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Pirate Smile

(27,617 posts)
Wed Dec 14, 2011, 01:03 PM Dec 2011

Mitt="swindler who plots to win your mother's heart &make off with her fortune".Will he stay bought?

Two Candidates

Jonathan Chait: "The robotic consistency of Romney's newfound conservatism does contrast sharply with Gingrich, who lurches between hysterical right-wing paranoia and bouts of bipartisanship. And yet the erratic character of Gingrich's swings suggests that they're unplanned, and thus that they spring from actual conviction, albeit momentary convictions. Gingrich actually believes what he is advocating at the moment he is advocating it. Nobody can plausibly say the same of Romney."

"Romney is the handsome swindler who plots to win your mother's heart and make off with her fortune. Gingrich is like the husband who periodically gets drunk and runs off to spend a week with a stripper in a low-rent motel but always comes home in the end. Which one would you rather see your mother marry?"

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/12/14/two_candidates.html

Full article:

Romney’s Eerie Post-Flip-Flop Consistency

By Jonathan Chait

When Mitt Romney decided to get Republican ideological-purity cautionary tale and non-witch Christine O’Donnell to announce her endorsement of him, he was probably thinking about how useful it would be to have the support of another staunch conservative. He may not have been thinking about some of the secondary issues involved in this plan, such as the fact that it would require O’Donnell to talk, which would involve her saying awkward things like, “he’s been consistent since he changed his mind.”

The line actually gets to the nub of the conservative question on Romney. Since he changed his mind, he has indeed been dogmatically consistent. (In contrast to Newt Gingrich.) But why?

One of the most revealing stories I’ve seen on Romney was written by Jonathan Weisman last month in The Wall Street Journal. In it, Weisman chronicles the degree to which Romney simply flipped a switch in 2005, deciding virtually overnight to stop courting moderates and liberals he needed to get elected in Massachusetts and to start courting the right. The switch occurred across the board, on social as well as economic issues:

-snip-
The positive interpretation of this narrative, if you’re a conservative, is that Romney will stay bought — he decided to ingratiate himself with the right, and he needs to retain the right's support to accomplish anything. That’s more or less the argument Ramesh Ponnuru made in his National Review cover story endorsing him. The negative interpretation is that Romney is essentially running a con, though it’s impossible to tell if he was conning Massachusetts then or is conning Republicans now. (My guess, based on Romney’s admiration for his moderate father, is that he’s conning conservatives now, but I can’t really be certain.) When you’re running a con, of course you stay consistent – you have to keep up the front, no matter what.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/12/romneys-eerie-post-flip-flop-consistency.html
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