Boston Herald
Only a fool, or maybe a couple of talk radio hucksters, would consider wasting a vote come Tuesday on our native carpetbagger, Mitt Romney. And to tell you the truth, I think the allegiance of the radio blow-hards is as much a scam as Mitt’s allegiance to Massachusetts.
You didn’t need to be George Will to figure out what the deal was when Mitt and the lovely Ann blew back into town from Salt Lake City with their matching black leather Olympic jackets five years ago.
Mitt Romney was in a rush to pick up what Humphrey Bogart stashed inside a lounge singer’s piano in Casablanca. Mitt was looking for his political letters of transit, the ticket that would help point him toward the White House. And Massachusetts was the easy mark. All Mitt had to do was kick his fellow Republican, Jane Swift, to the side of the road. And he was eagerly assisted by a fickle and spineless group of GOP horse traders who were convinced that they had found their Barbaro in pleated khakis and a plaid shirt.
Yeah, Mitt became our governor for what - maybe 18 months out of four years? And let’s be honest, it didn’t take that long to know we’d been had. Truth is, Mitt started running for president the day after he beat Shannon O’Brien. And he started running against Massachusetts not long after that.
The most heartening thing about this 2008 presidential season is that the rest of the country has not turned out to be the suckers we were. Iowa, South Carolina and Florida did not fall for Mitt’s smile, his shoeshine and the $50 million in TV ads.
Despite a fantastic head of hair, Mitt’s sojourn onto the national stage has more in common with hairless Howie Mandel and his TV show, “Deal or No Deal.” The only reality to Mitt Romney is all those attache cases filled with cash.
It was Benjamin Disraeli who once observed there are lies, damned lies and statistics. If old Ben had been sitting in the shadow of Ronald Reagan’s Air Force One during Tuesday night’s Republican Presidential debate at the Reagan Library, he might have been moved to revise his words to say: There are lies, damned lies and state budget claims.
Mitt insisted that when he waltzed out of the corner office a year ago, in a hyper choreographed and scripted moment, he left us with a surplus of a couple of billion dollars.
Funny, but the aides Romney left behind weren’t exactly saying the same thing when Gov. Deval Patrick’s number-crunchers started making noise about a potential budget deficit of close to a billion dollars.
In off-the-record comments to reporters, those leftover Romney aides conceded that the state’s finances were in much rougher shape than their boss with Potomac fever had admitted to.
Even as Mitt’s mouthpiece, Eric Fehrnstrom, scrambled to get out of Dodge a year ago, he declined to offer an on-the-record explanation for the huge discrepancy between what Mitt and his people were claiming in public and what they were privately telling their successors in Deval Patrick’s administration.
But then, Mitt had places to go and people to see. He had money to burn, tons and tons of money. And who could refuse a guy who looked like Ricky Nelson and carried a wallet the size of Nelson Rockefeller?
Now, he limps back to us in Massachusetts, the least favorite of his 22 home states. Mitt comes back looking more like Willy Loman, his trunk heavy with the samples people failed to buy. Even his wonderfully cynical WASP mentor, Bill Weld, recognizes that around here nobody really has any love for Mitt. Perhaps that’s because we knew him just long enough to see that there was no there there. Nothing more than a smile, a shoeshine and briefcase full of cash.
No comments:
Post a Comment