Willard Inc. may be his father's biological offspring, but politically speaking, he's no George Romney

Michigan Gov. George Romney and his son Retard Willard look out over the New York World's Fair grounds, May 18, 1964.

"Not only was George Romney, that loser, ironclad in his ideological commitments; his vision of how capitalism should work was in every particular the exact opposite of the one pushed by the vulture capitalist he sired."

-- Rick Perlstein, in his debut rollingstone.com column,
"What Mitt Romney Learned From His Dad"

by Ken

Oh boy, I've been meaning to get back all week to Rick Perlstein's inaugural rollingstone.com column, "What Mitt Romney Learned From His Dad," and since it was posted last Tuesday, I'm thinking we're only a day away from the arrival of another one.

Rick has a theory about sons-of-pols with political ambitions of their own, specifically sons of pols who suffer traumatic electoral defeats. He starts from this premise:

Here is a truism about the psychology of politicians: there is almost nothing so soul-definingly traumatic for them as losing an election. You believe yourself a great man, a figure of destiny. You love your job, or covet an even more important one -- and then suddenly one day it's gone, all because the public decides it doesn't love you any more. The trauma shapes future ideology: if you're a conservative, say, you might become more conservative. That was the case for two pioneers of the Democratic Party's long march to the right: Joseph Lieberman, who lost a bid for the U.S. House of Representatives, and Bill Clinton, who lost his reelection as Arkansas governor, both in 1980, a year of profound reckoning for Democrats who got blindsided by Ronald Reagan and his coattails.

But there is, Rick suggests, something worse, and that is being the son of such a traumatized pol. He has two such cases in mind, starting with --

a third pioneering Democratic corporate sellout, Evan Bayh, who managed the 1980 Senate reelection campaign in which his fighting liberal father Birch Bayh lost to baby Reaganite Dan Quayle. Thereafter, as governor and senator from Indiana between 1989 and 1997, the son hardly met a right-wing idea he couldn't embrace.

As far as I've been able to ascertain, the "lesson" learned in the Bayh family was exclusive to young Evan. Apparently Birch Bayh -- who was, as I've written, a political hero of mine -- has never made any such rightward move. And neither, I gather from what Rick tells us, did his other famously traumatized pol: Michigan Gov. George Romney, who came within a washed brain of riding a wave of almost unblemished popularity to the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. As you may know, George Romney had a bunch of sons, one of whom has long entertained delusions of presidential fitness.

I really don't want to preempt Rick's narrative, which as usual is laid out in rich, elegant, and ultimately eloquent detail. I just want to offer three blindingly stark contrasts he establishes with overwhelming eloquence between the Romney father and son.

1. THE "SHOCKINGLY AUTHENTIC"

GEORGE ROMNEY ON CIVIL RIGHTS

Rick writes about George Romney's "shocking authenticity."

[H]is courage in sticking to his positions without fear or favor was extraordinary. In January of 1964, for example, the second-year governor received a letter (downloadable here) from a member of the top Mormon governing body reminding him of the "teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith" that "the Lord had placed the curse upon the Negro." Drop your support for the 1964 civil rights bill, the elder warned, arguing that God might literally strike Romney dead for his apostasy: "I just don't think we can get around the Lord's position in relation to the Negro without punishment for our acts," the letter said. Romney only redoubled his commitment -- leading a march the next year down the center of Detroit in solidarity with Martin Luther King's martyrs for voting rights' in Selma, Alabama. In 1966, the Republican Party staked its electoral fortunes on opposing open housing for blacks. Romney begged them, unsuccessfully, not to. "This fellow really means it," an amazed Southern Republican said when Romney toured Dixie pushing civil rights in his presidential campaign; after America's worst riot broke out in Detroit under his watch, the governor said that America could respond with a crackdown on law and order – "but our system would become little better than a police state."

2. GEORGE VS. WILLARD ON

THE NATURE OF CAPITALISM

George Romney, a Republican governor who had of course been a fantastically successful corporate chief executive, had a "vision of how capitalism should work" that --

was in every particular the exact opposite of the one pushed by the vulture capitalist he sired. (If George Romney's AMC was around now, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital would probably be busy turning it into a carcass.) A critic once said he was "so dedicated to good works his entrance into politics is like sending a Salvation Army lass into the chorus at a burlesque house." As a CEO he would give back part of his salary and bonus to the company when he thought they were too high. He offered a pioneering profit-sharing plan to his employees. Most strikingly, asked about the idea that "rugged individualism" was the key to America's success, he snapped back, "It's nothing but a political banner to cover up greed." He was the poster child for the antiquated notion that corporations have multiple stakeholders: the workers that breathe them life, the communities in which they are situated, and the nation to whom they owe a patriotic obligation -- most definitely and emphatically not just stockholders, as Mitt and his defenders say.



In the video above, today's Romney insists there is no reason to question the distribution of wealth in America except for envy of the rich -- did his rich dad question the distribution of wealth in America out of envy for the rich? -- and that it was a subject only appropriate for discussion in "quiet rooms." (His dad didn't talk about it in quiet rooms; he talked about it at a Sunday worship service at the 1972 Republican convention, praying, "Help us to help those who need help.") Even if Mitt Romney is not the most right-wing candidate for the nomination, when he wins it, in a Republican Party becoming more extreme with every passing day, he may still be -- because the party won’t have it any other way -- the most right-wing nominee in the history of the country.

Rick draws a painful contrast between the signature "shocking authenticity" of George Romney and the palpable inauthenticity of Willard --

with, I think, an exception. Every time he opens his mouth on the subject of capitalism, he says what he sincerely believes, which happens to fit neatly with present-day Republican ideology: that rich people deserve every penny they have, and if people complain about anything rich people do, it's only because they're envious.

3. GEORGE ROMNEY ON THE LIES AMERICANS ARE
TOLD ABOUT OUR FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS

I've left for last the issue that cost George Romney not just his shot at the presidency but his political career: the Vietnam war, which he had supported through a visit to Vienam in 1965 but found himself beginning to question following a second trip in 1967. Asked in a TV interview about his apparent change of heart (Rick has the video posted with the column), he gave the answer that undid him: "When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam." That, says Rick, is the line that everyone remembers.

But he continued with a devastating, prophetic, and one-thousand-percent-correct assessment: that staying in Vietnam would be a disaster. The public, and certainly the pundits, weren't ready to hear it. All they heard was the word "brainwashing" -- not in the colloquial sense in which Romney obviously intended it, but as something literal. Here was this weird dude accusing our generals and diplomats of Svengali-like mind control. The mockery was swift and furious. ("I would have thought a light rinse would do," William F. Buckley said -- hilarious! Only an idiot would criticize the Vietnam War!) Romney nose-dived sixteen points in the next Harris poll. As I wrote in my book Nixonland, on Vietnam a national brainwashing continued apace.

The gutter-brawling Richard Nixon didn't have to lift a finger to destroy Romney; the man had done it to himself. But as Rick underlines, amid all the mockery, Romney stuck to his guns (as it were), telling New Hampshire voters "that LBJ was 'spinning a web of delusion,' and that 'when you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you don't kill them and destroy their property. You don't use bombers and tanks and napalm to save them.'" And Nixon would proceed to get himself elected by: (a) conspiring to make sure that the Paris peace talks wouldn't produce, you know, peace, and (b) flat-out lying, saying that he had a "secret" plan to end the war -- so secret that he couldn't tell us what it was. In fact, when he became president, he didn't end the war, he escalated and widened it.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the "brainwashing" that Romney diagnosed would become a fixture of American political discourse, not just on the Right, but ultimately among self-serving pols almost across the increasingly narrow American political spectrum.

Rick has this shocking notion that understanding the past may actually enable us to see where we are and figure out where we may be heading. It is, in other words, the exact opposite of Newt Gingrich's perverted notion of "history," which consists of cherry-picking the past for bits and pieces that can be used to buttress your ideological prejudices and delusions. I can hardly wait to see what the next column brings.

#