That was yesterday. A day later, we are now starting to come in off the ledge. At least I am.
In interviews today, I was seeing in President Obama's demeanor a clear determination to fight and win. He acknowledged the debacle for which he was responsible last week rather than denying it, which made credible his calm pledge to produce a different outcome in his next at-bat. That comes next Tuesday night on Long Island.
More importantly for the mood of us Obama campers, Joe Biden came out debating his tuchus off tonight against Paul Ryan and made the points that had been left so disappointingly unmade last week. The GOP spin machine are doing their damnedest to convince the public that Biden was too smirky, too rude and arrogant, and therefore we should see Ryan as "the winner". They are spinning their wheels hard trying to convince voters that on their TV's they saw Rep. Ryan beat the "too-hot" Joe. Only problem is that the very nature of their attack, focused on style elements, reveals that they think Biden won the debate on substance.
Voters will crystallize their reaction to the debate over the next few days. Early surveys support the sense that Biden impressed viewers as “more presidential" and "stronger" as well as having made more compelling arguments on the issues. We'll see.
However, the one result I do feel confident about sustaining is that the prevailing winds of Romney momentum from the first debate has officially become yesterday's news. The spin wars over Biden-Ryan will certainly persist on MSNBC and Fox, in the Times and the Standard, but that only reinforces the retirement of Obama's anything-but-excellent somnambulent adventure from the foreground.
As pissed off, embarrassed, disappointed and nervous as we have been this last week, I do think one compensation may have been the electric angst of feeling the all-too-real possibility of the deeply dreaded President Romney. That angst may have provided the wake-up call to get us moving that a viral Samuel L. Jackson by himself could not. I'm moving. On Saturday afternoon at one o'clock I will go get my list from Obama campaign HQ, and I'll spend the day knocking on Democratic doors to get out the vote.
This past week I have been forced to imagine what I did not want to imagine: a future with a heartless, soulless automated cadaver in the White House, a man who will be pulling out all the stops to bend all knees to the plutocracy he cherishes. A President Romney would certainly mean that we're headed for that cataclysmic collapse that karmically must happen when a world-view based on lies and denial is empowered and inevitably crashes into undeniable reality.
How can I make such a dramatic, hyperbolic characterization? With all of Mitt Romney's slippery flop-flippery so well documented on issues such as women's autonomy and reproductive rights, taxes, health care, social safety nets like Medicare and Social Security and defense spending (e.g., Ryan just tonight claimed that Romney/Ryan would not increase defense spending!), how can one claim to know The Real Romney with enough confidence to predict anything about a prospective Romney administration?
The single most horrifying story was related by a woman named Carrel Hilton Sheldon. In 1983 she was a pregnant mother of four children in her late 30's who was hospitalized in the second month of the pregnancy for treatment of a "life-threatening blood clot". Long story short, her physician told her her life was at risk if she did not have an abortion. The then-LDS stake president, Dr. Gordon Williams counseled her. A Harvard-trained medical doctor himself, he concurred with her physician that she should have the abortion.
According to an account later written anonymously by Sheldon for the LDS women's journal, Exponent II, it was after receiving this counsel from Williams supporting the potentially life-saving procedure that she experienced an uninvited visit in her hospital room from her Mormon bishop at the time, 36-year-old Mitt Romney, who adamantly opposed the abortion.
"He regaled me with stories of his sister and her retarded child and what a blessing the child had been to the family," Sheldon wrote of the incident. "He told me that 'as your bishop, my concern is with the child.'"
...
There was no empathy forthcoming from Romney, according to Sheldon, no warmth or sympathy. Moreover, Sheldon contends, Romney cast doubt on her story about the stake president's approval. He simply didn't believe her. He threatened to call him and track him down. "At a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends," Sheldon wrote, "I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection."
Indeed, Romney was so agitated about the matter that he confronted Sheldon's parents about her decision as well. According to R. B. Scott, author of the insightful Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics, Romney's only concern was for the unborn fetus. Last year, Scott, who is also a Mormon, interviewed Sheldon's 90-year-old father, Phil Hilton, who remembered the incident quite vividly. "I have never been so upset about anything in my life," he told Scott. "[Romney] is an authoritative type fellow who thinks he is in charge of the world."
Back at the hospital, a distraught Carrel Hilton Sheldon assented to her doctor's advice and terminated her life-threatening pregnancy. She recovered from her medical crisis, moved to the West Coast, and continued to raise her four children.
"He can seem very distant, unattached at times, almost heartless," says Judith Dushku, a lifelong Mormon and an associate professor of government at Suffolk University in Boston. Vivacious and energetic, with a wide range of intellectual interests, Dushku has known Mitt Romney since the early 1970s, when they were both active in the LDS. Romney later served as her ward bishop, from 1981 to 1986, and as her stake president from 1986 until 1994, when he ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate against Edward M. Kennedy.
[The narrative relates another woman's encounter with the imperious Romney. She was single and gave birth to a boy. Romney essentially ordered her to give the child up for adoption by an LDS family or risk excommunication. She refused, and she describes her now-grown son as a wonderful young man with whom she has a great bond that does not include the LDS. The Dunn narrative concludes (highlighting added):]
These stories involving Mormon women of different age and different status in the church community--and all taking place when Romney was in a hierarchical (and, indeed, patriarchal) position of power over them--form an alarming, composite pattern of Romney's leadership career for more than a decade in the LDS Church. Dushku dubbed them "horror stories."
"Romney just doesn't have any sensitivity to women's issues in general," says Dushku. "But even more than that, he genuinely believes he's always right, that he's never made a mistake. He can never say, 'I might have made a mistake, I didn't understand that.' In Mitt's view, no one else has anything else to offer. He's always right."
When Romney uttered his now-immortal comments at a Republican fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida, about 47 percent of Americans being "victims" who think "that government has the responsibility to care for them," Dushku says that we were seeing the "real Romney." [bold added]
"He sees other people in need as lazy and slackers," Dushku notes. "He doesn't acknowledge that the path he took was a privileged path, from his parents, that gave him distinct advantages."
Last week, as Dushku watched the first of the presidential debates, she saw a competent, even "slick" politician sparring with President Obama, but she also witnessed someone who is a political chameleon.
"He's not a man who has anything like a moral core," she says. "He's very loyal to the Mormon church, pays his tithing, is faithful to his wife, and so on, but he doesn't have a set of core values you can count on. I've known him for nearly 40 years. He may have a different suit on, but he hasn't changed. His experience hasn't changed. His performance was very consistent with the Mitt I knew back then. He can't relate to average working women--teachers and nurses and care givers. He's still coming from a place of privilege and entitlement."
Peggie Hayes--who doesn't know Dushku--concurs with her assessment. The prospect of Romney becoming president, she says, "is a horrible idea. It would be terrible." She says Romney's recent positioning as a moderate "is a mask."
"I've known him since I was 13," she says. The Mormon leader who tried to impose church doctrine on her when she was experiencing some difficult challenges in her life hasn't changed. "Not a bit. That's exactly who he was," she declared. "And that's exactly who he is."
The full-length version of this article, "The Book of Romney: The Republican Presidential Candidate's Problem with Women," can be found online at Metro Silicon Valley.
This history is important. It is not suitable for use by the Obama Campaign, but it is relevant to assessing the character and policies this man would bring into office. President Obama must at least use the next debate opportunity to delineate Mitt Romney's public record of treating women's rights as nothing more than convenient campaign slogans, tailored to the constituency of the moment. When confronted with his contradictions and hypocrisies on women's reproductive rights -- as he does with all the other issues we listed -- he denies and denies, as if he has, well, "Romnesia" * ...
Obama ought to go ahead and recite this chameleon's litany of moral hollowness and show Romney's essential contempt for women as being nothing but pawns in his game.
For The Real Romney, there is no doubt that we would all be but pawns in his game.
* Thanks to Dr. Sam Gould for the Romnesia graphic.
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