Romney Is Afraid To Run On His Record

There's a lot of truth in the cartoon above. Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie) is afraid to try and run on his record (or any part of his background really). This is unusual for a candidate running for president -- even George W. Bush, failed businessman, was not afraid to run on his record as governor of Texas (even though it was very debatable whether he was a good governor or not).

And frankly, I don't blame Romney. I'm not at all sure there is anything in his background worth bragging about. Even as far back as his youth, Romney was a bully who thought it was funny to torture his classmates (like holding a classmate down and cutting his hair off). That just illustrated his smug and self-centered attitude that he has displayed throughout his life (and even today, he doesn't think the American people deserve to know anything about his finances).

He doesn't want to run on his mormon religious devotion (although that is one of the two driving forces in his life, the other being making money). He knows that putting his religion front and center (like other candidates have done) will just upset the GOP's evangelical base -- many of whom consider the mormons to be some kind of cult. Running on his religion is likely to cost him more votes than it would get him.

There was a brief flirtation with running on his business record. But then that record was exposed as more "vulture capitalism" than good business. He made many millions of dollars, but he did it by stripping companies of their assets and letting them go bankrupt. In the process, he destroyed many American jobs and outsourced many more to foreign countries. That kind of "business" background certainly wouldn't let him campaign as a "job creator". And it doesn't look too good either that he put much of the money he made into secret foreign tax havens (and refuses to release his tax returns).

Then we have his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, which is probably the most relevant experience he has to establish his qualification to be president. He certainly doesn't want to campaign on that. The only real achievement of his administration was to pass a health care bill (Romneycare) that served as a model for President Obama's health care reform (Obamacare). He would like for the GOP base voters to forget that. It also doesn't look too good that he took a fairly prosperous state and reduced it to 47th in job growth during his term.

The latest effort is to portray him as some kind of savior of the Winer Olympics in Utah -- and he is going to the London Olympics to try and forward that notion. But that probably won't work either. It turns out that the paperwork on those Olympics is still unavailable to the public (or the press). And even if it was available, it probably wouldn't show much. It seems that the most important stuff, the contracts and agreements, were all shredded and destroyed (just like records from his tenure as governor). Romney is obsessive about keeping his actions secret. Another rather revealing thing about his tenure as Olympic organizer was revealed in Madeleine Albright's book Memo To The President Elect, where she says:

This episode is worth recounting because every prospective torch carrier was given, courtesy of the U.S. Olympic Committee, a special uniform consisting of a nylon sports jacket and matching pants. When my uniform arrived, I glanced at the label, which read “Made in Myanmar,” that is, Burma, a country that suffers under one of the most repressive governments on Earth. It was not yet illegal to import clothing from Burma, but public pressure had induced most U.S. retailers to stop doing business there. I had my own grounds for revulsion, having visited the country to pledge support for its courageous democratic leader, the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. I was furious about the uniform but knew it was too late to reorder all the clothing, though I did go out and buy my own shirt and pants (Made in America). When I arrived in Salt Lake City, I informed Mitt Romney, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, about the gaffe; he thanked me kindly for keeping my mouth shut. The following year, Congress approved a ban on all imports from Burma.

So, what does that leave? Nothing of Romney's background or record. That means we're probably going to see a whole lot more negative advertising from the Romney campaign (and his super-PACs). Since he doesn't have a background or record he can run on, he is reduced to trying to tear down the record of President Obama.