Bye, Mitt!

There's a part of me that loves to say I told you so.

Long before Mitt Romney formally announced his Presidential bid, I was predicting he wouldn't make it to the final round.

Romney is the last in a series of GOP governors of Massachusetts who have tried to launch national careers from one of the most liberal states in the country. The only one who was even remotely successful was Paul Cellucci, the most doggedly punitive-minded of the bunch. For a short time he became Ambassador to Canada, leaving the likable, but hapless, Jane Swift in his place.

Fresh off the great Olympic Clean Up caper, Romney swept back into town, brushed Swift aside and became the Republican gubernatorial candidate.

I didn't vote for him, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. There's room in my politics for business-minded pragmatism. Of course, after all his pontificating about doing away with nepotism in state agencies, he installed all his own people wherever he could. They did the same power playing whole lotta nothing that the previous bunch had done. Ah, bureaucrats!

Romney's singular achievement, perhaps the only thing he really accomplished here, was the removal of former State Senate President Billy Bulger from his latest post as President of the University of Massachusetts. You see, Billy has a famous brother Whitey, and, for those of you not in New England, Whitey is on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list based on his Irish Mafia connections. Whitey disappeared from Boston years ago, he pops up around the world from time to time like an Elvis sighting. Billy claims not to know where Whitey is, so Mitt punished him by going after his job. In so doing, he deprived UMASS of the best fund raiser the institution had ever had. Thanks, Mitt! There's a feather in your cap.

When a concrete ceiling tile from one of our infamous Big Dig tunnels fell and crushed a motorist to death, Romney blamed the unions, he blamed the government transportation agency he had not been able to take over, and said absolutely nothing about the private companies involved, two of which were later criminally charged by our Democratic Attorney General (one reached a settlement with the State).

Romney is the only one of this crop of Presidential candidates whom I've actually met. I heard him speak at a State House conference on education. While he didn't engage in the blatant teacher-bashing that Cellucci was famous for, he talked predictably about achievement and accountability without ever acknowledging what deep cuts in local aid from the state had done to the schools in non-wealthy communities, and how difficult that made it for struggling schools to provide additional services to those kids who most needed academic support. He was utterly unconcerned about the issues we had come to the State House to discuss.

Mitt Romney personifies many of the reasons that, even though I am a registered Independent, I am rarely able to vote for a Republican. Privileged beyond my wildest dreams, they seem to have little or no empathy for those with fewer opportunities in life. Their connection to the middle class seems to rely solely in stirring up antipathy for those even less fortunate. Their sympathies lie with big business and its wealthy CEOs and shareholders at expense of everything and everyone else. They'd rather invest in prisons than public schools and their "solutions" seem to be similarly punitive in nature, all stick and no carrot.They lecture about values with no evidence of a conscience. It doesn't work for me.

Thankfully, even Republicans are starting to say that it doesn't work for them either (that's not counting those in the Bible Belt who felt Romney wasn't a real Christian). And while I struggle to figure out what "not conservative enough" means when referring to McCain, I am thankful that Mitt Romney, who was so unresponsive to his constituents to the point of mocking us on the campaign trail, has proven himself quite out of touch with the rest of the country as well.

Comments

[Linda]

Great post on Romney. I'm surprised he won MA (where I grew up). I thought the people there would have known him too well to be fooled.

So long, Mitt. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

On the other hand, let it!