Mitt
Romney’s current media handlers would like you to think he’s a
mild-mannered guy who has become increasingly conservative over the
years—especially since he was pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-tax
increases, pro-gay and
fairly liberal as Massachusetts governor before he ran for president in 2008 and started pandering to right-wingers.
But
a more complete picture of Romney is emerging this summer. Some great
reporting by journalists reveals that the man behind the smile isn’t
just a political flip-flopper who can't be trusted, but a self-serving
man who is often tone-deaf to his impact on others and whose internal
compass seems to spin wildly.
These seven recent reports reveal
the real Romney—starting with a young man who didn’t care how he made
money, as long as he made it.
1. Bain Capital Launched with Funds Tied to Salvadoran Death Squads
People who start new businesses are always hungry for investors. But as
Huffington Post reporters Ryan Grim and Cole Stangler found in their report, “
Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads,”
there was no possible way that anybody in 1984 could "check out" these
families and be convinced this money was clean, as Grim told
Democracy Now.
“After
initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in
1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain’s start-up money,”
Democracy Now’s report began. “Some investors had extensive ties to the
death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands
of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s.”
As Amy Goodman noted,
“The investors include the Salaverria family, whose former U.S.
Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, has previously accused of
directly funding the Salvadorian paramilitaries. In his memoir, former
Bain executive Harry Strachan writes, 'Romney pushed aside his own
misgivings about the investors to accept their backing.' Strachan
writes, ‘These Latin American friends have loyally rolled over
investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital’s
May investor meetings and are still today one of the largest investor
groups in Bain Capital.’”
2. Romney Wants Tax Cuts For the Rich Paid By Higher Middle-Class Taxes
Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor showed he had no aversion to raising taxes or fees, according to a
report
by John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—including raising the state
fee assessed to families before cremating the dead, which the state’s
media called creepy. So it is not surprising that independent analyses
find Romney’s 2012 tax proposals would hit other vulnerable people.
The proposals, in an analysis cited by the
Washington Post and
others,
would cut taxes for the wealthiest 5 percent but raise taxes on
everyone else. Extreme Liberal's blog posted a graphic that shows
exactly how it would work,
saying,
“You may notice that everyone pays more in taxes right up until you get
to the top 5 percent of the population. According to the analysis,
those who make $3 million dollars a year would get a TAX CUT of
$250,000.”
Romney obviously wants to protect the interests of the
ecomonic class of Americans in which he resides—the rich. But what’s
emerging is a more nuanced picture: he has no qualms beating up on the
poor, including playing the race card, like many previous Republican and
Democratic presidential candidates.
3. Romney’s Racist Attack on Welfare
We have all seen this ugly script before. Bill Clinton
went after Sister Souljah in 1992. Four years later he
signed
a bill “ending welfare as we know it” to win conservatives. Fast
forward to spring 2012 and Newt Gingrich attacked Obama as the “food
stamp” president, a swipe at poor and non-whites receiving benefits. Now
Romney has accused Obama of wanting to eliminate work requirements for
public assistance recipients.
As Matthew Rothschild, editor of the
Progressive has
written,
there are so many layers of hypocrisy here. “Romney says Obama wants to
take the work requirements out of welfare reform. As evidence, he cites
the administration’s recent decision to let states apply for waivers on
these requirements,” he writes. “Never mind that some Republican
governors have been applying for them. Never mind that Romney himself
applied for one when he was governor of Massachusetts. And never mind
that to get this waiver, states must be able to show that they’ve
recently moved at least 20 percent more of their welfare recipients into
jobs than in previous years. No, facts don’t matter.”
4. Romney, the Bad Neighbor
The
personal is political. Romney thumbing his nose at his neighbors at a
vacation home in La Jolla, Calif. shows that Romney does what he wants
and doesn’t really care about the impact on others near him. There’s no
other way to interpret it, according to this
New York Times report, that recounts how after Romney bought his beach house he offended his neighbors by seeking to quadruple its size.
“The
only thing he wants small is government and taxes,” said Mark Quint, a
Democrat who lives three doors away and who hates the prospect of more
McMansions such as Romney's plan. “He likes big houses, big families and
big religion.” Quint also was peeved, the
Times reported,
because Romney had complained to the local police about beachgoers who
drank or smoked pot nearby. The cops told Quint to report people smoking
or drinking, saying, “Your neighbors have complained.”
Romney may
end up buying another nearby large property, the paper speculated, even
though he’s hired a local team to shepherd the project through the
permit process.
5. Intolerant Then, Intolerant Now
There
is always the question of how much people change—or don’t—over a
lifetime. Before Romney entered business and politics, he was an active
member of the church who took his pastoral role seriously, even as a
graduate student at Harvard University.
This
Washington Post profile
of Romney from that time—as the young but highest-ranking Mormon in
Boston—notes how he told an older, recently divorced women who had
converted to Mormonism not to have premarital sex. At the time, the
Post
said many Mormon couples were at Harvard and the women were curious
about feminism. The report goes on to say that Romney tempered his views
by the time he became Massachusetts governor—which the 2008 McCain
campaign opposition research reports shows. Another report from that
period in
Vanity Fair notes
how Romney told a Mormon single mother who became pregnant to put her
child up for adoption—which she refused. When she faced serious medical
issues, he refused to come to her hospital bedside.
6. The Tip o the Iceberg?
As
Romney seeks to convince Republicans that his views are more
traditional, the question is not just "where is the real Romney?" but if
he ever moderated those views in the first place. There are other
stories of straight-laced insensitivity. Everyone has
heard about
how he put the family dog in a cage strapped to the roof of his car for
a drive to Florida. But a $200 million man and national candidate who
doesn’t tip a barista?
There are many profiles of Romney—such as in
Vanity Fair—that
say his aloofness and clinical focus have been key to his success in
business: he does not let empathy get in the way of making a profit or
closing a deal. But a president has to make ordinary people think that
he understands and cares about them. And this is where Romney still
seems challenged.
In 2010, Romney and his wife apparently went to a
Borders bookstore in Utah and ordered two hot chocolates and didn’t tip
the baristas, according to the blog
Jesus’ General.
That was cheap. But what happened next has been called strange. They
didn’t finish the drinks, so Mitt approached the baristas and urged them
to drink it.
The
Portland Mercury blog
wrote
about this incident and believes it’s true, saying, “Jesus’ General is
best known as a satirical Web site, but I know the guy who plays the
General, I've met him personally, and he swears that this story is true.
It’s told by Bryan Young, an assistant director on the documentary
This Divided State; one of the baristas in question is Bryan's brother.”
7. Romney Campaign Takes Money From Olympic Bribery Scandal Figures
Romney’s
relationship with dark financial patrons cannot be explained away as
youthful indescretion—the start-up funds from men tied to Salvadoran
warlords. Apparently, the candidate who likes to say that he helped the
2002 Winter Games move from the fiscal red into the black, and who
helped to turn a page after an Olympic bribery scandal, has allowed his
2012 campaign to take donations from figures from that bribery scandal,
according to longtime investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.
Barrett, a Newsweek/Daily Beast contributor and Nation Institute fellow, told
Democracy Now
about the tainted campaign cash. “He was a managerial success, Barrett
said. “The problem is that he was brought in because of the worst
Olympic scandal in history, and he befriended and awarded contracts to
people deeply involved in the scandal that caused him to be recruited to
this rescue operation. And he’s still collecting money from them.”
Romney,
as we all know from his tenure at Bain, has a very can-do attitude
about money. He will take it whereever he can find it, and use it for
whatever is most expedient.
Americans will be introduced to a very
stage-managed Romney in the weeks ahead, starting with the Republican
National Convention. But glimpses of the real Romney will keep coming
through. And the more Americans get to know him, the greater the chances
that they will not feel comfortable with him as their next president.
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