The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies by Jonathan Alter

Author:Jonathan Alter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics
ISBN: 9781451646078
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-06-04T07:00:00+00:00

MOST VOTERS IN 2012 knew nothing of George Romney’s centrist record, but they suspected that his son might govern as a moderate, as he had in Massachusetts. Romney played on this sentiment. His pitch was subtle and highly unusual. As the columnist Michael Kinsley first pointed out in October 2011, he might win “because his supporters are convinced that he’s a liar”; they were betting that he didn’t actually believe the right-wing things he said during the primaries and would govern from the middle. In other words, they would support him not in spite of his flip-flops but because of them. It was a comforting assumption—that the “adult” Romney would show up eventually—but it was flawed. If Romney truly intended to push back against the right wing and show his moderate colors, the time to do it would have been before the election, when suburban women and other swing voters were in play.

There were two interrelated reasons why it should have been in Romney’s interest to push back against wackos: To prove to swing voters that he wasn’t the captive of the right wing and to show that he had the guts and toughness to be president. Faced with a similar situation on his left after he wrapped up the Democratic nomination in June 1992, Bill Clinton held a press conference to attack a female rap star, Sister Souljah, for making antiwhite comments. The message to moderates and independents was unmistakable: I will attack left-wing Democrats occasionally to prove I’m not their prisoner. It worked well, setting Clinton up for a successful nominating convention that unified and broadened his party. To Chicago’s relief, Romney never had his Sister Souljah moment. Perhaps it was impossible. “He couldn’t have done a Sister Souljah,” Grover Norquist said later. “People would have gone, ‘He’s not a real conservative.’ ” In fact Romney had to keep moving right. After Fox’s Bret Baier questioned him aggressively about his flip-flops, Romney told CPAC in February that he was a “severely conservative Republican governor,” which was both infelicitous and factually untrue.

Candidate Romney was trapped in a right-wing universe that civilian Romney, the one from the business world whom people admired, would have found ridiculous. Instead of denouncing Donald Trump for suggesting that the president wasn’t born in the United States, Romney welcomed Trump at a Las Vegas fundraiser just a day after the man conservative columnist George Will called a “bloviating ignoramus” went on CNBC and doubled down on his “birther” fiction.

Unlike John McCain, Romney did nothing to restrain the trash-talkers whose paths he crossed. Rather that rebuking a woman supporter in Euclid, Ohio, who said at a May event that Obama “should be tried for treason,” Romney ignored the comment and launched into a long answer to the woman’s question. He looked the part of president but was having trouble showing the fortitude that Americans expected in the Oval Office.

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