Mitt Romney-Still Struggling with the Truth

I didn’t know in 1969 that I would be in this room today.

That was how, in 1988, Dan Quayle explained his use of family connections to get into the National Guard during the Vietnam conflict. Joining the guard was a way to avoid actually going into battle.

He got slammed. Campaigns in those days devoted some effort to at least adapt a veneer, even if it was thin, of honesty.

George H. W. Bush was the last President to have personal combat experience. The Quayle effort as a youth to avoid the draft was an experience shared by millions. But the minor story was replaced with an off-the-cuff confession of a lack of integrity. Dan Quayle would have done what he thought was the right thing if he had realized that people would notice in future decades.

Those were the good old days. Campaigns changed over the years. The veneer of honesty became so unimportant, that one party abandoned it entirely.

2011 brought us a startling ad, even by the slick standards we have come to know in presidential campaigns: Grainy images of Barack Obama with brief snippets of campaign speeches. One stood out.

If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.

– “Believe in America”, an ad by the Romney for President, inc.

The public statement by the President, a statement in front of a crowd, was so self-destructive it raised suspicions. Reporters scrambled to find the source. They found it. During the campaign of 4 years earlier, when Senator Barack Obama was running for President against John McCain, he did indeed make a speech in which those very words were spoken. Here they are again:

Senator McCain ‘s campaign actually said, and I quote, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

– Senator Barack Obama, running for President, October 16, 2008

So Senator Obama was quoting a McCain campaign aide on the Republican strategy in that year of avoiding any talk about the economy.

Four years later, the Romney campaign was unapologetic about chopping up a statement from 4 years before, a statement quoting Republicans, to make it seem like it was President Obama talking about his own record. Here was part of the Republican response to what reporters had discovered:

Then-candidate Obama criticized his opponent for not wanting to talk about the economy. Today President Obama and his campaign are afraid to talk about the economy.

– Romney campaign, November 22, 2011

In a background interview, a top member of the Romney campaign explained more fully:

First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.

– Reported by the New York Times, December 5, 2011

That made a brief splash. The Republican campaign not only admitted dishonesty, but they were advancing a new proposition. Political campaigns had an obligation to lie, and lie blatantly, in order to mislead voters.

News outlets featured the false quote story for a day or so. It was not the most famous controversy of the election season. That would go to Mitt Romney’s 47% presentation to a small group of fellow members of the very, very extraordinarily wealthy elite.

The presentation was secretly taped and the world outside that room of extreme wealth discovered what Mitt thought of them and their fellow Americans.

More recently, that 47% briefly came back into the news as Mitt Romney gave a series of interviews explaining that the economy would be soaring, ISIS would vanish, and America would be in a more healthy condition in countless ways if voters had chosen him instead of President Obama. Within one of those interviews, Mitt Romney explained the lesson he had learned from that embarrassing moment of 47% truth.

My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man. If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.

– Mitt Romney, September 30, 2014

News reports, analysts, and pundits flooded networks and print media with accounts of the interview. It was big news.

The news was not the confession of massive Janus-like two faced public dishonesty. It was not the admission that he should have been careful not to be caught.

No, the big story centered on another question raised by the interview. Will Mitt run again?

News focuses on the unusual. The complete absence of integrity within Mitt Romney simply is no longer news.

This article is a collaboration between MadMikesAmerica and FairandUnbalanced.com.

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