See, right now I at a crossroads between supporting two former governors, Sarah Palin, who is sort of from Alaska and Mitt Romney, who is sort of from Massachusetts. For the sake of my own clarification, and hopefully in a helpful way to some readers, I will devote this space to two original candidates who each give aid and comfort to the political right in very different original ways.
My case for Mitt Romney
As I write this piece, Mitt Romney is very much in the place that Ronald Reagan found himself in during the 1980 Republican Presidential primaries – he is the lead horse, and he has practically turned his Republican opponents into Non-Entities Anonymous. But that is not entirely true, because Sarah Palin is not a non-entity and she will never be one again.
The writer Gore Vidal in one of his novels – it was his scandalous “Myra Breckinridge” — made a point once that we should take the simile “like” out of our vocabulary because nothing is “like” a different thing and no person is ever “like” a different person. So I agree it would be an ad homonym to say Mitt Romney is like Ronald Reagan, or that he is like Franklin D. Roosevelt. But there is reason to say that Romney today is more like an amalgamation of pieces of Reagan and Roosevelt.
Like Reagan, Romney has a passion for economics. This is as unusual among politicians as it is neglected among them. My own university experience allowed me to see that generally political science students prefer more amorphous courses where their finessing gifts can get them through. But there is no way that finessing can get you through economics, as I found out myself at Fresno State.
We have seen in America that most our politicians don’t even have an interest let alone an understanding of that crucial national science — economics. But economics was the overriding interest in Reagan’s career, and it has also the main theme of Romney’s business life. Romney’s Harvard economics and law background has indeed helped give him a Midas Touch in his billionaire private enterprise career.
Like Franklin Roosevelt, Mitt Romney was born to an affluent family that had a strong sense of noblesse oblige towards the less fortunate. In the traditional French meaning, noblesse oblige refers to the obligation of the aristocracy to perform services to their community not for their personal gain, but because it is the right Christian response for the more privileged.
Mitt’s father George exercised that noblesse oblige in his record of relieving the poverty in Detroit when he was chairman of General Motors. George Romney later recreated in his job as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development the housing opportunities for the poor that he had drawn up as governor of Michigan. As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney also passionately legislated to lessen poverty in the state, including health care that made a medical response available to those who could not pay for it.
It is probably this concern for the poor that had made both George and Mitt Romney suspect to the Old Guard Conservative GOP, which sometimes talks as if it is the job of Republicans to fend off with the Sheriff of Nottingham the poor and their needs for relief and opportunity. But in this election year, it is the concern of Romney for America’s bulging unemployed and underemployed that has built up his support among independents. Really, Romney is the only GOP candidate to draw enough independents on his side for him to be the only Republican currently outpolling President Obama among registered voters.
My case against Romney
I try not to be a negative person, so I will keep my criticisms shorter than my accolades. After all, both my subjects here – Romney and Palin – have lived unusually good lives that deserve many more accolades than body slams from a mere onlooker. It should also clear that both Republican leaders like California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and South Carolina’s Mark Sanford as well as Democrat kingpins like New York’s Anthony Weiner and North Carolina’s John Edwards have been acting out like they have graduated from Bill Clinton’s School of Sexual Slobbering.
In contrast, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin have taken their wedding oaths and their family responsibilities as seriously as we would like them to take solemnly another oath of office.
My main complaint against Romney was the unpresidential way he handled his 2008 presidential campaign. In other words, he acted more like a billionaire running for office than a president. With all the money he threw into each primary – much of it from his own immense fortune — he simply cut off an opportunity of building his own grass roots campaign that raises its own money. It was of course John McCain’s grass roots campaign that came out of nowhere to finish the primaries on the winning end.
Can we indulge any more billionaires in politics and their tendency to bypass the grass roots for purchased ubiquitous imaging of themselves? I can think of a number of billionaires who have gone this road, and in each case it has made them major losers. They include Nelson Rockefeller losing the race for president in 1964, Ross Perot losing the race for president in 1992 and 1996, Meg Whitman losing the California’s governor’s office to a practically penniless Jerry Brown in 2010, and Mitt Romney losing the Iowa caucuses to a nearly penniless Michael Huckabee in 2008.
My case for Sarah Palin
Like Romney, Sarah Palin is endlessly inventive, and it is this protean inventiveness that makes GOP party hacks nervous about both of them. When you are a party hack, your main concern is your footing, but Palin and Romney change the atmosphere so much that no political slug feels steady on their feet with them.
But do you notice that Palin is still very much around, in spite of being counted out prematurely so many times? This being counted out sometimes has to do with her decisions, such as when she resigned as governor of Alaska in mid-term. This is an unprecedented act by a popular governor who was not in any trouble. But it worked out perfectly. Her successor is a perfectly good governor, and Palin meanwhile has been free to join and enhance the pageantry of mainstream America.
All this time, Palin’s has been absorbing our attention with her remarkable creativity, ranging from her “Going Rogue” coffee table book to her vantage point on Facebook to the multi-color dream bus that has let her tour the country in populist style. What other personality who is not president has been able to absorb our nation’s attention every month over the past two years? Meanwhile her political competition – except for Mitt Romney – is fast disappearing into the woodwork
My case against Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin seems to always prefer to create dramatic effect with unconventional political constructs, such as creating a podium from Face book. You have to wonder if the White House is a good place to try out these devices. But I guess I am comforted simply by the fact that Sarah Palin is a very good woman. No other Republican approached the contribution Sarah Palin made in 2010 with her indelible presence to restore a Republican balance to Congress.
In fact, it is very hard to find in history any woman who has failed a government she has taken over. Instead practically all of the world female heads of government in history have been great leaders. Today Germany’s Angela Merkel is surely the outstanding leader in Europe, and before her it was England’s Margaret Thatcher.
Certainly, no woman in history has ever been as poor a leader as men like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Alucard the Impaler or Ethelred the Unready.
The religious thing
It is a shame that the greatest opposition against Mitt Romney is not over his politics, but it is centered in the Deep South over his Mormon religion. Tragically, it has been years since the Deep South has refused to accept as neighbors its African-Americans, and now it looks like a similar thinking there is reacting the same toward Mormons and more specifically a Mormon running for president.
Fortunately, this discomfort is very removable, just as the Deep South’s general hostility toward African-Americans proved very removable. Since I have been a Mormon for almost 40 years, I know the drill. All that Mormon doctrine which seems so controversial in this debate is actually only a lot of books, rules and lessons to make us become as complete a Christian as possible. Compared to that huge goal, the means to this goal is practically minutia. Our endless reading and learning and lessons mean nothing if it all does not make us more Christian in the end.
Meanwhile, probably the best way to treat Mitt Romney about his Christianity is the same way Sarah Palin is treated about her Christian dimension. After all, they are examining running for president, not for pope.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California.” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.
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