Empty Praise With Mitt Romney

David Letterman once described former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney perfectly. "He looks like the American president in a Canadian movie", Letterman quipped.

The man is so improbably coiffed and handsome that it's almost impossible to take him seriously. Worse still, he acts like the American president in a Canadian movie, politically expedient to the point of immorality, Romney has never met a principle that he knew that he wouldn't someday betray. He's the walking embodiment of every negative stereotype in American politics.

And in large part, that's why he's going to be the next Republican nominee for president. Today's GOP is living in a mystical fairy tale world of willful ignorance and wishful thinking. So long as you tell the Republican faithful and their Tea Party lapdogs what they think they want to hear - that everything is the fault of the "progressives" and that they, the "water carriers", are the living embodiment of American exceptionalism - you will have their momentary loyalty.

I say "momentary" because their principles seem to change almost as frequently as Romney's. It wasn't that long ago, after all, that your average Tea Partier was four-square behind the Republican big government "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush. Even after February of 2009, when Bush's name became a dirty word in the GOP, the former president was still overcome with adulation when his book was released.

The hypocrisy and historical revisionism of the Tea Party can be best explained by the very moment that give birth to it, the famous Santelli rant. Rick Santelli, a former scumbag hedge fund manager, cum CNBC sycophant of the financially powerful went on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and decried the subsidization of the "loser's mortgages". The irony of this coming just four months after the the very same traders and bankers that surrounded Santelli and cheered him on nearly blew up the world ... and were saved from starving to death by a massive federal bailout was lost on everyone.

Most ordinary and moral people would have been, at a minimum, embarrassed for Santelli and socially shunned him for the rest of his natural life. The Tea Partiers and their Republican patrons instead built a populist political movement around him and his devious double standards. If you want to understand the Tea Party, go no further than the Santelli rant and the physical backdrop in which it took place.

There's also the fetishization of Ronald Reagan, a man who wouldn't have recognized the Tea Partiers as anything other than an perplexing distraction. Of course, Reagan had dealt with their ilk before, the John Birch Society, but he had managed to avoid their fate, which coincided with the catastrophic defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Because of his political skills, combined with the fact that he almost never called anyone out by name, Reagan managed to be all things to all people, especially self-described "conservatives."

The Tea Party legions whose lonely eyes constantly wander to the crypt of the 40th president in Simi Valley don't remember - or choose to forget - that the conservative wing of the Republican Party was infuriated to the point of disgust with Reagan by the time he left office in 1989. They felt that he had sold out the United States to the Soviets with the INF Treaty and left the country with unforgivable amounts of debt. His rhetoric aside, the federal government was spending even more money when he left office than when he entered it. At the time, conservatives saw Reagan as a willing dupe of Tip O'Neill.




Of course, that's not the Ronald Reagan that Mitt Romney chose to memorialize yesterday in USA Today. As is Romney's wont, he wrote a shopping list of platitudes and listed quotes that say nothing at all about the man or his presidency. They do, however, contribute to the formidable personality cult that has been built around President Reagan since the mid-90s.

America entered the Reagan era as one kind of country and exited it another. His mixture of extraordinary personal and political qualities made it possible. One must begin with his sunny disposition: cheerful conservatism in flesh and blood. The Gipper's irrepressible high spirits tapped into something deeply rooted in the country: optimism, faith in America itself.

I'm not even sure what that means in concrete, definable terms, but it sure sounds pretty. Governor Romney must feel like a putz being an independent during the Reagan era and vowing not to return to it as recently as 1994.

Reagan came to occupy the White House in a moment of national crisis, not altogether dissimilar from the one we face today. Abroad, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had brought the Cold War to the boiling point. Islamic radicals in Iran humiliated our country in a 444-day hostage drama.

At home, the misery index — the sum total of unemployment and inflation — had reached a post-war high. Jimmy Carter, shivering in the under-heated White House, was complaining about American "malaise."

Reagan would have none of this. His policies, foreign and domestic, reflected his optimistic spirit. He confronted the Kremlin frontally. He initiated a military buildup that outmatched the USSR, challenged it in Afghanistan, and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative that is now vital to our defense.

Reagan's words were even more significant. He rang the bell of freedom and gave courage to brave souls resisting one of the great tyrannies of modern times — the "evil empire," he was not afraid to call it. Reagan was quick to see what many experts could not: that the Soviet system was faltering. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is what he boldly demanded during a visit to Berlin. In short order, the wall came tumbling down. The Cold War was over and America had won.

If I wrote meandering, patronizing, ahistorical gibberish like that for a major newspaper, I'd probably die of embarrassment rather than think that it qualified me to occupy the Oval Office.

The Reagan defense buildup was important, but not as important as Romney and the Tea Partiers think, and for different reasons. First, any halfway serious student of history knows that Reagan did not end the Cold War. The policies that brought victory were propagated and put into practice by Harry Truman.

If you read George F. Kennan's 1946 "long telegram" and his 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", you know that it was established long before the Reagan Administration that containment of the Soviet Union would allow the internal contradictions of communism to eventually bankrupt the system without war. In fact, the largest and most consequential build-up of American military capability didn't occur under Reagan, it happened under Truman and Eisenhower. We also now know that the Soviet economy went into its irreversible death spiral in the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was president.

Reagan's defense spending was important, in that it may have accelerated the implosion of the Soviet Union. But the question that should be asked is "at what cost?" Combined with his tax cuts, and in the absence of domestic spending cuts that Reagan never seriously sought, Reagan's defense spending brought about an age where truly awesome peacetime deficits became commonplace. Prior to the 1980s, you never heard a Republican say that "deficits don't matter" which has since become Republican orthodoxy ... at least when Republicans are in power.

President Reagan also made a strategic miscalculation in believing that Soviet imperialism was a consequence of communism, rather than inherent in the Russian character. We're seeing evidence of that today, just twenty years after the disintegration of European Marxism. Yet Romney and even the most fevered of pro-defense Tea Partiers is suggesting anything that would challenge emerging Russian expansionism, preferring instead to confront sideshows like the Iranian nuclear program.

Here at home, Reagan saw a federal government that had become, like a diseased heart, enlarged and sclerotic. Paving a path trod today by the Tea Party, he sharply cut taxes to restore economic growth. He took painful measures to rein in double-digit inflation. He fought to cut federal spending. He sought to restore our Founding Fathers' vision of American greatness and limited government.

It's noteworthy that the governor spends so little of his time on Reagan's domestic programs because that's where he was truly consequential.

The single most disastrous development of the Reagan years was that he "fought to cut federal spending" for about ten minutes in the early spring of 1981. When he lost that battle, he proceeded with the largest tax cuts in American history to that time and massively increased defense spending anyway. Once that was set in motion, astronomical deficits became unavoidable and routine.

The "painful measures to rein in double-digit inflation" that Romney refers to was a deliberate recession that caused even higher unemployment than the United States faces today, created entirely by Reagan and Paul Volcker. That was the single most courageous decision of the Reagan years. The recession that finally broke inflation was just as responsible for the economic growth of the 1980s as the tax cuts, and very probably more so.

The sad thing is that Romney and the Tea Partiers hide from the actual history of the Reagan era in downplaying the importance of the Reagan-Volcker recession and embrace the most fiscally irresponsible and counter-productive aspects of his presidency. To this day they fail understand that tax cuts are still spending from a budgetary perspective. Large tax cuts have never paid for themselves when coupled with large increases in discretionary military spending, and it has been tried three times in the last half century.

They also ignore that Reagan tacitly understood this, having raised taxes six times subsequent to the '81 tax cuts, including a doubling of the payroll tax. By the time Ronald Reagan left office, the federal government had reclaimed fully half of the 1981 tax cut. The President had a unique opportunity to reform entitlements but refused to. Thus, he created an economic boom that was overshadowed by an empire of debt.

There are no shortage of lessons that can be learned from Reagan, both his successes and his failures. Romney, the GOP and the Tea Party aren't learning any of them, preferring instead to prop up a personality cult that was never fully grounded in reality. In not learning from history, they're dooming themselves to repeat it at a time when America can least afford to do so.

The worst part is that Mitt Romney himself doesn't believe any of his own nonsense. Romney was 47 years old when he ran for the Senate in 1994 and actively distanced himself from the Reagan legacy. He was 55 when he became governor and carried himself as a moderate Northeastern Republican. It was only when he decided to run for president at the age of 61 that he reevaluated everything he ever believed and decided that he was wrong.

That doesn't make him a Reagan Republican as much as it proves that he's either an opportunistic whore or mentally ill.