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Anti-Kerry Blogger: Why Do The Media Obsess About A Flip-Flopping Politician?

Why do the media go after Mitt Romney?  It may be that they don’t like his new politics (which reminds us once again just how new and different they are!), which might explain the extra close scrutiny they are paying to him, but it might also have to do with their ability to easily catch […]

Why do the media go after Mitt Romney?  It may be that they don’t like his new politics (which reminds us once again just how new and different they are!), which might explain the extra close scrutiny they are paying to him, but it might also have to do with their ability to easily catch him in contradictory or simply false statements:

Romney: “Ronald Reagan was pro-choice, and became pro-life. I understand that George W. Bush was pro-choice before he came pro-life. Zell Miller was pro-choice before pro-life. And I was effectively pro-choice before I became pro-life. I don’t think anyone questions the commitment on the part of those other gentlemen for pro-life principles. And, in my case, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can look at my record as governor, because I made the move to pro-life some time ago. I’ve been governor. I’ve had several bills that came to my desk that raised the question of abortion or life, and I came down on the side of respecting the sanctity of human life every time.”

The White House said Bush has always been “pro-life.” During the presidential race of 2000, Dan Bartlett – then a spokesman for the Bush campaign, now the White House counselor – was asked about a quotation from a Texas newspaper in 1978 suggesting Bush’s position had been unclear. Bartlett told The Washington Post: “The governor was pro-life before he ran for Congress, during his run for Congress and after he ran for Congress.” A White House official said Friday that Bartlett’s quote is still accurate today.

Romney’s campaign said the comment was off the cuff and was based on a National Review article, which remained on Romney’s Web site Saturday morning, asserting that “George W. Bush ran as a pro-choice politician in his 1978 congressional campaign.”

So when Romney’s in a tight corner, he blames NR–what will K-Lo say? 

My guess is that many journalists are having a field day with Romney because his political odyssey makes for such great copy and creates an easy target for people who would just as soon settle for the “gotcha” stories as do nose-to-the-grindstone investigative reporting.  When they can catch a politician in a contradiction or a falsehood, it makes them feel as if they engaged in a high-minded civic duty to keep the politicians honest, so in addition to saving them work it boosts their sense of mission. 

Delving into the past of Giuliani or McCain would be, by comparison, a lot of work.  All the media need to do with Romney is wait a few minutes for him to say something else they can document as a radical change of position from something he said two or three years ago.  The old anti-Clinton conservative media were great about doing the exact same thing, and Clinton was so obliging with his daily deceptions and half-truths that he made it easy for them to churn out story after story.  Romneyites, like Clintonistas, don’t like the extra attention paid to their candidate’s flaws not just because it’s “unfair,” but because they’re well-aware of just how many flaws their guy has.  They have decided to overlook all those flaws and back him anyway, but they get awfully nervous when these flaws are exposed to the rest of the world.  After all, they can’t be sure that the rest of us will be as easily taken in by Romney’s nice smile and big hair as they have been. 

In fact, Romneyites are almost sure that we won’t be fooled, which is why they have to moan and complain about the media constructing a “narrative” (i.e., reporting what Romney said five years ago and then reporting what he said today and drawing obvious conclusions that these two things are different) about their preferred candidate.  That way, we will think that the identity they are constructing for Romney has no basis in reality and is simply a product of interested parties.  Who knew that literary theory would catch on with the Republican blogging crowd? 

Of course, the trouble with talking about narrative–especially if you are a lawyer who probably doesn’t quite understand what all this deconstruction stuff is anyway–is that, like every theory that can reduce things to their barest elements and explain away many phenomena as rationalisations or “mere” expressions of deeper urges or forces, it is equally devastating to the counter-narrative that you create to oppose the reigning narrative.  It turns out that your counter-narrative is “just” the expression of your Romneyphilia, so why acknowledge it as being any more  meaningful?  This leads us to something of a dead-end, where we assume that everyone who reports something negative about Romney must be doing so only from hostile ulterior motives (i.e., they hate conservatives) and everyone who says anything positive about it him is one of his partisans or in his employ.  Recognising that people do create narratives and often do so to advance their own interests is interesting only to the extent that you are also able to recognise that this is not all that people do when they are describing things or acting in the world. 

There is something deeply satisfying about watching the tiresome GOP bloggers who crucified Kerry for his flip-flopping, which was perfectly fair game, now whine when someone does the same thing to their guy out of equally partisan, interested motives.  Back then, pointing out these contradictions and inconsistencies was truth-telling and holding Kerry to account.  How proud those bloggers were in 2004 when they were fighting for the integrity of the political process!  Today, making the same charge based on equally egregious changes is the fictive creation of a narrative that Romney’s enemies are weaving around him–poor Romney!  Yesterday, a politician who demonstrated thoughtfulness and reconsidered his opinions with new evidence was an untrustworthy swine, partly because he came from the wrong party, but today the same behaviour proves that Romney is a serious and nuanced fellow who is able to learn from his mistakes.  The difference, besides party loyalties, is that Kerry learned that the Iraq war was a mistake, which is not considered permissible by the screaming meemies of the GOP, for whom the Iraq war has some kind of totemic value, while Romney supposedly “learned” the “right” things about the right kind of issue.  Somehow I don’t think Barnett would be deeply interested in defending the integrity of someone who “evolved” in the other direction in his abortion views.

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