“Sentimental Storytelling”: Beware Of Mitt Romney’s “Softer Side”
Everyone is talking about Mitt Romney’s “softer side.”
That’s how some reporters are characterizing a recent shift in Romney’s stump speeches.
Because Governor Romney has started talking about dead people: the Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi. The 14-year-old boy who died of leukemia (profiled at the Convention). The long-lost friend stricken with multiple disabilities, who drags himself to meet Mitt Romney at a campaign rally. And dies the next day.
The New York Times reports Romney’s stump speech: “I reached down and I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder and I whispered into his ear, and I said, ‘Billy, God bless you, I love you.’ And he whispered right back to me—and I couldn’t quite hear what he said… [He] died the next day.”
And a hush fell over the crowd.
What does this have to do with running for president?
Look, people tell tear-jerkers about dead people all the time. Dying moms and kids especially.
Glenn Beck did it with his book The Christmas Sweater, in which a boy turns up his nose at a particularly unattractive but dearly-bought sweater his mother gifted him for Christmas.
And she dies in a fiery car crash a few pages later.
Beck learned the genre, I once argued, from a particularly bruising subgenre of Mormon sentimentality: Sunday School manual anecdotes and movies that circle like vultures around accidental, lonely, and untimely deaths. Just to make us cry.
This sentimental storytelling is an American tradition dating back at least to the nineteenth century. It encourages us to zero-in on the anecdote—to identify with and shed tears for the helplessness of the victim—and lose complete sight of the big picture.
Is there anything in Romney’s foreign policy that will ensure that more Navy SEALS, sailors, and soldiers will come home quickly?
Does the Romney-Ryan budget maintain the social safety net on which disabled people depend?
And how will repealing the Affordable Health Care Act help out the thousands upon thousands of American families who don’t have access to medical care or who face medical bankruptcy as their loved ones fight cancer?
Time to ask harder questions about the “softer side.”
By: Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches, October 11, 2012
“Culture And The Hand Of Providence”: On Israel, Mitt Romney More GOP Than LDS
When Mitt Romney claimed “culture” and the “hand of Providence” led to Israel’s economic superiority over the Palestinians at a Jerusalem fundraiser this morning, he was hardly reading from a Mormon script.
Daniel C. Peterson, professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University, editor in chief of the BYU Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, and author of the book Abraham Divided: An LDS Perspective on the Middle East, said in an interview that growing up as a Mormon in California in the 1960s, most Latter-Day Saints were “very militantly pro-Israeli.” That stance has evolved, however, said Peterson, describing the evolution as a “mellowing” as people have gotten to know Muslims and discovered the conflict is “not as black and white as I once thought it was, that there are decent people on both sides. Good people have gotten hurt on both sides.”
Although Mormons believe that God has a hand in returning the Jews to Palestine, unlike many evangelicals who claim to be pro-Israel, Mormons also have what Peterson characterized as a “fairly liberal view of other religions,” including Islam. “We don’t have the same imperative, we don’t have same sense of urgency of getting to people in this life or else they’re going to hell.” As a result, it’s not uncommon in Mormon circles, he said, to hear Buddha or Muhammed described as “inspired,” a view that has “filtered down largely to the rank and file membership.”
What’s more, an important feature of Mormonism is “that Abraham is the father of the faithful and his other posterity also have a role to play and are heirs to promises given to him.” In 1979, the flagship magazine of the Church published an article entitled, “Ishmael, Our Brother,” and has paid “tribute to Muhammed, among other religious leaders, as having received a portion of God’s light used to serve his people, a very positive statement for a Christian group to make, before that was really politically correct.” That was not a break with previous LDS tradition, said Peterson, because “it flows right out of Joseph Smith,” although Peterson noted that he didn’t know how Smith came in contact with teachings about Islam or what he read about Islam.
There are critics, said Peterson, who “think we’re too friendly with Muslims.” Such critics, particularly evangelicals, he said, think “we should be condemning Islam as the religion of the devil, and because we’re not, that goes to prove we’re not real Christians.”
While the Church has, said Peterson, avoided taking explicitly political stands in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—it does not, for example, use the word “occupation” and it does not take positions on proposed political solutions to the conflict—it lays down “broad moral guidelines” about “all God’s children.” The Church is “very concerned that we be seen, for example, in Jerusalem itself as friends to both sides,” something Peterson said the administrators of the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies of Brigham Young University strive for.
While “a Latter-day Saint would find it very hard to be fundamentally critical of the Zionist project because our scriptures talk about the return of Jews to the Holy Land,” said Peterson, “there’s certainly room to disagree about the form that it’s taken or specific policies of the Israeli government. Some are going to be very sympathetic. You take someone like Glenn Beck who’s obviously very closely aligned with the government of Israel but others who are extremely critical and embarrassed that Glenn Beck is a Mormon.” Peterson described Beck as “much more in line with certain militant evangelicals.”
With regard to Romney’s statements about economic disparities between Israel and Palestine, Peterson noted, “There are other factors Gov. Romney should’ve noticed,” including that “Palestinians are not just under occupation but are surrounded by a wall.”
“If I could sit down and talk to him,” said Peterson, “I’d like to say, but Governor, remember, the Palestinians are too from our point of view theologically descendants of Abraham, and they deserve concern and consideration too.” While a Latter-day Saint would believe, as Romney claimed, that “the hand of Providence” is on Israel, Peterson cautioned, “I would be really careful about saying that in a political context, I would really want to balance it out if I were speaking publicly as a politican to express concern and support for legitimate Palestinian aspirations.” Peterson said he worried about Romney’s statements because “I don’t want Mormons to be seen as so pro-Israeli that we discount actual grievances that I think in some cases the Palestinians really have.”
Peterson added that he was worried, as well, about Romney’s reaction to Abraham Hassan, a Palestinian-American (and a Republican) who asked, at GOP presidential debate earlier this year, “How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people?” Peterson described Romney’s response as “fairly dismissive,” and that “I really thought he missed an opportunity there to send a message to the Arab community, which is fairly large, too, that I hear your concerns too. That I regret.”
Peterson added, “I list myself as a political conservative, I am a quite serious conservative, probably more than Mitt Romney is, probably of a peculiar kind. I really don’t like dismissing Palestinian concerns because in many cases they are legitimate.” What’s more, he added, “pragmatically, this is a voting bloc, and some of them have money, and he ought to be thinking about that.”
BY: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, July 30, 2012
Why Romney Decided to Go Glenn Beck
A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney abruptly changed his main campaign message. Before that point, he had been lambasting President Obama as a likable failure, well intentioned but sadly unable to revive the economy. When asked if Obama was a socialist, Romney would deny it outright, insisting he was merely in “over his head.” But starting December 7, Romney began to paint Obama as a sinister radical who had not failed, but had succeeded all too well, in transforming the basic nature of America.
At the time, I thought Romney’s sudden switch was a response to Newt Gingrich’s sudden (and apparently short-lived) challenge from the right, positioning himself to speak more directly to the fears of a freaked-out Republican electorate. But I now think Romney’s campaign has concluded that his old campaign message wasn’t strong enough for the general election. Conservative columnist Kimberly Strassel has a column passing on research findings from American Crossroads, a Republican independent expenditure group. Crossroads surveyed a large number of swing voters and concluded that they couldn’t beat Obama merely by portraying him as having failed:
“To lock down voters in the middle, Republicans are going to have to convince them that Obama isn’t just a flawed and ineffective leader, but that he has an agenda and motivations that they don’t share,” says Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads
Strassel presents these findings as advice that Romney needs to take. But I think it’s pretty obvious that Romney has already taken it. His tone toward Obama has grown harsher, and he is now openly (and falsely) calling Obama a socialist who is promoting total economic equality. I’m actually pretty skeptical of this research – the political middle clearly seems to be voters who like Obama but blame him for the poor economy without having a strong ideological understanding of why the economy has failed. But, whatever its merits, this seems to be the strategy Romney has embraced.
The tension between the previous version of Romney and the newest model sprang to the fore when he visited the Wall Street Journal editorial board for a weekend interview. In it, Romney carefully presented himself as an ideologue rather than a technocrat:
[Romney] concludes with even more force, “America doesn’t need a manager. America needs a leader. The president is failing not just because he’s a poor manager. It’s because he doesn’t know where to lead.”
Voters will have to judge the quality of that vision, and how it compares with President Obama’s. But there’s no doubt it’s a contrast with Mr. Romney’s visit to our offices in 2007, which became legendary for its appeal to technocratic virtue.
In that meeting the candidate began by declaring “I love data” and kept on extolling data, even “wallowing in data,” as a way to reform both business and government. He said he’d bring in management consultants to turn around the government, mentioning McKinsey, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Romney seemed to elevate the power of positive technocratic thinking to a governing philosophy.
So it is also notable that now Mr. Romney describes the core failure of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda as faith in “a wise group of governmental bureaucrats” rather than political and economic freedom.
Romney’s problem is that he is, as Jodi Kantor’s New York Times profile shows, a technocrat at heart. He approaches public policy from a data-driven standpoint, searching for solutions that do the most to increase human welfare. This inevitably estranges him from the conservative tradition, which in its essence is a philosophical belief in limited government that holds firm regardless of empirical effects.
It was Romney’s technocratic inclinations that caused him to look at a problem like health care and wind up embracing essentially the same solution that the Obama administration did, which is why conservatives distrust him. The irony is that Romney approaches campaigning the way he approaches governing, obeying the data above all else. If the data tell him to start wildly accusing Obama of abolishing all economic inequality, then that is what he will do.
By: Published in New York Magazine, Daily Intel, December 27, 2011
“Insane”: Mitt Romney Goes Glenn Beck
Mitt Romney has reworked his stump speech and delivered the new version last night. It’s premised on … a total lie:
Just a couple of weeks ago in Kansas, President Obama lectured us about Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy of government. But he failed to mention the important difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Roosevelt believed that government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities. President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government. The truth is that everyone may get the same rewards, but virtually everyone will be worse off.
This isn’t just a casual line. In eight sentences, Romney asserts over and over again that Obama wants to create “equal outcomes” and give everybody the “same rewards.” This is nuts, Glenn Beck–level insane. Restoring Clinton-era taxes is not a plan to equalize outcomes, or even close. It’s not even a plan to stop rising inequality. Obama’s America will continue to be the most unequal society in the advanced world — only slightly less so. The alternative proposals accelerate inequality even further.
This is a form of insanity that has become extremely pervasive in the Republican Party since 2009. The response to liberal invocation of rising inequality from the right’s intellectual leaders has been to argue against not liberal policies but against socialism. This wild lie has become so widespread that press accounts don’t even bother to mention it anymore.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, December 21, 2011
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