It’s OK to stop pretending, Mitt

[Luddly Neddite]

It?s OK to stop pretending, Mitt - Salon.com

The defeated White House candidate returns to the place where his reputation for spineless opportunism was born

I wonder why their whole line up is made up of has-beens, wannabes and never will be's. Couldn't they find even one relevant Republican?

Oh wait, "relevant Republican" is an oxymoron.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

The [2008] nomination, the Romney team quickly concluded, would be theirs if they could position their candidate as the pure alternative to McCain and Giuliani. The only problem: Romney, to that point, had never been a conservative purist, at least publicly. As a candidate in Massachusetts, he’d bent over backward to establish pro-choice bona fides, pledged to do more for gay rights than Ted Kennedy and distanced himself from Reagan-Bush Republican orthodoxy. And as governor, he’d signed the state on to a regional greenhouse gas initiative and closed a budget deficit with massive fee hikes. But when it came time to run in ’08, he settled on a strategy of pretending none of this had ever happened.

It would be remarkable and refreshing if, in 2016, a republican candidate would run on a pragmatic platform reflecting traditional republican values: fiscal responsibility and individual liberty, advocating abortion rights, marriage equality, and comprehensive immigration reform.

In conjunction with returning to traditional republican values, such a candidate would refuse to make that disastrous hard turn to the right during the primaries, rejecting conservative fiscal extremism, the social right, and Christian fundamentalists.

Unfortunately that’s not likely to happen.