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Kincaid and Jacoby: Romney embraces big government and the influence of lobbyists—more on how Romney has abandoned his caricatured faux-conservatism

January 21, 2008 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign communications, campaign communiques, campaign management, conservatism, election 2008, GOP, media, mitt romney, policy, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
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“Consider some recent sound bites,” requests Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe in an article titled What would Reagan say?

  • “You said we would fight for every job! You said that we would fight to get healthcare for all Americans! You said we’d fight to secure our border! You said we’d fight for us to be able to get lower taxes for middle-income Americans!”
  • “Guess what they’re doing in Washington: They’re worrying, because they realize, the lobbyists and the politicians realize, that America now understands that Washington is broken. And we’re going to do something about it.”
  • “Washington told us that they’d get us better healthcare and better education – but they haven’t. Washington told us they’d get us a tax break for the middle-income Americans – but they haven’t.”

You don’t have to be a political junkie to recognize those as specimens of populist Democratic boilerplate, right? The only challenge is to match each quotation to the Democratic candidate who said it.

Except that no Democrat uttered those words. The three big-government platitudes above were taken from Republican Mitt Romney’s Michigan primary victory speech on Tuesday.

No one is surprised when Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards insists that it’s the federal government’s responsibility to “get us better healthcare and better education.” Coming from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the claim that the Bush tax cuts shortchanged middle-income Americans is all too familiar. But from a Republican like Romney, who casts himself as the truest, most Reaganesque conservative in the GOP field?

Romney’s message used to be one of unabashed small-government conservatism: “Government is simply too big. State government is too big. The federal government is too big. It’s spending too much.” Those words still appear on his website, but there was nothing like them in his remarks last week. He told his supporters that Washington is broken and needs to be fixed – which is decidedly not the same as saying it needs to be shrunk. Romney used to boast of the hundreds of spending line-items he vetoed as Massachusetts governor; “I like vetoes,” he told audiences. But these days he’s singing from a different hymnal […]

Yes. And about those lobbyists Romney broods about:

“Insisting that he is a Washington outsider, Mitt Romney has been captured on tape arguing with a reporter about whether a Washington lobbyist named Ron Kaufman runs or just advises his campaign for president,” writes Cliff Kincaid in a NewsWithViews.com article titled ROMNEY SURROUNDED BY PRO-U.N. LOBBYISTS

The more important issue is what Kaufman lobbies for. It turns out that Kaufman’s firm, as well as another Romney adviser, Vin Weber, have worked to put more American taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the corrupt United Nations and other international agencies.

Kaufman’s firm, Dutko Worldwide, represents and works directly with an organization chaired by Bill Clinton, the Global Fairness Initiative (GFI), whose board includes AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and is dedicated to promoting “a more equitable and sustainable world for all people” […]

[…] But that’s not all. Romney adviser and lobbyist Vin Weber, a former Congressman and member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, worked for an organization promoting a U.S. taxpayer financial bailout of the United Nations. This group, the so-called Emergency Coalition for Financial Support of the U.N, included the pro-world government World Federalist Association, National Council of Churches, Catholics for a Free Choice, Americans for Democratic Action, and the United Nations Association […]

Romney and his lobbyists. See:

AP journalist Glen Johnson rocks!—dared to call out his imperious aloofness, Willard Milton Romney, when Romney issued yet another unabashed lie

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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