Romney is owed an apology
`Romney didn't win, did he?”
That was former Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid's response to whether he regretted lying about then-GOP presidential nominee, and now Utah senator, Mitt Romney.
Reid accused Romney on the Senate floor in 2012, when he was running for president, of not having paid any taxes in four years. It was untrue and was discredited by Washington Post factcheckers and others. But that didn't stop the onslaught of unfair and inaccurate accusations and innuendos.
The Mitt Romney who ran for president in 2012 went on to vote for conviction in President Trump's impeachment trial. And that same Romney became the first known Republican senator to march with the George Floyd protesters over the weekend.
You remember 2012, right? That was the year of the last presidential election before Donald Trump's victory. And the way liberals attacked Romney's presidential campaign on opinion pages of newspapers, news broadcasts and in the media echo chamber of blue check-mark Twitter has a lot to do with how the next election went — and how this one will go. Their treatment of Romney was an inflection point for many on the right.
A recent fundraising email from the Trump campaign begins: “President Trump isn't running against Sleepy Joe Biden. He's running against the Radical Left, the Deep State, the Do-Nothing Democrats, and their partner, the real opposition party, the Fake News media.”
Trump didn't invent the idea of the media as “the real opposition party.” In the modern era the tactic dates to Richard Nixon. In 1988, George H.W. Bush goosed his shot at the nomination by aggressively pushing back against CBS' Dan Rather in an interview. Rather's failed attempt to destroy his son's re-election in September of 2004 by using forged documents only confirmed conservative hatred of the media in general and Rather in particular. You could see conservative hatred of media reaching critical mass when Newt Gingrich turned nearly every debate question into an attack on the media as an elitist, partisan, fifth column determined to do the Democrats' work for them, and the base loved him for it.
But it was the understandable perception of conservatives that the press treated Romney unfairly that caused many on the right to openly declare war on the media, because they believed the press had already declared war on them.
What you see is what you get with Romney, if you don't have partisan blinders on. He's a transparently decent man who is also a transparently conventional, if a bit stiff, Republican politician. What he isn't — and wasn't in 2012 — is a racist, a sexist or a cold-hearted monster. And yet, that is how he was routinely depicted by his opponents, with precious little pushback from mainstream reporters.
Recall the time when Romney explained how, when he was elected governor of Massachusetts, he bent over backward to work with women's groups to get names of qualified women to staff his administration. He said he got so many recommendations — which he used! — that he needed binders to hold all the resumes. In other words, a Republican governor did exactly what feminist groups want elected officials to do, but the internet exploded with condemnation and liberal commentators reacted to his phrase “binders full of women” like he was a character from “A Handmaid's Tale.”
Then Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky called Romney a “race-mongering pyromaniac.” Why? Because he referred to Obamacare as — wait for it — “Obamacare” in a speech to the NAACP.
The lesson many on the right took from all the Romney attacks was that a candidate can't win by being decent. “At least he fights” became a kind of unofficial mantra of the Trump brigades.
Now, Trump the Fighter vs. The Fake News is the defining issue for many on the right, as Reid's once-damnable cynicism has become a Republican virtue. Now it is the right that attacks Romney's character while the left has a strange new respect for it, not because his character has changed, but because it hasn't. What you see is what you get with Romney, if you don't have partisan blinders on. He's a transparently decent man who is also a transparently conventional, if a bit stiff, Republican politician.