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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (188945)	5/10/2012 8:06:20 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542946

Barney Frank On Mitt Romney: "There Is A Meanness At His Core" March 30, 2012 "He has reversed his position on the environment. On the questions of whether or not we should ban abortion. On health care, very clearly. And usually, I will say this, usually when a politician shifts position to a certain group, they don't mind. People are very tolerant of people who flip towards them," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said of Mitt Romney on MSNBC's "Martin Bashir" program. "But Mitt Romney has been so obvious in his absolute lack of principle that even the people who he temporarily says I agree with you, are not reassured because they understand that when the wind blows, there he will go again. There's also in Mitt Romney and people don't fully intend -- there is a meanness at his core," Frank observed. "You know, he ran ads -- I never thought i would feel some sympathy for Newt Gingrich but Mitt Romney with enormous amounts of money at his beck and call from people who want him to treat them right and protect their riches has run the most relentlessly savage campaign against anybody who dared get in his way. He ran an abusive personal campaign against Senator Kennedy. He ran a demeaning personal campaign against a first-rate woman who ran against him for Governor, Shannon O'Brien. When he wanted to be governor, he undercut the then-Republican governor, Jane Swift. He has a record of being very abusive toward women politicians if he has to be. So with all this planned image of his, you will not find a more devoted practitioner of the most vicious aspect in a record of politics than Mitt Romney," Frank opined. realclearpolitics.com

To: JohnM who wrote (188945)	5/10/2012 9:58:56 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542946

Hello John, it has been a while. I know you're not defending Romney but I think you place too little value on what this incident tells us about him. The thing that strikes me about Romney's denial is that either he didn't even feel enough remorse to plant the incident in his memory or, almost as bad, he recalls the incident but he has such an impaired sense of empathy that he doesn't realize that his statement of no recall is a greater indictment of him than the actual incident itself. The latter indicates that he's so tone deaf with respect to empathy that he can't understand how average people will view the "forgetting" of a teenage hurtful act that most of us would expect the perpetrator and the victim to remember with shame and embarrassment for the rest of their lives. How must that unfortunate man have felt when he read that Romney's act meant so little to Romney that he forgot it? So I think this is pretty important in evaluating Romney as a candidate. I can take an opportunistic liar as a President but not a tone deaf president charged with operating in a complex world where relationships with international power brokers and foreign populations are critical and he has to measure them, understand them and push the right buttons. But hey, maybe the haircut guy, like his all to willing cartop dog, habitually laid on the ground inquiring if every passer by was a barber? Ed