Willard vs Mitt-- The Story Of 2 Men Trapped In One Body

This week sure started off badly for Mitt Romney-- not as badly as today started for the British Embassy in Tehran... but badly. Aside from the two ads-- the one up top and the one below-- released by Democrats about his character, or lack of character, Republicans started attacking him as well. It's as though the Union Leader endorsement of Gingrich this weekend opened the floodgates-- at least for anti-Romney Republicans desperate enough to wound the Republican who will eventually they'll be supporting (even if with reluctance and distaste) against Obama. Yesterday Gingrich was in air in South Carolina rubbing it in: “I don’t claim to be the perfect candidate, I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anybody else." Could anyone who thinks Romney is unfit because of his character and flip flops possibly get behind... Newt Gingrich? Huntsman was even meaner to his co-religionist. "Anyone who is in the hip pocket of Wall Street because of all the donations they are picking up, like Mr. Romney, is in these days not going to be the change agent who is going to fix the too-big-to-fail banking system," he told an audience in New Hampshire.

The Erick Erickson diary at Red State just further inflamed the rightists among the GOP activist base who already distrust, or even hate, Romney: Why Mitt Romney Will Be A terrible Nominee. He ran this video:



Erickson: "[M]y interpretation of this hit is pretty straight forward. The DNC is gambling that Romney will be the nominee, but they also know there is a lot of angst with the GOP. By hitting Romney now they can potentially drag out the pain of the Republican Primary before doing what every Democrat and Beltway Pundit in America thinks-- settling for Romney, a guy they will have already defined as a flip-flopper."

And, as Greg Sargent pointed out at the Washington Post Democrats are pounding Romney on his "multiple choice Mitt" deportation flip flops.

As I suspected, Mitt Romney’s denunciation of Newt Gingrich’s sensible and humane suggestion that we shouldn’t deport long-time illegal residents of the United States is quickly emerging as a flashpoint in the campaign.

The Obama campaign quickly convened a conference call to hammer Mitt Romney over the issue, and linked it to other Romney positions that that the campaign hopes will alienate Latino voters. It’s a sign that the Obama campaign is aggressively moving to gain a head start in energizing Latinos, whose engagement in next year’s election remains uncertain.

“He is the most right wing presidential candidate on this issue in recent presidential history,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said on the conference call. “He attacked Speaker Gingrich for saying we should have a humane immigration policy. He’s now opposed to comprehensive immigration reform. He’s opposed to the DREAM act. He wants to roll back the investments we made in Pell Grants that have [given] hundreds of thousands of Hispanic children the opportunity for a higher education. He wants to roll back the Affordable Care Act and their health care benefits.”

...“Gov. Romney is somebody who once claimed to support comprehensive immigration reform,” LaBolt said. “But now he’s a candidate that’s absolutely demagogued the issue of immigration in a politically craven way because he believes that it serves his political interests.”

Between this and yesterday’s false Romney ad attacking Obama on the economy-- and the massive Dem pushback to it-- it’s hard to avoid a sense that we’re approaching something like full general election engagement between the two campaigns, even though the GOP primary voting hasn’t even started.

So who's the polar opposite of Mitt Romney? Obama? We wish! Go further back in the history of the universal human experience and you'll come up with... Jesus, the not-Romney, a much better not-Romney than Newt or Perry or the Hermanator-- an even better not-Romney than Bachmann. Rev. Howard Bess asks-- and answers-- a question all Christians, all Americans, should be asking themselves: would Jesus have joined the OccupyWallStreet Movement? You bet! It's worth hitting that link directly above and reading the whole thing, but I'll give away the ending:

Christians should thank the current Occupy Wall Street protesters for their message and their activism. They are doing our justice work for us. The current crop of national bank leaders are being shown to be just as corrupt as the Temple bankers were in Jesus’s day.

If Jesus were present among us today, he would be moving from Portland, to Los Angeles, to Kansas City, to Dallas, up to Chicago and on to Wall Street in New York City. He would join the protest in every city. He would be demanding an overhaul of our financial and banking system. He would be standing with the poor and their allies-- and against the rich and their protectors.

When Jesus pursued the corruption of his own day, the representatives of the religious and political status quo killed him. And Jesus said to his followers “take up your cross and follow me.”

Romney is still the darling of the 1% of course. He was born into that and understands and fully embraces their perspective. Creepy multi-billionaire, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, for example, fresh off comparing raising taxes on the rich to the Nazis invading Poland, is raising big bucks for Romney. Romney's campaign is already just plain sleazy-- something that doesn't bother money-obsessed greed hogs and vampires like Schwarzman. Watch this: "The leading Republican candidate is failing the trust test."




UPDATE: Empty Suit

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen got to the heart of what Romney is all about this morning:

Mitt Romney runs for president with the eye of a venture capitalist. He sees the profit in certain positions, discards those that are no longer profitable and moves on. He was pro-choice when it did him some good, instituted a health insurance plan that he now denounces and once supported amnesty for some illegal immigrants. Richard III offered his kingdom for a horse. Romney offers his principles for some votes in Iowa.

Amnesty for undocumented immigrants has become a GOP pariah and a matter of some passion among Iowa Republican caucus-goers-- about 0.05 percent of the national electorate. Reasonable men-- even unreasonable ones -- have been hurt by the issue. John McCain spent much of the 2008 campaign backing away from an amnesty plan he had supported, and it is conceivable that he chose Sarah Palin for his ticket just so people would talk about something else. No other explanation comes to mind.

...As a venture capitalist, Romney created jobs and he destroyed them. It was all the same to him. Only profit mattered-- the end, not the means. But a shrinking middle class is going to exacerbate ethnic and racial tensions, and America is no exception to the ugly verities of human nature. Gingrich acknowledged this, saying that America would never give 11 million people the boot. Romney, provided the chance to agree, just looked the other way, his eye as always on the bottom line. In the short term, there’s no profit in moderation.