THE MORMONATOR: MITT ROMNEY’S BLINDING AMBITION. PLUS, THE INEXPLICABLE OPPOSITION TO AN ARMENIAN-GENOCIDE MEMORIAL

The Phoenix, MA
Oct 25 2006

Political dynasties are as American as apple pie. Since the Civil War,
witness the marks made – or still being made (for better or worse) –
by the Tafts of Ohio, the Stevensons of Illinois, the Roosevelts of New
York, the Bayhs of Indiana, the Bushes of Connecticut and Texas, the
Clintons of Arkansas and New York, and the Kennedys of Massachusetts,
New York, and Rhode Island.

Now comes Mitt Romney, son of George, who as governor of Michigan
in 1968 unsuccessfully sought to become the first Mormon elected
president. Son Mitt hopes to succeed where dad George failed. And
Mitt, the governor of Massachusetts, is not going to let anything
stand in his way. On the surface he is as smooth and as gentlemanly
as his dad. But in his heart Mitt is a sharpie, as cold as he is
ambitious. Like George Bush II, who saw his dad outflanked on the right
by Reagan, and on the left by Clinton, Mitt Romney is not going let the
failings of his paternity mess with his success. His will to power,
whatever the price, is straight out of Nietzsche. And his desire to
do his dad one better, whatever the cost, feels like pure Freud.

Armchair analysis aside, Mitt Romney’s dedication to his own success is
undebatable. With the help of Christy Mihos (a politically delicious
irony), he strong-armed Republican acting governor Jane Swift aside
to stake his claim to Beacon Hill. He shamelessly fudged his Utah
residency to get on the Massachusetts ballot. He cavalierly abandoned
Massachusetts’s voters after two years in order to launch his White
House run, and he held on to his office to use it as a convenient bully
pulpit. From that perch he morphed from a centrist to a right-winger,
flip-flopping on choice and suggesting – with a straight face – that
the sort of stem-cell research conducted at Children’s Hospital and
Harvard Medical School should be criminalized. Mitt Romney: what
an hombre.

In his latest exercise in duplicity, Romney secretly lobbied an
influential member of the Mormon church’s innermost ruling council
to leverage resources in the service of his White House campaign. The
scandal of this is that Romney has long sought to wrap himself in the
mantle of Roman Catholic John Kennedy, who in his 1960 presidential
run stressed that he would not be an ideological slave to the pope.

On the eve of that election American Protestants – especially the
evangelicals and fundamentalists whom Romney now courts so assiduously
– still feared Rome’s potential influence on the American Caesar. (What
a difference 50 or so years can make.)

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