Mitt Romney is from Michigan. He is proud to be from Michigan. His wife is from Michigan. He loves how tall the trees are in Michigan. No one questions that he was born there. He makes it clear that no one questions that he was born there. Wait, what? Was Romney attempting to make a joke? Was he playing on the Obama birth-certificate conspiracy to fire up his base? No, it had to be humor right? But with Romney you never can tell if he is joking. He doesn’t laugh. So was it, what was it exactly?
Time to take off the Mitt and put on the glove
According to a Romney campaign PR rep, Romney was simply illustrating that he was from Michigan, a fact that no one really cares about and that won’t do him any favors in the state of Michigan, where he angered pretty much everyone when he made it clear that he opposed the bail out for the auto industry, and then later took credit for it. If any state knows how ridiculous Romney is, how he adheres to no strict position for any amount of time before switching sides of an issue for the sake of popularity, it’s Massachusetts. But if there is a second state, it’s Michigan. Michigan didn’t need any reminders that Romney is from there, his father was a governor. Even though Romney hasn’t come back to Michigan except to campaign, and shows a true disdain for the workers who live there, everyone knows he is from Michigan.
Yet he picked up on the birther issue, which circles around two things: disclosure and racism. The first point, disclosure, was what the extremely racist, right wing Republicans demanded when the movement began. Obama released his short form certificate, and when that wasn’t good enough, he released a long form one. Now the only people who still believe it are radical nut cases like Donald Trump who have no other access to the national stage than by prolonging the death of this issue. Romney, on the other hand, is under a lot of fire to disclose his tax returns from the past decade, and not just the partial one he released along with one year’s tax returns from a few years back. Romney insists he has nothing to hide, yet it is awfully suspicious not to let everyone have a look around in there. Therefore, Romney is guilty of the highest level of hypocrisy: accusing your opponent of doing exactly what you are doing now. This is not quite New Gingrich accusing President Bill Clinton of adultery, but we are approaching the same level.
The second point is racism. People in the USA are racist. People everywhere are racist. Countries like Italy have no integration of African immigrants, even after generations. You never see any black politicians there either. Civil rights around the world have not progressed as far as they have in America, which is the first major country to have a black man lead them. When you consider that the last spectacle lynching — when white people hanged black people for the fun of it — in the US was in 1956, we have come a long way since then. But the “we” used in the previous sentence is not everyone, it is the majority. There are still places in the US where racism rules supreme, where interracial couples are no where to be seen, where employers wont hire any minorities no matter how illegal it is. These are precisely the people who believe the birther conspiracy. These are people who will never open up to civil rights, who will never accept that a black man can lead the country, who will never accept that black people are equal to white people. These are the people that Mitt Romney is playing to.
And this is why he will lose in November. Instead of focusing on the middle, the independents, he is courting the far right. No one would have expected it from a candidate who once endorsed gay marriage, created a socialized healthcare program, and who supported tougher gun laws. Every comment he makes towards the right, he loses votes to Obama in the center. Keep it up Mitt.
