Every Man an Island

This will go in the books as a very bad week for the Romney campaign.

Not that it was any surprise to hear Mitt describe nearly half of all Americans as tax scofflaws who feel entitled to government support; this is a standard GOP trope, red meat for the party faithful and fat wallet donors, and it goes hand in glove with the laughable notion that wealthy people are beleaguered by excessive government regulation and exorbitant tax rates.

You see, it’s the rich who have a gripe about the terrible state this country is in, not the working class or the poor.

Voters can’t know Romney for a couple of reasons, the first being that the more of himself Romney exposes, the less voters like him, and second because he spends an inordinate amount of time on the campaign trail trying to distance himself from past statements and positions: I was against (fill in the blank) until I was for it, but now I’m against it because Obama is for it, but if Obama should change his mind, I will change mine.”

Hardly a profile in courage or conviction.

We have a fair sense of what Romney is against, but less clear is what he stands for and depends on the audience he’s addressing at any given time. On the one hand he seems to believe that America desperately needs a larger military and an even more bellicose foreign policy, and that America is duty-bound to agree with anything Benjamin Netanyahu says. America, according to some Romney statements, needs to be tougher and less apologetic in its dealings with the rest of the world, excluding Israel, of course. Under Romney, tiny Israel will continue to dictate American policy in the Middle East.

On the domestic front, all Romney offers is the tried and true Republican formula: more tax cuts, less regulation, more charter schools, less science, more religious nonsense in the public realm, more self-reliance, and, above all, blind faith in the free market. In Romney’s world view, there are producers and parasites, winners and losers, strong and weak; the old adage that no man is an island is flipped on its head so that every man (woman and child, too) is an island, and if he can’t walk the path of the rugged individualist on his own two feet, he has no one to blame but himself.

This is the same atavistic fantasy the GOP has advocated since Newt Gingrich rose from the muck to become Speaker of the House.

I suppose credit should be given Mitt for trying to pass himself off as one of us, a regular Joe, even though he flops every time. Mitt simply has no common touch, no capacity to connect with people other than those of his own rarified class, and he obviously finds mingling with the commoners distasteful. 

Thus far, Campaign 2012 has been dreadful, a grotesque parody of what democracy should look like, and the scripted-in-advance “debates” with their pre-approved questions are yet to come. Both camps will lie, spin, exaggerate, obfuscate and make outrageous claims about the other. The American media will treat each debate like the Superbowl, analyzing the style and tone while ignoring the content. Who got the debate “bounce” is the only question that will matter.

Welcome to the island.