Romney's Human Side

Accepting the Republican Party's nomination for President, Mitt Romney gave a good, solid acceptance speech last night.  To be sure, it was not as flashy as Paul Ryan’s.  Nor was it Ronald Reagan. There were no cymbal crashes – well, a few – or verbal fireworks.  Mainly, it was serious talk for serious times.  It was Mitt Romney.

Polls indicated that the feckless Independents wanted Romney to show his human side.  So he talked about his family and his admiration for his wife’s courage in raising five boisterous boys:

"She [Ann] was heroic. Five boys, with our families a long way away. I had to travel a lot for my job then and I’d call and try to offer support. But every mom knows that doesn’t help get the homework done or the kids out the door to school.

"I knew that her job as a mom was harder than mine. And I knew without question, that her job as a mom was a lot more important than mine. And as America saw Tuesday night, Ann would have succeeded at anything she wanted to.

"Like a lot of families in a new place with no family, we found kinship with a wide circle of friends through our church. When we were new to the community it was welcoming and as the years went by, it was a joy to help others who had just moved to town or just joined our church. We had remarkably vibrant and diverse congregants from all walks of life and many who were new to America. We prayed together, our kids played together and we always stood ready to help each other out in different ways."

Now, there’s a candidate of courage, speaking, in these secular times, of his faith.  He told us about his Mexican immigrant father.  He spoke of Neil Armstrong’s courage and spirit.  He spoke about the hopes and dreams of immigrants to America, how they came here seeking the American dream, a better of life.

Without getting into ideology, he spoke about Obama’s promise to America and how America believed in his promise.  Then Romney factually detailed how Obama had failed in that promise.  He was too gentlemanly to examine the causes, the ideology behind that havoc and what Obama intends for America “I’m not that kind of guy.”  In his mind, rightly, who cares what Obama has in mind, because we’re going to elect Romney, an experienced, successful businessman whose expertise was in rescuing flailing companies.

America will be his biggest challenge – a country with a flailing economy.

Still, there are the unconvinced out there, brainwashed into the Obama cult who just don’t get it.  Obama has failed, deliberately thrown the test.  He’s an avowed Third World guy who hates America, he hates the upper and middle class, and if you just read his biography, Dreams From My Father, you discover he hates white people.  Passionately.  There’s just no getting around it.  The words are there in black and white, in his own writing.

Romney may not want to fight Obama’s ideology because he’s just not that kind of guy and he figures the dismal statistics alone should be enough to indict Obama.  That doesn’t mean, however, that the rest of us shouldn’t fight back.

The Obama in “Dreams” is decidedly not a nice guy.  You don’t need to read critical biographies of him (although it’s a good idea) to find that he’s colder, more distant, more impersonal, and more detached, by his own admission, than Mitt Romney is.  Although it might be understandable, having been essentially abandoned by both parents, he does not attend his father’s funeral, and doesn’t go to see his mother in her dying days.  He just shrugs.

He is passionate only about distancing himself from his privileged, suburban background, including attending the elite Punaho School, a private school, in Hawaii.  Take him seriously when he admits that he sought out the socialists, Marxists, and radicals.  He did do pot and other drugs, although eventually he decided to clean up his act.  But only to pursue his mission of “transforming” America into his idea of a nation – a Third World country.

Obama is not above deceit at all, having been trained in the Alyinskite-style of political organizing (that’s what community organizing is).  “Drop the radical pose for the radical ends.”  In other words, the ends justify the means, and if that means deceiving the white people into believing you care about them, so be it.

We are like the drivers through Six Flags/Great Adventure Wild Safari in Jackson, N.J.  In desiring to get closer to the wild animals, drivers willingly bring the cars right into the center of the action.  They get to see the animals close up.  And the animals have the fun of tearing your car apart, particularly the monkeys.

Theirs is no racism meant or implied here; it is, in fact, what monkeys do.  They’re destructive wild animals.  Years ago, at another New Jersey safari park in West Milford, called Jungle Habitat (which is now defunct), I remember riding with my mother on her bus on a class trip she was driving through the park.

A monkey landed on the twin doors of the bus and proceeded to tear off the molding and eat it.  Anyone else would have laughed it off and said, “Oh, who cares?  The insurance will take care of it, or the bus yard mechanics will fix it.”  Not Mom.

With a scowl, she put the bus into park, put on the parking brake, and turned off the engine.  She then got out of her seat, stepped into the doorwell and proceeded to yell at the monkey.  Mom yelled at the monkey (“Get away from there!  You’re not going to eat MY bus!!”) and the monkey yelled back.  Mom won, actually.  The monkey flew off.  The bus was in hysterics.  I, being only a teenager, was mortified.

“Mom, you’re arguing with a monkey!”  More howls of laughter from the kids.

“I don’t care!  I’m not going to let that thing tear my bus apart!”  The monkey returned, landing on the hood of the bus.  It screeched at Mom, who sat there sullenly.  Then it proceeded to try to tear off the passenger-side windshield wiper.  Mom realized there was no point in trying to argue with a monkey; it would just make a monkey of her.  Instead, she turned the windshield wipers on (at high speed), sending the monkey into a final retreat.

We’ve reached a point in our economy – and in culture – where we can no longer afford to shrug and figure someone else (the bus company, the insurance company, the taxpayer, the government) will pay for the damage.  Six Flags finally realized it, after 30 years.  Jungle Habitat realized it after about four years.

Mom came from the Responsible Generation (aka the Greatest Generation).  Not only didn’t she shrug, but she fought back, with spirit.  She wasn’t going to let a monkey make a monkey out of her, or just laugh off the damage it was doing to her bus.  The bus company owner considered Mom a model employee.  She was given the task of training new drivers.  When she got too old drive, they gave her the job of straightening out their records.

Mom was also a model Mom.  That’s why I rode with her so often on her bus trips.

We need to stop shrugging.  We need to stop shrugging at Obama’s dismantling of our country, making excuses because we mistakenly think he’s nice guy.  Last night, some pundits were concerned about Clint Eastwood’s slightly naughty performance (I thought it was pretty funny and right on target).  Apparently, they didn’t like the insinuation that Obama is foul-mouthed.

Publicly, he isn’t.  Just read his own book and you’ll find out just how foul-mouthed he really is.  Clint Eastwood had Obama pegged quite accurately.  If the Independents, and their sympathetic Media allies (including, I’m sorry to say, Fox News), just did their research, they’d find out.  Our intellectually superior media also seemed to have missed the lesson of a simple metaphor of the empty chair - the invisible president, the empty suit, the empty promise.  Instead, they gnashed their teeth (yet again) over whether this performance would be perceived by Independents as an "attack" on Obama.

In a sense, Romney doesn’t have to “attack” Obama.  Obama reveals his own dark side and where he’s reluctant to do so, for obvious political reasons, there are plenty of critics (Dinesh D’Souza’s books fill in the gaps and correct the falsehoods Obama tells, such as the story about the black man trying to turn his skin white) with the information.  All you have to do is uncover your eyes and stop pretending that he’s a nice guy.

Romney is the better choice for President of the United States.  He’s decidedly more capable, experienced, patriotic, and caring.  We can be pretty sure that he'll never shrug us off.