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.

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It's possible to be as stupid as Evan Bayh, but does anyone in his position have the right to be? PLUS: Jay Leno on Obama vs. Bush

Senator Evan with one of his prominent admirers

by Ken

Longtime DWT readers know that Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh is not a favorite here. Howie and I have fairly often been driven to fairly extreme vituperation. There's no evidence I'm aware of that the guy has a working brain, because if he does, the only use he makes of it is to process his intake of prevailing-wind measurements.

He is to all appearances the worst kind of gutless panderer, and I do mean the worst kind, because he is not only willing but happy to pander to voters' deepest ignorances rather than attempt to exercise the tiniest bit of leadership and attempt to educate them. When it comes to a grasp of social and economic issues and the backbone to exercise leadership thereon, his model appears to be a leftover dish of tapioca pudding.

It's all the more distressing because his father, former Sen. Birch Bayh, was a genuine statesman of the '60s and '70s -- and since being thrust out of elective office has continued to champion the values he espoused in government in other sectors. Is there not some eerie symbolic resonance to the fact that Senator Birch was ousted from his seat by that poster boy for idle-rich imbecility Dan Quayle in 1980, in the same election that installed Ronald Reagan, the man who made the U.S. officially a country built on and devoted to imbecility? Is there any reason to think that Senator Evan is anything other than a (nominally) Democratic version of Dan Quayle?

But this is an old story. Granted, it became topical during the last presidential election cycle, when first candidate Hillary Clinton and then nominee Barack Obama seemed perfectly prepared to make this giant lunk of nothingness her/his running mate. Still, we dodged that bullet -- and while Joe Biden may not be my all-time favorate U.S. politico, every time I hear "Vice President Biden," I still remember only too vividly how close we apparently came to, well, a different outcome.

This is still old news, though. Well, Senator Evan has popped up again. He's one of 14 Democrats, as counted by stalwart progressive Mike Lux in a stirring HuffPost exhortation, "Dems Need To Drop Culture Of Caution," who were identified in a Wednesday Politico piece "as having concerns with [President] Obama's policy plans." It seems the Politico 14 are trying to counsel caution to the White House.

It's an exciting piece from our colleague and friend Mike, stressing that the great Democratic victories for social progress have never come from being cautious. Everyone should read this piece. (This seem an appropriate place too for a plug for Mike's new book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.) But the quote from our boy Evan still has me spluttering. Here's a post I churned out earlier to a list on which Mike's post was circulated:

At the risk of belaboring the bleedingly obvious, Politico quotes that great thinker and crack economist Sen. Evan Bayh as saying:

"The American people and businesses are tightening their belts. I think we need to show that the government can economize, as well."

Much as I admire Mike Lux's exhortation for Dems to rise above caution, this isn't even a "caution" issue, is it?

(1) Isn't the fact that NOBODY IS SPENDING a functional description of how we have sunk into, and are mired in, a depression (still masquerading in polite society as recession)? (Hence the logic for "economic stimulus"?)

(2) I know that Senator Bayh isn't very bright. I've called him things like "imbecile." But is it really possible that a prominent Democratic U.S. senator -- a man who came this close to being nominated for the vice presidency -- DOESN'T GRASP THIS? I understand that he's got a serious and apparently incurable case of panderitis, but still . . .

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
JAY LENO ON PRESIDENTS BUSH AND OBAMA


"Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was on Meet the Press yesterday. And he said that Barack Obama is more analytical than President Bush. Well, there's a shock, huh? I think Tickle Me Elmo is more analytical than President Bush."

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With the fateful VP e-mail from Obama HQ likely to arrive at any minute now, here are my more or less final thoughts on the selection process

Is Evan Bayh really the best Obama can come up with?

by Ken

I have a feeling that the basic things I have to say about this whole vice presidential business are very much the same things you've been saying, starting with the basic question:

What the [expletive] is going on here?

I shudder even to run through the names. Sam Nunn? That egomaniacal homophobic right-wing hack? (And those are his better qualities.) Tim Kaine?? Ann Fergawdsakes Veneman???

For a while we were hearing the name of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who is still more conservative than I'd like and seems to be a soporific speaker (aren't we hoping for a candidate who can breathe some fire on the campaign trail?). But in this company, she seems like a giant.

And then of course -- no matter how much we may wish to duck him -- there's the inevitable, inescapable, and unspeakable Evan Bayh.

Evan Bayh???? Evan Bayh????? Evan Bayh??????

If you look up "empty suit" in the dictionary, you'll find Evan Bayh's picture there -- or you would if there were anything there to photograph. (You've probably heard Stephen Colbert's line from the other night, that he looks like the guy who came with the picture frame.) But no, our Evan is worse than an empty suit. He represents the New Generation of triangulating political sludge epitomized by the likes of DLC founder Al From and all-around superschmuck Holy Joe Lieberman. What little our Evan seems to have done tends to register in the negative column. Most notably, when George W. Bush and his band of war-mongering sociopaths were lying the country into the invasion of Iraq, our Evan didn't just vote for it. The drooling jackass cosponsored the resolution. An authentic do-nothing might be an upgrade.

Evan Bayh is, in other words, everything that's wrong with our political system short of actually being a Republican, which in many ways, looking at his voting record, he might as well be. Among DLC types, the technical term for this systematic betrayal of the people's interests is "bipartisanship." Holy Joe Lieberman fobs himself off as a prince of bipartisanship. But of course in the real world what they mean by "bipartisanship" is having the courage to do whatever those other guys want us to.

The true DLC-er has achieved Nirvana when he can lay claim to being almost as good a Republican as the wingnuttiest real Republican. The question these DLC types never seem to answer, or perhaps ask, is why anyone would vote for their version of crypto-Republicans when there's such an abundance of the genuine article to vote for?

But even that's old-school talk -- talk left over from the bad old days of 2000, 2002, 2004. Isn't 2008 supposed to be the year when it's virtual political death to be caught being a Republican in public? When those poor GOP sumbitches forced to run for reelection are running from their party as fast as their stumpy little legs will carry them?

There are people who hold it against our Evan that he's the son of a former U.S. senator from Indiana. They say our Evan has built his career on the mere fact of being his father's son.

As best I can tell, those people are right, of course, but I truly don't blame our Evan for being his father's son. What I blame him for is being a disgrace to the family name.

I have fond memories and especially a lot of fond feeling for Birch Bayh. Perhaps it had something to do with my being a recent transplant from the Midwest, in the advancing stages of early political consciousness, when he was elected to the Senate in 1962. John Kennedy was the still-new president, and while he wasn't getting all that much accomplished in Congress -- thanks to the obstruction of the immovable bloc of Dixiecrats, who still pretended to be Democrats -- still, it seemed that constructive change was possible. And even as things started going to hell with the assassination of the president, important progress was being made, and Bayh always seemed to me to be in the thick of it. Maybe not my political hero, exactly, but a supremely honorable political role model. Definitely one of the good guys.

To be honest, I've wondered over the years -- especially contemplating the grim nullity of the new-model Senator Bayh -- whether I've romanced the memory of the elder Bayh. Was he perhaps not the person I thought he was? I was young, after all, and perhaps easily impressed.

Even if I hadn't been too lazy to do the homework myself, I'm not sure I would have wanted to dig into Birch Bayh's record, for fear of what I might find. So I'm doubly grateful to my colleague Steve Clemons for doing the work for me. In a recent post on his blog, The Washington Note, Steve wrote:

Here's why I like Bayh the father so much and why he sets a standard for leadership that we should be comparing others to:

~ In 1962, narrowly won a Senate race in a big time red state against a Republican incumbent in 1962 through a "dynamic grassroots campaign"

~ helped draft and pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act

~ led the effort to defeat Nixon's appointment of two segregationist judges -- Clement Hanyesworth and Harrold Carswell -- to the Supreme Court

~ earned a place on the Nixon "enemies list" (I still am an avid fan, however, of Nixon's foreign policy -- and many of his domestic policies)

~ drafted and helped secure passage of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution establishing rules for presidential and vice-presidential succession

~ drafted and helped secure passage of the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age in the nation to 18 from 21 years of age

~ by drafting and passing two Amendments to the Constitution, Birch Bayh became the first American to author more than one amendment since the Founding Fathers

~ helped sponsor and nearly passed the Equal Rights Amendment that narrowly failed to secure ratification by the states

~ authored and helped secure passage of Title IX of the Higher Education Act that prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender in the classroom and athletic field

~ authored the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

~ He was a co-author of the Bayh-Dole Act which allowed US universities, small businesses, and non-profit organizations to retain intellectual property rights of inventions developed from federal government-funded research -- probably one of the most significant triggers of new university-based innovation in US history

~ after leaving the Senate, served as Founding Chairman of the Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, which laid the original ground work for hate-crimes legislation that eventually became law

~ and today serves on the Advisory Board and is working hard to get states to pass legislation that would bind their electoral college votes to the outcomes of the national popular vote. In other words, Bayh is trying to make individual votes matter and is attempting to neutralize the electoral college

Of course I'm sharing this material and reminding people of Birch Bayh's leadership in part because his son, Senator Evan Bayh, might be the next Vice President. Others might end up in that spot either with Obama -- or, alternative, John McCain may win which means a different cast could be up for Cheney's newly crafted VP perks.

But Evan Bayh's father sculpted a pattern of principled leadership in the Senate that should be noted -- and it's the kind of results he achieved that are what should be saluted and what Obama, McCain, Evan Bayh, Kaine, Sibelius, Pawlenty, Biden, Hagel and others should be measured against.

Steve explains that he had a chance to interact with Birch Bayh (who turned 80 this past January) over the last year when Steve helped moderate a series of four Senate Colloquies at Washington College with Bayh and former Senators Gary Hart (D-CO), Paul Laxalt (R-NV), and Dale Bumpers (D-AR) and current Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN).

"My role was to keep the sessions moving and to provoke discussion and responses," Steve writes, "but it was Birch Bayh who provided the foundation for these discussions because of his own love for the legislative machinery of government and his mastery of policy and political success -- even when the cards were frequently stacked against him and the causes he fought for."

Now one thing we can't say, at least not casually, is that Birch Bayh proved that it's possible to maintain liberal principles in a conservative state and still be not only elected but reelected. Well, he did, up to a point -- he did serve three terms in the Senate. But it's not as if he retired. He lost his bid for reelection in the Reagan landslide year of 1980. And he was defeated by, of all people, Dan Quayle, a primitive humanoid life form who makes Birch's boy Evan look, comparatively, merely empty-suit-ish.

Still, Birch Bayh served those 18 years in the Senate with distinction. And when he went down, he went down with his principles more or less whole. What, after all, would be the point of continuing to be reelected if there was, well, no point in being reelected? Has political principle become that disposable? And even after Bayh was defeated, as Steve Clemons notes, he found ways of continuing to serve the public interest.

I've heard it suggested that Senator Obama is considering the wrong Bayh for his running mate. I've also heard it suggested that Evan Bayh would make a more appropriate running for mate for Obama's GOP opponent, Young Johnny McCranky. What can I say? You hear things. And speaking of things you hear, isn't our Evan supposed to have been at or near the top of Hillary Clinton's VP list too? What is it with these people?

But one thing I know: When I and a whole lot of people I know or merely encounter online have the identical response to the recent talk that the pride of Delaware, Sen. Joe Biden, is suddenly hot 'n' heavy in the Obama VP mix, namely that he doesn't sound half bad, you know we've been conditioned to some painfully low expectations.

In the end, it may not matter much. In regard to his vice presidential powers as in so many other respects, "Big Dick" Cheney is, mercifully, an aberration. It seems pretty certain that we'll never have another VP like that. (A lot more certain than that we'll never have another president like our Chimpy the Prez.) Is Young Johnny that much better?) In reality, the VP has exactly as much policy influence as the president wants him to. It's still the president's show.

I don't even believe that the running mate helps the presidential candidate win states he might not otherwise. It just doesn't happen. People simply don't vote for a vice president. They may well vote against a vice presidential nominee, however, and that's normally the top guy's principal concern: to find someone who doesn't cost him votes.

It is true, though, that the choice tells us something about the chooser -- about both his politics and his character. The VP does, after all, have to be prepared to step into the top job, and while it's understandable that a presidential candidate doesn't want to be overshadowed by his running mate, just as a president can't allow himself to be overshadowed by his vice president (again, the example of the aberrant Cheney-Bush regime doesn't apply), we can fairly ask whether the presidential candidate is offering us someone worthy of the office.

I still cling to the hope that all the talk we've been hearing about Democratic vice presidential possibilities is a smokescreen, that the very fact that these people are being talked about so much publicly is a giveaway that they're really not being seriously considered privately. I have to cling to that hope, because otherwise I have to wonder: Are the people who we're told have been receiving serious consideration by the Obama team not the sorriest damned bunch of nobodies in tarnation?

The Democratic talent pool isn't that shallow. I still don't know why retired Gen. Wes Clark isn't being considered. And there are interesting governors in addition to Governor Sebelius, like Ted Strickland of Ohio [right] and Brian Schweitzer of Montana. For that matter, there's always Hillary, whom a lot of primary voters judged to be of presidential caliber.

But when we sigh a collective sigh of relief at the thought of friggin' Joe Biden, you know that we've been conditioned to set our sights really, really low.


UPDATE: HELP OBAMA SELECT HIS RUNNING MATE

Firedoglake is running a poll today. Wes Clark is way out ahead-- but Hillary isn't doing badly. Bayh... well even Republican Chuck Hagel has more votes than he does. Currently he's tied with elderly Dixiecrat Sam Nunn. -- Howie

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