Narratives of Mitt Romney

So much of politics, and life more generally in fact, revolves around the narratives that we generate to make sense of the world.  Politicians get defned in certain ways, and it's hard to shake a narrative once it takes hold.  So of course it's important for the candidates and the parties to work the media and the culture to nail down the narrative that they want to generate.

Republicans are really good at this game.  They defined Bill Clinton as "slick Willy", and the narrative of him as a liar became locked into the public consciousness.  Of course it didn't hurt that Clinton was indeed a liar, at least around the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, giving them ammunition to fuel the narrative to which they had already commited.

My favorite Republican example of this was what they did to John Kerry: "flip flopper".  Now Kerry didn't really change positions any more than the average politician.  In fact, he changed less than many- he's basically been a consistently moderate liberal politician from day one.  But George W. Bush's campaign in 2004 successfully hung the flip flopper narrative on Kerry, even though it was Bush who had run in 2000 as a "Compassionate Conservative" and who had essentially made a hard right turn upon getting into office.  And it worked.

Republicans have tried a number of negative narratives on Obama, most notably the "socialist" one in which the president is allegedly dedicated to class warfare in a Marxist sense.  This hasn't really grabbed hold except on the far Right, though, partially due to the strong discipline of Obama and his refusal to give them much real ammunition.

Mitt Romney won't let go of this narrative, though.  He's brought it up a notch recently, in speeches like this:

Just a couple of weeks ago in Kansas, President Obama lectured us about Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy of government. But he failed to mention the important difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Roosevelt believed that government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities. President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes.

In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government.

As many have pointed out, this is just a flat-out lie. Obama has never said that government should create equal outcomes, and in fact has never even implied it.  His policy proposals don't lead to equal outcomes, just to Clinton-era tax rates. 

This isn't the first time Romney has engaged in flat out lies about Obama's positions.  He has accused Obama of "apologizing for America" to other countries, a clearly false claim.

So I'm hoping that Democrats and those in the media start working this narrative: Romney is a liar.  He'll say whatever sounds good in the moment, but ultimately we have a Republican nominee who believes it's totally fine to lie whenever he opens his mouth.  This can also be linked to the flip flopper narrative that is much more appropriate for Romney than it ever was for Kerry.  Here's a guy who said he was for abortion rights, and now is against them.  Was for an individual insurance mandate and is now against it.  How do we know which time he was telling the truth?  His own party doesn't really believe he's telling the truth about his positions now, which is why they keep looking for someone better.  Democrats need to beat this issue to death.