To the Editor;
“If the election were held tomorrow, Obama would be re-elected.”
That was not my prediction, although many of the members of the Daily Times’ online, right-wing echo chamber will, no doubt, assume it was.
That prediction was made just days before the opening of the Republican convention by long time GOP strategist, and senior adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign four years ago, Steve Schultz.
I agree with Schultz’s prediction, not because I am in agreement with everything President Obama has done, but because I believe Mitt Romney has no clue about the harsh realities, economic and otherwise, confronting ordinary Americans today. And the man’s record since he entered public life here in Massachusetts in 1994, when he challenged Ted Kennedy for the U.S. Senate, lays bare the reality that he stands for absolutely nothing.
In both 1994, when he challenged Kennedy, and again eight years later when he ran for governor of the Bay State, Mitt Romney ran as a fiscally conservative, socially progressive, dare I say “intelligent” Republican — much like his father did when he ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 1968, only to be destroyed by the right wing extremists of that era whose progeny today dominate the once great party of Abraham Lincoln.
In 1994, Mitt Romney was pro choice and pro gay rights.
People should visit the archives of “Bay Windows,” New England’s leading gay newspaper, and read the interview Romney gave during his challenge to Kennedy that year in which he said if Massachusetts’ gay voters gave him our votes, he would be more supportive of gay rights and funding for AIDS research, treatment, and prevention programs than Ted Kennedy had ever been.
He maintained similar positions on those issues when he ran for governor.
He endorsed and embraced the science behind climate change and global warming. He supported, as did many bipartisan leaders, the concept of “
cap and trade.” “C&T” was designed to try and limit the excessive dispersal of carbon gases into the atmosphere.
He also, or so he said as governor, believed in expanding access to health care benefits to as many people as possible, even if a “mandate” was necessary.
Yet, look at what Mitt Romney has done since he cast his eye on the presidency.
He has done almost as many 180-degree toe spins, politically speaking, as all the male dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet have done since that august dance company was founded.
He has abandoned and rejected all the positions he once held when he sought political office here in Massachusetts because he knows the extremists who now dominate his party, if he held to those positions in a national campaign, would do to him what the ancestors of today’s right wing extremists did to his truly honorable father forty four years ago.
MICHAEL COOK
Gloucester
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