Like a tourist visiting Jurassic Park, Mitt Romney returned to Massachusetts last week to revisit a political dinosaur - bipartisanship. Romney was showered with Democratic praise for his role in creating the blueprint for near-universal health coverage. “You proved what’s possible when we look past partisanship and instead set our eyes on the common good,” said Gov. Maura Healey.
How quaint! As he ran for president in 2008 and 2012, Romney found himself vilified by the right over Romneycare. After his vote to convict President Trump for inciting the January 6 2021 Capitol riot, he was forced to spend $5,000 a day on personal security due to an avalanche of death threats, a flourishing tactic during the MAGA era. In an exclusive interview during his visit here, he forecast more of the same. “The current course would say that J.D. Vance will be the Republican nominee in 2028,” he told us. “I like what Winston Churchill said: ‘You can trust the American people to get things right, after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.’”
But is the concept of political principle anything more than a fossil? Cynics would call it an oxymoron, and Romney-haters paint him as the poster boy. After all, didn’t he Jerry-rig a dance away from his pro-choice positions during his 2002 run for governor here when faced with a decidedly anti-choice GOP presidential primary election later on? Wasn’t it his campaign aide who suggested Romney would pivot towards the center once he won the 2012 Republican nomination “like an Etch A Sketch”?
Yes and yes. That’s politics, and always has been. Today’s two-faced pols are merely a knock-off of Louisiana Gov. Earl Long, who famously explained away his immediate post-election abandonment of a campaign no-new-taxes pledge in 1939: “I lied.”
But that doesn’t mean principle has no realistic place in our political culture. For all of Beacon Hill’s well-documented warts, just imagine it if there was zero respect for the law, no shame about lying, near-total devotion to self-aggrandizement and self-dealing, widespread obliviousness to basic social needs and vulnerabilities.
You’d have to change the name of the place to D.C. North.
“It’s terribly embarrassing,” says Romney of what he saw during his six years down there. “Republicans now salute and do what the president tells them, and by the way, Democrats did the same thing under Joe Biden. It’s the best job they’re ever gonna have and they don’t want to lose an election. They’re gonna go back home and do what? Sell real estate? No, they want to stay there. One senator said to me, ‘Mitt, sometimes we have to rise above principle.”
Sometimes we have to rise above principle. What a bumper sticker. Sales would be brisk across the vast marketplace of corporate rip-off artists, tech-bro Visigoths and all the other greed-crazed narcissists for whom principles are naive hurdles placed in the path to profits by foolish cry-babies for the less-fortunate, like the Pope.
Readers who recognize themselves in that litany won’t like it. They demand respect, but are reluctant to give any to the likes of Romney and others who dare to call them out. After all, everybody looks down on politicians who aspire to occasional virtue, don’t they?
Not everyone. The Romneycare collaborators all shared a basic principle – that government ought to at least try to make decent health care accessible to all. In hindsight, the fact that Romney suffered politically within his party for allegiance to that principle was an early warning sign of the moral catastrophe to come.
These days, everything’s a deal.
So here’s one, for all the creeps across the political spectrum who imagine their nihilism is a badge of honor.
No principle.
No respect.
