Mitt Romney’s venture-capital politics
By Richard Cohen,
WashPost
Published: November 28
Mitt Romney runs for president with the eye of a venture capitalist. He sees the profit in certain positions, discards those that are no longer profitable and moves on. He was pro-choice when it did him some good, instituted a health insurance plan that he now denounces and once supported amnesty for some illegal immigrants. Richard III offered his kingdom for a horse. Romney offers his principles for some votes in Iowa.
Amnesty for undocumented immigrants has become a GOP pariah and a matter of some passion among Iowa Republican caucus-goers — about 0.05 percent of the national electorate. Reasonable men — even unreasonable ones — have been hurt by the issue. John McCain spent much of the 2008 campaign backing away from an amnesty plan he had supported, and it is conceivable that he chose Sarah Palin for his ticket just so people would talk about something else. No other explanation comes to mind.
Bloomberg News unsurprisingly reports that Romney at one time held such an amnesty position himself. “We need to begin a process of registering those people, some being returned, and some beginning the process of applying for citizenship and establishing legal status,” Romney said during a March 2006 interview. This is dangerously close to the position Newt Gingrich staked out in a Republican presidential debate last week.
Almost instantly, Gingrich got the word “amnesty” flung in his doughy puss. Michele Bachmann, still in the race for some unfathomable reason, uttered the vulgarity and so did Romney. “The principle is that we are not going to have an amnesty system,” he said. This rare coupling of Romney and principle was not followed by what the 11 million undocumented immigrants might have been listening for: the promise that draconian measures would not be taken. Romney, presidential in voice but not in policy, never assured us that no one was going to round up these people, assemble them — grandparents and grandchildren alike — in schools, National Guard armories and Wal-Marts, put them on buses to transit camps and then shove them across the border to Mexico: Done and done.
(More here.)
WashPost
Published: November 28
Mitt Romney runs for president with the eye of a venture capitalist. He sees the profit in certain positions, discards those that are no longer profitable and moves on. He was pro-choice when it did him some good, instituted a health insurance plan that he now denounces and once supported amnesty for some illegal immigrants. Richard III offered his kingdom for a horse. Romney offers his principles for some votes in Iowa.
Amnesty for undocumented immigrants has become a GOP pariah and a matter of some passion among Iowa Republican caucus-goers — about 0.05 percent of the national electorate. Reasonable men — even unreasonable ones — have been hurt by the issue. John McCain spent much of the 2008 campaign backing away from an amnesty plan he had supported, and it is conceivable that he chose Sarah Palin for his ticket just so people would talk about something else. No other explanation comes to mind.
Bloomberg News unsurprisingly reports that Romney at one time held such an amnesty position himself. “We need to begin a process of registering those people, some being returned, and some beginning the process of applying for citizenship and establishing legal status,” Romney said during a March 2006 interview. This is dangerously close to the position Newt Gingrich staked out in a Republican presidential debate last week.
Almost instantly, Gingrich got the word “amnesty” flung in his doughy puss. Michele Bachmann, still in the race for some unfathomable reason, uttered the vulgarity and so did Romney. “The principle is that we are not going to have an amnesty system,” he said. This rare coupling of Romney and principle was not followed by what the 11 million undocumented immigrants might have been listening for: the promise that draconian measures would not be taken. Romney, presidential in voice but not in policy, never assured us that no one was going to round up these people, assemble them — grandparents and grandchildren alike — in schools, National Guard armories and Wal-Marts, put them on buses to transit camps and then shove them across the border to Mexico: Done and done.
(More here.)
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