Is Mitt Romney Really Running Against Himself?

Mitt Romney
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Mitt Romney’s attacks have a rather curious pattern to them. Time after time he calls out his opponents for traits that are rather similar to his own.

Flip-Flopping

Take, for instance, this 2004 footage that’s been doing the rounds on the internet recently. In it Romney calls out John Kerry for flip-flopping. He goes into excruciating psychological detail about why someone might engage in this. “For those who don’t understand how he can be so vacillating – it stems from the fact that he is very conflicted, that he is drawn in two different directions, and very powerfully,” he says. “If he is with an audience he wants to identify with and satisfy that audience and will say what he thinks they want to hear. And if that audience is on one side of an issue he’ll follow that, and if on another, he’ll follow another.”

Jon Huntsman was the first of his GOP rivals to imply in an ad that Romney sounds rather like he’s talking about himself. However, he certainly wasn’t the first to have a titter at it; the footage’s very prominence of late is due to the fact that everyone had the same reaction.

Healthcare

The major flip-flop that has haunted Romney’s current campaign from the very beginning is of course the issue of healthcare. Romney’s Massachusetts reform is the undoubted intellectual underpinning of “Obamacare,” and his attempts to wriggle out of this have led to increasingly ludicrous contortions. Frankly, it’s the one overarching policy achievement that both he and Obama share, and his attempts to explain why his version is a triumph while Obama’s is a travesty have so far failed even to convince Fox News.

Career Politician

Then there’s the “career politician” line he tried earlier in the summer when he was trying to ward off Rick Perry. He kept using that line for a while, presumably since it seemed malleable enough also to apply to President Obama, who’s been running for office since 1996.

There’s just one problem here: Romney himself has been running for office since 1994. The Democrats gleefully leaped onto this in an attack ad that prompted an unintentionally embarrassing response: Romney said he couldn’t be a career politician because – well – he kept losing.

Secrecy

A recent line of attack on the Obama administration has been about its alleged secrecy. That’s despite the fact that Romney is currently in the middle of a media firestorm about destroying computer records from his time as the Massachusetts governor. And that’s before we get into the fundraising secrecy which has provoked another Democratic attack ad.

Harvard

It doesn’t stop there. The crux of Romney’s attack on Obama’s foreign policy is that the President spent too much time around “the Harvard faculty lounge.” Romney is, of course, himself a graduate of both Harvard’s law and business schools.

Golf

Lately, just as Democrats once mocked President Bush for playing too much golf, Romney’s been saying the same about Obama. Indeed, his campaign even has a website dedicated to the subject. It doesn’t take too much research to discover that Romney is himself no stranger to the golf course, and – indeed – that his father loved the game so much he tried to play it every single day.

Out of Touch

Speaking of Romney’s father, there are some strange goings-on there. The dad was of course the fabulously wealthy and well-connected former governor, CEO and presidential candidate George Romney. Mitt (whose real first name is “Willard,” as Al Sharpton incessantly points out) had a rather privileged upbringing. And yet the thrust of his attacks on President Obama is that the President’s background somehow makes him detached from the lives of ordinary Americans. When he recently attacked Obama for vacationing in Hawaii, the Democrats were quick to mail around these pictures of Romney and his wife holidaying there that are readily available on his twitpic feed. But Hawaiian vacations are one thing, and owning multiple (and capacious) houses is another. Perhaps realizing that, lately the Romneys have been at pains to play down their fabulous wealth and come across as middle class.

Running Against Himself

In virtually every instance, Romney winds up excoriating his rivals either for traits he is himself accused of or for lifestyle issues that aren’t very different from his own. It’s so breathtakingly brazen that one almost wonders whether it goes beyond mere opportunism and isn’t instead some form of psychological projection. After all, if you were to judge his opponents only on the substance of his attacks you would get the impression that the person Mitt Romney is really running against is… Mitt Romney.

Here’s all that in video form:

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