In the hours since my last letter I’ve received emails asking if I was really going to vote for Romney or whether I wrote it somewhere between two and three sheets in the wind. The answer to the first question is in the title. The answer to the second is a simple no. I was making an attempt at humor, apparently not too successfully, to gently damn him with faint praise.
But I was serious in that, excluding John Huntsman, Mitt Romney is the best Republican choice for the country and that his alleged “flip flopping” is a trite and presumptive criticism. It could be argued, not by me but by his supporters, that a health care plan that is good for the people of Massachusetts is not right for the nation.
As a pejorative, flip flopping is now being used in situations where “pandering” was once the word of the day. In 1992 Paul Tsongas accused Bill Clinton of this transgression, illustrating his point on TV with a toy panda. For those unfamiliar with the dialect “pander” is the way panda is pronounced where Tsongas came from.
Another bit of unintended humor came from Romney himself last week when he got carried away with the common practice of a candidate referring to himself in the third person plural. After saying that we will win the Iowa caucuses and that we will win the party nomination he couldn’t stop before blurting out that “we” will be president, an interesting thought indeed.
Ah how I digress! But these tidbits give me something to write about when real news is scarce. The way the contest for the Republican nomination is dominating the news these days it’s any port in a storm.
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