Fighting clothes for Mitt Romney
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Mitt Romney has fighting clothes in his closet,
after all. He has taken them out twice over the past
fortnight and his new duds have made a difference
already.
If
his new aggressiveness lasts, it's a sign of good
things to come in November. Defense wins football
games, but only offense wins elections. Republicans,
who instinctively prefer drawing-room niceness,
often have trouble getting their heads around that.
Instead of continuing to playing the sucker in the
Bain blame game, endlessly trying to explain away
his success in making money - which has always been
the national pastime - the Republican challenger is
finally taking the fight to the president, taking
due note of what a new campaign commercial calls “a
perverted form of crony capitalism during his first
3 1/2 years in office - to the detriment of the
American middle class.”
“This is a tough time for the people of America,”
Mr. Romney told a Fox television interviewer. “But
if you are a campaign contributor to Barack Obama
your business may stand to get billions of dollars
or hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from the
government. I think it's wrong. I think it stinks to
high heaven, and I think the administration has to
explain how it is they would consider giving money
to campaign contributors' businesses.”
This burst of aggressiveness followed one of his
best speeches so far, to the national convention of
the NAACP, telling the delegates bluntly why he
intends to repeal Obamacare. Nevertheless, he said,
he and not Barack Obama is really the One they have
been waiting for. “If you want a president who will
make things better in the African American
community, you are looking at him.” No cheers, but
when the scattered booing subsided, he pressed on:
“You take a look.”
This beats by a mile repetition of trivia, reprising
stale talking points and, most of all, it beats
repeating demands for apologies for the assorted
libels, defamations and slanders that are the
standard fare of political campaigns. Nobody this
side of state prison likes being called a felon (and
felons don't like it much, either) and when an Obama
campaign aide said that Mr. Romney was “either a
liar or a felon” for his explanation of how he
filled out certain reporting documents about his
employment at Bain, Mr. Romney was right to call her
out on it. But then it was time to let it go.
Apologies are for sissies and they’re rarely
sincere, anyway.
We’re becalmed in the midsummer doldrums, when
political speech rarely impresses voters, if indeed
any are listening. But fighting speech fires up the
troops that Mr. Romney must count on to win.
Tom Davis, the former congressman who is an honorary
chairman of the Romney campaign in Virginia,
observes that the doldrums are the time to fill up
space because “if you don't fill it, the other
campaign will.” Kenneth Cuccinelli, the attorney
general of Virginia, tells David Sherfinski of The
Washington Times that the change in Mr. Romney may
reflect not tougher, but smarter. “I think Gov.
Romney is by nature a nicer guy than you're used to
seeing in politics.” Perhaps, but nice guys, as
baseball legend Leo Durocher famously said, finish
last.
There will be time later for speech more substantial
than name-calling. The president's proposed cuts in
defense spending will be one of them; Mr. Romney
promised during the primary campaign that he intends
to reverse “the hollowing out of the Navy.” When
crisis calls, every president first dispatches the
Navy's carriers, which now number 11.
Not only is the Navy being “hollowed out,” but, like
the other services, its fighting spirit is being
crippled by politically correct admirals ever ready
to retreat at the first sound of grunts and squeaks
by feminists, gays and powder-puff warriors.
USS Gerald R. Ford (US Navy artist's conception)
Only this week, the Navy announced that it would not
outfit its newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, with
urinals. “Heads,” as the Navy calls shipboard
latrines, must be redesigned to accommodate the
ladies. “Gender-neutral bathing,” the Navy says,
will insure “comfort” aboard the carriers. The sight
of a urinal on the wall might offend feminist
delicacy. The chief of naval operations must make
sure the swabbies put down the toilet seat before
they leave the gender-neutral head, and the only
solution might be an order, backed by threat of
drumhead court-martial, for everyone to take a seat.
Hollowed-out Navy, indeed.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.