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An Empty Suit For A Bankrupt Movement

If the Mount Vernon statement was a meaningless declaration filled with platitudes and stock phrases, Mitt Romney’s speech to CPAC was yet another expression of the political persona of a man who lives and breathes cliches and trite re-statements of thirty year-old ideas without really believing a word of any of it. As if to […]

If the Mount Vernon statement was a meaningless declaration filled with platitudes and stock phrases, Mitt Romney’s speech to CPAC was yet another expression of the political persona of a man who lives and breathes cliches and trite re-statements of thirty year-old ideas without really believing a word of any of it. As if to underline how little credibility he has on national security, these were Romney’s remarks on what he thinks the U.S. should do:

We will strengthen our security by building missile defense, restoring our military might, and standing-by and strengthening our intelligence officers.

Restore our military might? To the extent that it needs to be restored, it is so that it can recover from the excessive demands and overstretch that have been imposed on it by the policies championed by Romney and Romney’s party. The obsession with missile defense is simply comical. There is probably no item so irrelevant to U.S. security needs, and yet it is inevitably the one thing that every mainstream conservative and Republican insists that we need to have.

When it comes to the state of conservatism, Romney does no better:

They won, we lost. But you know, you learn a lot about people when you see how they react to losing. We didn’t serve up excuses or blame our fellow citizens. Instead, we listened to the American people, we sharpened our thinking and our arguments, we spoke with greater persuasiveness [bold mine-DL], we took our message to more journals and airwaves, and in the American tradition, some even brought attention to our cause with rallies and Tea parties.

Where has all this sharpening of thought and argument been happening? The main example of real conservative policy thinking in the last year has come from Paul Ryan, whose ideas the Republican leadership cannot reject quickly enough. When exactly were they demonstrating this “greater persuasiveness”? When they dishonestly demagogued the missile defense decision and claimed that Obama had handed over Poland to the Russians? When they foolishly urged government proclamations of solidarity with Iranian protesters so as to better weaken and undermine the Iranian opposition? Perhaps it was when they managed to get the administration to include some tax credits for hiring only to denounce the same credits as failed Jimmy Carter economics?

Of course, in reality it has been the opposite. As the Mount Vernon statement reminds us, there has been not only no sharpening of thought and argument, not to mention no re-thinking or learning, but there has also not been much thinking of any kind going on. There have been no efforts at persuasion, because there is no real positive agenda with which to persuade anyone, but instead there have been numerous efforts at rejection and denunciation. That might be all that one expects from an opposition party, but it is a far cry from Romney’s imaginary “vigorously positive, intellectually rigorous agenda.”

Update: Somehow I overlooked the most absurd part of the speech when Romney referred to “liberal neo-monarchists.” I know this is an old Republican trope (even Romney’s insults are over thirty years old), but it remains as stupid now as it was thirty-five years ago when Reagan compared liberals to Revolutionary-era Tories.

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