There They Go Again

I am a big fan of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. I just feel so damn cultured after I get done reading each month's issue. (You should have seen how upset I got when my sister lost last month's copy before I had the chance to read it. Darn her!) I am also a big fan of the Atlantic's cadre of bloggers - Marc Ambinder, Matthew Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and Ross Douthat. These are the bloggers I read first most mornings. They all have unique points of view which makes me think about ideas that I normally wouldn't think about on my own. Which is always a good thing.

Today Marc Ambinder reported that an iPetition appeared on a website called "No Mitt VP." My first question - an iPetition, what's that? The website was created by people who don't want John McCain to pick Mitt Romney as his vice-president choice because Mitt is insufficiently dedicated to social issues such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage and YouTube. Nothing new here as one of the reasons that Mitt Romney cratered as a candidate was because his conservative credentials were always suspect. Reading through the comments of Marc Ambinder's post seemed to favor Romney 3 to 1 however. The message of most of these commenters - if you don't like Mitt Romney, you are a religious bigot.

I think Mitt Romney was a terrible candidate. Many times before the primaries even started, I would tell my friends, "Mitt would be a worse candidate than George W. Bush." Seriously. I said that. George W. Bush was enough of his own man to go against generally accepted conservative beliefs. For example, George W. Bush has been rather welcoming of immigrants to this country. For that, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh raked him over the coals. Could you imagine President Mitt Romney ever going against Rush Limbaugh? I can't. George W. Bush believes he is a conservative which allows him to pick and choose battles with the conservative base. His comfort with them (because he is one of them) means he can try to push them into the direction he wants. Family squabbling is okay. We all do it.

Mitt Romney is the equivalent of someone marrying into the family. Most of us guys would not argue with the mother of our fiancée right before the wedding. We would probably go along with whatever our future mother-in-law wanted. This would be the prudent course. Why make waves? Mitt is this person. He knows he is not a conservative but he wants all the benefits that he thinks being a conservative would get him. Heck, he is pretending he is a conservative already so he might as well go all the way into Limbaugh/Hannity/O'Reilly Land. The ironic thing is that 2008 just wasn't the year to be a conservative. Romney gambled and lost. Yet his followers can't see that.

Romney's supporters can't accept the real reason he lost (the reason stated above) so they come up with the "religious prejudice" excuse. There are always going to be people who don't like Mormons. But then there are people who don't like blacks or Catholics or Jews. Barack Obama seems to be doing fine. Joseph Lieberman was seen as a decent vice-presidential candidate in 2000. And John F. Kennedy is still regarded by many as a good president. People sometimes can't admit that the candidate they picked was seen by many people as insincere and wooden and politically clumsy. To see things this way impugns the judgment of Romney supporters. To impugn the judgment of phantom religious bigots means that Romney supporters won't have to go to sleep at night wondering how they picked such a weak candidate.