), or suffer both defects. Kevin McCollough noted that for over a year before the 2008 elections polls indicated that in a straight up race Huckabee would defeat Obama, yet the mainstream media sang the praises of McCain while doing everything it could to vilify and marginalize Huckabee, to keep him from gaining traction. The purpose of the liberal media is to elect liberal candidates: you will never find unbiased coverage of conservative Republican candidates in the MSM unless, well….., I cannot think of an exception.
But besides the annoying victory parade being lead by the MSM almost two years before the actual 2012 election, Romney has demonstrated some very serious lapses in judgement from a policy perspective, the most glaring of which is Romneycare. Enacted while he was Governor of Mass., it is the same monstrosity at a state level that national Democrats foisted on the unsuspecting citizenry at the Federal level, hence Pelosi’s famous quote that “we would have to pass the bill to be able to find out what was in it”! So much for transparency in government, eh? Yet Romney is either too arrogant to admit he made a mistake in signing Romneycare into law, too duplicitous in thinking we the voter cannot tell the difference between (actually the striking similarities of) the two pieces of unconstitutional legislation, or so completely tone-deaf to the national rejection of Obamacare that he has never said he was sorry to have allowed the bill to live. Nay, he defends his part in the process, making only the feeble argument that the legislature was overwhelmingly Democrat, so he did the best he could. No, the BEST he could have done would have been to veto the beast, and let it slide into the long, dark, night of legislative limbo. So…., he is either a liar, dumb, two-faced, or arrogant to a fault: any of which disqualifies him as a presidential contender in my eyes. Say Romneycare and Obamacare in the same sentence, realizing that they both focus on the same goal of single-payer insurance run by the government, enacted through coercion, tax penalties and in Romneycare’s case, characterized by a complete and abject failure to produce any positive results. Now try to say “Romney is a conservative” with a straight face. Ain’t gonna happen.
