I have to give Mitt Romney credit: he can be brutally honest about his lack of feelings or interest in performing his duties. When asked, as the
June 2011 Republican debate about disaster relief for the citizens of Joplin, Missouri, and for the victims of similar natural disasters, Romney replied
"We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all."
Well! the people of Joplin, and everywhere else in Tornado Alley, or in anyplace prone to natural disasters are on notice: for the federal government to help them is
"immoral".
The Zoo has
a fuller discussion of this incident and what it means in terms of Romney's personal moral vision ... go read it ... but what struck me about this conversation is that Romney seems to have learned nothing from the disasterous "
dog poop" tale of his 2007 Presidential bid.
You remember that one? It seems that Romney thought that a good way to introduce America to his decisiveness as a leader was to talk about the time he had to hose dog poop off his car. The poop got on the car because he'd tied his dog to the roof before setting down the highway, and at highway speeds, the dog became frightened enough to lose control of its bowels.
The dog poop incident itself demonstrated that Romney is lacking something important in his personality; a person with ordinary empathy would know not to tie a dog to the roof of your car. But to tell the story in public, proudly, fully in the expectation that the public would admire the story shows a lack of ordinary human sensibility approaching mental illness.
This is not an illness that necessarily keeps a person from being a public leader. To the contrary, Romney's mental or emotional lapses seems to have served him well in enriching himself. Working at Bain Capital, Romney
specialized in leveraged buyouts: borrowing money to buy healthy companies, driving the company deep into debt to pay off the loans, then letting the hulk collapsed, destroying jobs but leaving Bain and Romney rolling in money. This is a great way of making money, so long as you don't mind destroying lives.
From these three incidents we see a man who is calm and able and who ... if he appeals sufficiently to the Aristocracy of Wealth ... could be elected President. But we also see a man lacking in normal capacity to care for his fellow Americans, fellow humans beings, or even his dog. That he cannot see that his responses are disturbing to the average person pretty much shows that, while he may be a very valuable person when kept on task with a tight leash, he must never graduate from minion to mad scientist.
