Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous;
you get knocked down by traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher
Reflections on the GOP National Convention Day 3:
Part 1
It's Official: Romney Accepts Nomination
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| Mitt Romney, GOP Presidential Nominee 2012 Image Captured During Acceptance Speech |
You cannot measure a man’s character
based on words he utters
before adoring crowds during happy times.
The true measure of a man is revealed in his actions
during times of trouble,
the quiet hospital room of a dying boy,
with no cameras and no reporters.
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| Mitt and Ann Romney on stage surrounded by family following speech Still captured from live feed |
Now the reason I say that is because I wrote a one-off post/essay entitled "If I Were President" back in March, and I ended the essay by saying that I already knew the first line of my inauguration address would be (i.e., a variation of a line from one of my unpublished poems: "I believe in America, as good as the hearts of her people."). I seriously don't believe that anything I've published has been read by the Romney campaign, and I'm probably not the only one of 310 million people with a slogan of believing in America. It's just a coincidence, but if the Romney campaign can find anything of use in my blog they can use to get rid of the worst President in American history, they can borrow it--I care more about results than getting credit.
Incidentally, ever the perfectionist, I've recently edited that opening line, which now reads:
"I believe in America,Romney and other speakers went out of their way to mention how he brought women into influential positions in his administration, including an African American female Democrat, whom mentioned how Romney was receptive to ideas, no matter the source, and worked across the partisan aisle. This appears to be a conscious attempt to address the concerns of suburban Moms, which many pollsters suggest is a demographic that Romney needs to work on.
as beautiful as her children,
as limitless as their dreams and ambitions,
as worthy as her founding ideals,
as good as the hearts of her people."
In my view, the best part of the night? If I was the Romney campaign, I would rerun the testimony of the Mormons whom gave absolutely riveting personal stories of how Romney helped them personally. In fact, I've led off this commentary with part of one of those stories.
As part of Romney's faith, he would do things for fellow Mormons in need; as these stories were told, the C-SPAN cameras panned out to the audience on occasion, and I see several female delegates wiping away tears. These are stories I've never heard, and I'm sure if every voter heard those stories, Romney would win the election by a landslide. The problem is that Romney doesn't want to politically exploit things he has done for other people; I don't know how or why these people came forward (probably not Romney's idea). My guess is that they wanted other people to know the Mitt Romney they knew.
Here's a story I don't think was touched on tonight but was retold by eldest son Tagg:
Tagg Romney spoke candidly about the sometimes misguided perception that the public has of his father's personality."He is emotional and kindhearted and soft in the inside. He projects a tough image on the outside," he said.
To demonstrate how his father prefers to keep quiet about his various acts of kindness, the 42-year-old told the story of how the former Massachusetts governor had watched over the daughter of a business partner who died suddenly from a heart attack.
When the woman asked Mitt Romney for a loan so she could attend medical school, his father promptly said yes, Tagg Romney said. "(He) made her a substantial loan. He actually … sat down with her at regular intervals to go over her grades," he said. After she graduated, Mitt Romney wrote her a Christmas card in which he said her loan would be forgiven.Tagg Romney also suggested that his dad was leaning against a second run for the nomination in late 2010:
Tagg Romney said his mother, Ann Romney, asked her husband if he could fix the country's problems if he won. "He said, 'Yeah, I think that I can.' She said if you can then you don't have a choice, you have to run, it's your duty. If you don't think about what's going to happen to your grandchildren, they aren't going to have as bright a future, and it's not fair to them," Tagg Romney said.The Oparowskis gave a riveting account of how Mitt Romney and Tagg helped with their dying 14-year-old son David:
Back in the early 1970s, Mitt visited our home numerous times with his oldest son, Tagg, tagging along. You cannot measure a man’s character based on words he utters before adoring crowds during happy times. The true measure of a man is revealed in his actions during times of trouble.The quiet hospital room of a dying boy, with no cameras and no reporters – that is the time to make an assessment.
In 1979, tragedy struck our family when our youngest son, David, age 14, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Over a period of seven months, he was in and out of Children’s Hospital in Boston for treatment. Throughout that agonizing period, Mitt took time from his busy schedule to visit David. They developed a loving friendship. On one of his visits, Mitt discovered that David was very fond of fireworks. He went out and bought a box full of “BIG TIME” fireworks. We waited until we were able to go to Ogunquit, Maine, where we set them off on the sand dunes.
On another visit, David, knowing Mitt had gone to law school at Harvard, asked Mitt if he would help him write a will. The next time Mitt went to the hospital, he was equipped with his yellow legal pad and pen. Together, they made David’s will. So, after David’s death, we were able to give his skate board, his model rockets, and his fishing gear to his best friends. He also made it clear that his brother, Peter, should get his Ruger 22 rifle. David also helped us plan his funeral. He wanted to be buried in his Boy Scout uniform. He wanted Mitt to pronounce his eulogy. Mitt was there to honor that request.
Pam Finlayson described how the Romneys helped her family
In 1982, my husband Grant and I moved from California to Massachusetts, with our newborn son. We didn’t own a dryer, and the day he stopped by to welcome us, I was embarrassed to have laundry hanging all over the house. Mitt wasn’t fazed. In fact, as we spoke, without a word, he joined me and started helpfully plucking clothes from around the room and folding them.
It was when our daughter Kate was born three and a half months early that I fully came to appreciate what a great treasure of friendship we had in Mitt and Ann. Kate was so tiny and very sick. Her lungs not yet ready to breathe, her heart unstable, and after suffering a severe brain hemorrhage at three days old, she was teetering on the very edge of life. As I sat with her in intensive care, consumed with a mother’s worry and fear, dear Mitt came to visit and pray with me. I will never forget that when he looked down tenderly at my daughter, his eyes filled with tears, and he reached out gently and stroked her tiny back.
During the many months Kate was hospitalized, the Romneys often cared for our two-year old son, Peter. They treated him like one of their own, even welcoming him to stay the night when needed.
When Thanksgiving rolled around, Kate was still struggling for life. Brain surgery was scheduled, and the holiday was the furthest thing from our minds. I opened my door to find Mitt and his boys, arms loaded with a Thanksgiving feast. When I called to thank Ann, she sweetly confessed it had been Mitt’s idea, that most of the cooking and chopping had been done by him. She and the boys had just happily pitched in.
But complications of her birth remained with her, and after 26 years of both miracles and struggle, she passed away just a year and a half ago. In the midst of making the final decision to run for President – which had to be the most difficult of their lives – when they heard of Kate’s passing, both Mitt and Ann paused, to personally reach out to extend us sympathy, and express their love.
Due to time constraints, I will continue discussion of tonight's events, including Mitt Romney's speech, in tomorrow's post.
I'm finally annoyed enough by inane fact checkers that I've decided to create a new label or tag. I'm not necessarily arguing wrong, incomplete or misleading facts by fact checkers but fairly shallow, superficial analysis and context. Just to parody the kinds of things I'm talking about, consider a hypothetical situation where Obama (who I have never met in person) was to say to me, "Nothing personal, Ronald, but you're fat." Whether I'm obese is a matter of fact. but Obama's comments would be intended as insulting: it's not the same as, say, his noticing my fly was undone coming out of a restroom. The point is, Obama would likely deny that he intended the statement to be insulting, arguing that maybe I hadn't noticed I had gained 75 pounds since I woke up this morning. The fact checkers would back up Obama's defense, arguing first of all, I am fat, and second, Obama explicitly said "nothing personal". (Obama deliberately couches his statements with enough wiggle room to argue that his intended meaning is "out of context" or some other disingenuous defense.)
I want to take issue with one item from Paul Ryan's acceptance address that illustrates exactly what I'm saying because the Democrats and fact checkers are climbing all over it. Now Paul Ryan is a big boy and can speak for himself, but the criticism is PURE CRAP. (Note that I have some issues with Ryan's positions and votes that he's taken (see a related commentary in an upcoming post). Their discussion is all beside the point.
To be honest, I would have phrased things differently than Paul Ryan did, and he should have realized that his remarks would have come under attack, particularly given the way that Obama has been focusing on the manufacturing sector. So first, here is the relevant excerpt:
My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: "I believe that if our government is there to support you. this plant will be here for another hundred years." That's what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.Okay, reality check: the plant closed Dec. 23, 2008. Obama was just under a month from taking office--how could he be held responsible?
That's a fairly shallow analysis; remember, one of the overriding issues in the Ryan speech was that Obama has failed to lead and perform: empty promises. Obama was specifically promising how the Janesville plant would benefit from government intervention--and he did make the quote in question. Let me cite verbiage from his 2/13/08 speech at the GM plant:
I realize that politicians come before you every election saying that they’ll change all this. They lay out big plans and hold events with workers just like this one, because it’s popular to do and it’s easy to make promises in the heat of a campaign. [Americans] need a change in our politics – a leader who can end the division in Washington so we can stop talking about our challenges and start solving them; and that is the kind of President I want to be. We know that government cannot solve all our problems, and we don’t expect it to.
I know that General Motors received some bad news yesterday, and I know how hard your Governor has fought to keep jobs in this plant. But I also know how much progress you’ve made – how many hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles you’re churning out. And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years. My energy plan will invest $150 billion over ten years to establish a green energy sector that will create up to 5 million new jobs over the next two decades – jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. We’ll also provide funding to help manufacturers convert to green technology and help workers learn the skills they need for these jobs.
We know that all of this must be done in a responsible way, without adding to the already obscene debt that has grown by four trillion dollars under George Bush. We know that we cannot build our future on a credit card issued by the bank of China. And that is why I’ve paid for every element of this economic agenda.Just a warning to any fellow libertarians--the full speech will cause blood to shoot out your eyes. I leave in the typical legalese fineprint CRAP typical of ObamaSpeak: "I realize politicians make promises"; "government cannot solve all our problems". How many times and how many contexts have we seen or heard Obama use the same rhetorical device? At least dozens of times? For example, he'll say something like, "I don't begrudge success, BUT [the higher income people need to pay 'their fair share']"
What he's clearly saying here is: "I know OTHER politicians make promises and don't keep them, BUT I'm different--and I keep my promises. This plant will be here 100 years from now, because the federal government will make the necessary funding available to keep it open." [Of course, that funding will come with strings attached like making products that politicians or bureaucrats want, say, consistent with a green energy objective, which may NOT be what consumers want to buy.] And progressives will come up with the usual predictable excuses as for why they couldn't keep their promises, e.g., we would have provided all the necessary money to fulfill all our promises to failing factory union workers to buy their votes, except for those nefarious filibustering Republicans.
Obama KNOWS that he is writing a check that he can't cash: he knows that an independent GM CEO may choose not to use federal funding with strings attached, and/or he knows that the GOP will reject this funding for fiscal reasons and/or political principles. He SHOULD KNOW that if GM had a legitimate business model to keep the plant open, it would be able to secure such funding from the private sector, not the government. Why are taxpayers being asked to provide funding that the private sector regards as too risky?
Obama (after the election, of course) can argue after the fact that the world is complex, and of course he couldn't possibly guarantee keeping the factory plant open (say, anymore than GOP gubernatorial candidate Sarah Palin ran on building the Bridge to Nowhere, but cancelled the project several months later when it was clear that Congress wouldn't fund additional necessary funds), and everybody knows that. But there's no question that he is knowingly setting worker expectations on ongoing plant operations tied to the outcome of the coming year's elections, and he's doing so knowing that GM had serious financial problems (which he acknowledged at the beginning of the speech).
The issue I have is not that Obama didn't keep the plant open; I don't believe that the government has any place whatsoever intervening in the auto industry. GM's problems didn't occur overnight; the company was in a negative equity situation in 2006, while the economy was still in expansion. The WSJ reminds us that the GM CEO in June 2008 announced that the Janesville plant would close by 2010--and then auto sales fell off a cliff with the economic tsunami several weeks later.
The closure occurred AFTER Bush announced an auto bailout. Here's a relevant excerpt:
President George W. Bush stepped in Friday to keep America's auto industry afloat, announcing a $17.4 billion bailout for GM and Chrysler. "If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy," Bush said at the White House, in remarks carried live by the national broadcast networks. The money will come from the Wall Street bailout passed by Congress, a reversal for the White House. President-elect Barack Obama and Democrats had long advocated that course, and Bush had resisted it. The structure largely follows the pattern of legislation that failed in Congress last week in the Senate because of Republican opposition.EXPLETIVE DELETED! And Jeb Bush has the AUDACITY to push back on criticism of George W. Bush... What Bush did and said was a betrayal of fundamental free market principles--he was manipulated into bad decisions by fear-mongering Wall Street veterans like Hank Paulson... So much for "the decider"... And my fellow libertarians argue that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans... What the heck about Republicans who were deliberately misled into voting for a government intervention slush fund?
Now how many hypocritical fact checkers and partisans are going to ignore that Bush had sided with Obama and the Democrat majority Congress on auto bailouts? How many times are they going to ignore the fact that with the overwhelming 2008 elections giving Democrats near super majority strength in both chambers of Congress and a President Obama, whether or not Bush was still in office, Bush was IRRELEVANT. The auto companies weren't going to close plants because of lame duck Bush. (They could have simply shut down production for a few weeks.)
Here's the progressive Huffington Post:
The Paul Ryan campaign is pushing back against charges that the vice presidential candidate blatantly misled viewers during his acceptance speech, when he blamed President Barack Obama for a GM plant plant closure that took place while George W. Bush was president.I've cited relevant discussion: the Post is knowingly misleading its readers. Ryan simply made the point that Obama made a promise about government intervention; he never said or implied that Obama was GM's CEO at the time of the plant closure. And I've just shown that Bush went along with the auto bailout that Obama wanted. And the undisputed fact is that despite the cash for clunker deal and tens of billions in auto loans, the Janesville plant hasn't reopened, 3 years into the Obama "recovery".
For the record, here is the Ryan spokesman response:
The facts are clear: when the GM plant went on standby, the president told the people of Wisconsin he would ‘lead an effort to retool’ it and restart production. But when the bailout’s winners and losers were decided, Janesville ended up losing. The people of Wisconsin, like so many Americans, are still waiting for the president’s imaginary recovery.Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Janis Joplin/Big Brother & the Holding Company,"Piece of My Heart". My inner record producer wants to pick up the pace, more frenetic, mad percussion leading to the chorus, but this is a priceless rock classic as is. I don't know if there ever has been or ever will be a better female rock vocal: Janis was a rock goddess. Unfortunately, done too soon due to alcohol and drugs. There are a few other female rockers whose work I admire as well: Dusty Springfield, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, and Joss Stone come to mind.
