Unity Time. Romney's Rolling, But Must Not Assume Obama's a Good Guy
Governor Romney, meet ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief and Department of Justice whistleblower J. Christian Adams.
Mitt Romney won the Arizona and Michigan primaries yesterday and is rolling on toward the Republican presidential nomination.
The important question is not when he will have the necessary delegates to be nominated, but much more damage his Republican rivals will inflict upon before he is nominated.
Romney says that the primary process is making the eventual Republican nominee (whom he expects to be) stronger.
I supported Romney in 2008 and am supporting him again, but that evaluation strikes me as wishful thinking.
Yes, the nominee will have honed his debating skills and therefore will be a better debater.
But the primary process has highlighted "the negatives" of each of the four remaining hopefuls--Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, the liberal media has wallowed in them and Team Obama has been taking careful notes.
2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a Romney supporter now, recently lamented, “I know he’s going to be the nominee, but I also worry about how much damage has been done.”
“This is like watching a Greek tragedy,” McCain told the Boston Herald.
(The 2008 presidential election was a Greek tragedy, complete with those columns that Team Obama used a backdrop. I supported McCain in the general election, although I disagreed with him greatly, because, those disagreements notwithstanding, he was ever so much better than Obama and conservatives who did not have Obama's thanks and themselves to blame.
McCain opined that negative campaigning and increasingly personal attacks “should have stopped long ago" and looked forward to "get[ting] this over" and "focus[ing] on Obama's failures."
In 2008 Laura Ingraham was an enthusiastic Romney supporter and vouched for him as a reliable conservative. This time around she says that she's not endorsing anyone and she's been desperately looking around for a Not Mitt alternative who can beat President Obama.
Diogenes used to stroll about in full daylight with a lamp and when asked what he was doing, he would answer, "I am just looking for an honest man."
Diogenes had a better chance of finding what he wanted.
Ingraham, in looking (futilely) for a better candidate than Romney, became an unwitting Obama ally and part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
On Arizona/Michigan primary day Ingraham posted on her website a brief memo titled "Memo to Romney: Get Real" and concluding, "Why not let Mitt be Mitt? That might not light up the voters' hair, but it may be the spark that Team Romney desperately needs" (www.lauraingraham.com/b/Memo-to-Romney:-Get-Real/-754009369330356477.html)
What America desperately needs is to make Obama a one-term President and to elect a Congress that will cooperate with him in restoring traditional American values and prosperity and for the people who realize that Obama must be replaced to unite behind Romney instead of, perhaps, making an Obama re-election a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also up at Ingraham's website is an article (www.mediaite.com/tv/laura-ingraham-on-this-week-i-dont-know-if-mitt-romney-can-beat-obama/) reporting that on an ABC Sunday news program Ingraham had described herself as not knowing if Romney can beat Obama and adding, "He’s got to bring his A-game, and he can’t just be, you know, the kind of thing he’s doing with Gingrich, because Obama’s operation is really smart. I think they’re going to run a tough campaign.”
Prominent conservative commentators will have plenty to complain about if Obama is re-elected and surely will win when their personal income taxes then inevitably rise.
But uniting behind Romney now and exposing the whole truth about Obama are the things they should do now as both patriotic and wise.
Romney has what it takes to turn things around and be a great President. He lacks the common touch that ingratiates candidates with voters, but America needs a president who is presidential, not a person with whom to enjoy a movie or a sporting event.
The liberal media establishment focuses on that and ignores President Obama's aloofness, even snootiness.
Anyone who doubts that Obama can be snooty should listen to the audio tape of him caught confidentially telling his rich supporters, "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Here's a link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTxXUufI3jA.
Gingrich, briefly the strongest Not Mitt hopeful, was the one Team Obama would have loved to run against, but realized that he would not be nominated and thus focused their attack on the one whom they realized was the strongest possible opponent, Romney. Gingrich predictably sank beneath the weight of his infamous "baggage" when it was focused upon, thanks to his foolish leftist-like attack on Bain Capital (which Romney had led for many years), his "consulting" contracts with Freddie Mac, his penchant for serial marital infidelity and divorcing his wives after nineteen years of marriage when they are suffering from cancer or multiple sclerosis and marrying a much younger mistress and his second wife publicly speaking out against him and Romney out debating him in the Florida debates.
Gingrich's swift political demise permitted Santorum's sudden rise as top challenger to Romney, but then voters learned that he was really a Washington insider who had lost his last race for re-election to the Senate by the biggest margin in Pennsylvania history and the kind of pro-lifer who supported pro-abortion Arlen Specter's presidential campaign in 1996 and then vigorously supported Specter in the 2006 primary against pro-life conservative (and now Senator Pat Toomey). When Romney pointed out that Obamacare would not have passed if Toomey had been elected in 2006 instead of Specter, he effectively turned the tables on Santorum, and then the media trapped Santorum into counterproductive public discussion of his personal opposition to contraception and belief that the Supreme Court was wrong when it ruled in 1965 that a state cannot outlaw it. Santorum will continue his campaign, even in states where he can't have Obama supporters vote for him in the Republican primary (as he did in Michigan, in a desperate, last minute commercial that cut Romney's victory margin (because Obama supporters realize that Romney is the strongest candidate that the Republicans can nominate).
Paul, a principled man, simply will not be put in charge of American foreign policy.
Result: Romney ultimately will win the Republican presidential nomination.
Problem: In futile efforts to promote their respective presidential prospects, Gingrich and Santorum (but not Paul) strongly attacked Romney's character, calling him a liar and driving down his public approval. Character counts, Obama's personal public approval in much higher than his job approval, and Team Obama has plenty of ammunition for commercials attacking Romney's character.
Solution: Romney must do MORE than refute baseless character attacks. The liberal media and the conventional wisdom notwithstanding, he must show that no only is he a man of good character, but that Obama is not. He must show that Obama has violated his oath of office by acting unconstitutionally in forcing passage of Obamacare and in implementing it in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. He must expose the full extent of Obama's relationship with ACORN and the illicit relationship between ACORN/Project Vote and the Obama presidential campaign. He must expose the radicalization of the Obama Justice Department.
Governor Romney, meet ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief and Department of Justice whistleblower J. Christian Adams (in that order).
Treating Obama as a fine man and the problem with him as only mistakes he made in good faith is not only a strategic mistake, but promotion of the Obama myth that has deceived America.
Setting the record straight as to both Obama and himself is what Romney must (and can) do.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.