Voted Off New Hampshire
Concord Monitor’s ed board a few weeks ago admonished voters, it’s time to get serious. Ed board recognizes its first-in-the-nation duty to play coy, however. Gets wistful about the marginal Biden, and unendorses Romney. It’s a little like the buildup in a reality TV vote-off: ”Those whose names I didn’t call … will find out after the commercial break whether they get to stay!” The New Hampshire primary is the nation’s longest-running reality TV show, and the podunk paper’s quadrennial national moment, so I guess that makes sense. CM re Romney:
If you were building a Republican presidential candidate from a kit, imagine what pieces you might use: an athletic build, ramrod posture, Reaganesque hair, a charismatic speaking style and a crisp dark suit. You’d add a beautiful wife and family, a wildly successful business career and just enough executive government experience. You’d pour in some old GOP bromides – spending cuts and lower taxes – plus some new positions for 2008: anti-immigrant rhetoric and a focus on faith.
Add it all up and you get Mitt Romney, a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped.
Romney’s main business experience is as a management consultant, a field in which smart, fast-moving specialists often advise corporations on how to reinvent themselves. His memoir is called Turnaround – the story of his successful rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City – but the most stunning turnaround he has engineered is his own political career.
If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you’d swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you’re left to wonder if there’s anything at all at his core.
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he boasted that he would be a stronger advocate of gay rights than his opponent, Ted Kennedy. These days, he makes a point of his opposition to gay marriage and adoption.
There was a time that he said he wanted to make contraception more available – and a time that he vetoed a bill to sell it over-the-counter.
…
When New Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the state’s first-in-the-nation primary, we talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we’ll know it.
Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.
Ouch. Here’s a little of the Bidenlust.
If campaign money had poured in and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden was nipping at their heels, his fellow Democratic presidential candidates might have been less willing to agree with him. But in recent debates, particularly when questions on foreign policy and the world’s trouble spots came up, one rival after another said, in some form, “Joe’s right.” It happened so often that “Joe’s right” became the heart of a Biden campaign ad.
If wishes were pigs, bacon would fly itself in. Monitor adds that Biden, a member of the unsuccessful surrenderist party, has championed the go-nowhere partition of Iraq.
Blue New Hampshire re Monitor: unusual step in four-way car crash.
Newshog: Yankees don’t mince words. Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:33 am Comments (2) on Sunday, December 23, 2007
2 Responses to “Voted Off New Hampshire”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
December 23rd, 2007 at 10:47 am
[...] Jules Crittenden has fun with the Concord Monitor’s editorial board. It is a large, slow-moving target, isn’t it? [...]
December 23rd, 2007 at 11:18 am
[...] at Jules Crittenden’s place. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]