Political dynasties are as American as apple pie. Since the Civil War, witness the marks made — or still being made (for better or worse) — by the Tafts of Ohio, the Stevensons of Illinois, the Roosevelts of New York, the Bayhs of Indiana, the Bushes of Connecticut and Texas, the Clintons of Arkansas and New York, and the Kennedys of Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island.
Now comes Mitt Romney, son of George, who as governor of Michigan in 1968 unsuccessfully sought to become the first Mormon elected president. Son Mitt hopes to succeed where dad George failed. And Mitt, the governor of Massachusetts, is not going to let anything stand in his way. On the surface he is as smooth and as gentlemanly as his dad. But in his heart Mitt is a sharpie, as cold as he is ambitious. Like George Bush II, who saw his dad outflanked on the right by Reagan, and on the left by Clinton, Mitt Romney is not going let the failings of his paternity mess with his success. His will to power, whatever the price, is straight out of Nietzsche. And his desire to do his dad one better, whatever the cost, feels like pure Freud.
Armchair analysis aside, Mitt Romney’s dedication to his own success is undebatable. With the help of Christy Mihos (a politically delicious irony), he strong-armed Republican acting governor Jane Swift aside to stake his claim to Beacon Hill. He shamelessly fudged his Utah residency to get on the Massachusetts ballot. He cavalierly abandoned Massachusetts’s voters after two years in order to launch his White House run, and he held on to his office to use it as a convenient bully pulpit. From that perch he morphed from a centrist to a right-winger, flip-flopping on choice and suggesting — with a straight face — that the sort of stem-cell research conducted at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School should be criminalized. Mitt Romney: what an hombre.
In his latest exercise in duplicity, Romney secretly lobbied an influential member of the Mormon church’s innermost ruling council to leverage resources in the service of his White House campaign. The scandal of this is that Romney has long sought to wrap himself in the mantle of Roman Catholic John Kennedy, who in his 1960 presidential run stressed that he would not be an ideological slave to the pope. On the eve of that election American Protestants — especially the evangelicals and fundamentalists whom Romney now courts so assiduously — still feared Rome’s potential influence on the American Caesar. (What a difference 50 or so years can make.)
Today, however, all that has changed. Secular voters fear the powerful influence of the religious right. And many conservative Christians still look with suspicion on the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are properly known.
An argument can be made that Romney is getting a bum wrap: that the Mormons aren’t just Romney’s faith community; they are also his ethno-cultural community. Just as evangelical Jimmy Carter cultivated his fellow believers, so should Romney be able to reach out in an organized way to his fellow Mormons. In fact, the parallel is closer to ethnic groups than to Christians of any stripe. For Romney not to court Mormons would be akin to an Italian candidate not courting fellow Italians.
The problem is that Romney — unregenerate power player that he is — subverts his own advantage in this line of argument by going right to the bosom of his church to tap into the affluent Mormon communities that marble the nation. Blinded by his own naked ambition, he shoots himself in the foot. Jack Kennedy was much defter at exploiting his cultural heritage while arguing convincingly that he could insulate his public self from his private beliefs. But then, Mitt Romney is no Jack Kennedy. In terms of slick ambition, Romney might turn out to have more in common with Dan Quayle. Be wary, America; be very wary.
The case for an Armenian memorial
The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Mayor Thomas Menino, and the Greenway Conservancy advisory board chaired by well-respected corporate citizen Peter Meade all agree that a proposed monument commemorating the deaths of at least 600,000 Armenians in the Turkish-prosecuted genocide — the first historically recognized genocide — has no place in a park named after Rose Kennedy, located on land cleared by the Big Dig near the waterfront. We ask this simple and clearly inconvenient question: why not? Are these Boston worthies afraid of offending local Muslim sensibilities? Is their vision of the Rose Kennedy Greenway so sterile and so suburban as to hold that history should not punctuate the reality of this public space as it does so elegantly in the Public Garden and along the Commonwealth Avenue Mall? Our advice is simple: set a limit. Reserve space for a set number of monuments and memorials. Devise design requirements. And set a high-minded example by approving this worthy project. The august and historic Public Garden found a place for a tasteful and quietly moving memorial to local victims of the 9/11 attacks. The Holocaust is memorialized near Faneuil Hall. The Irish Potato Famine is remembered on Washington Street near Downtown Crossing. The firemen who fell battling the blaze that almost destroyed the Hotel Vendome, in 1972, are honored for their service on the nearby mall — although approval for that modest shrine required a shameful battle.
