Romney’s Secret Video

I saw the news break on Mother Jones’ secret video about Romney’s speech at a campaign fundraiser. I saw the various liberal news Tweeters and RSS feeds go a little crazy, and surprisingly the conservative ones go quiet. Today, after a note from Romney that we hadn’t seen the whole video, Mother Jones released the full video.

I was surprised at the lack of conservative because I a) think Romney pandered to his audience and b)he’s right about a few things. I’ll say he is out of touch with most Americans, but so is Obama. You don’t get to Congress or the White House as an average person. You’ve got to be in your own world.

I wouldn’t say video shows exactly what Romney thinks, though my opinion is it’s not completely off base. If he’s really a devout Mormon and one that donates and gives a lot to others, he knows that 47% of the country that is able to work isn’t sitting idly by avoiding work. He knows that there are lots of people, especially Republicans in red states, that don’t make enough money, or they are retired or something else. However some of the comments, the gaffes in Israel, about Libya, the Olympics (twice), they show a person that isn’t empathizing with Americans. In my mind, he’s practicing the reverse class warfare from the Democrats, especially after reading a bit about his history with Milken.

I do think, however, that a lot of people expect a certain amount of help from the government on things, even though they don’t think they get it when polled or asked. We all get a lot of help in various ways, various services, and not the least of which is stability. We pay a lot of money in taxes over our lives, and some of that comes back to us in social security, health care, etc. That makes some sense, though you can argue that perhaps we should be taking that responsibility on ourselves, rather than having the government do it for us.

Romney’s talks about the Middle East and a “soft” Obama make sense to me. I think that our President has shown a lot of inexperience and naivety in how he deals with other countries and with Congress. He hasn’t been strong, and those are fair criticisms.

The issues of the recession over four years are fair targets. Obama said numerous times that unemployment needs to go down and the debt and deficit needs to be reduced. Those things didn’t happen. Could they have been under different policies? Sure, though I don’t know that the GOP ideas would help more. Maybe, maybe not.

Ultimately it’s sad and stunning that this guy, who was a centrist, who has a record of changing positions radically, who speaks poorly and not very thoughtfully at times, is running for President of the US. It shows the sad state of the GOP party.

It does give me hope that perhaps the splintering of conservatives with the Tea Party and the Libertarians will start to move us forward towards a more centrist solution rather than the far right conservative direction the GOP has gone.