Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287)

by Hurt, Charles

  When he ran for governor in 2002—still in his Massachusetts phase—Romney reiterated his commitment to abortion, saying that he was “devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard.”

  Luckily for unborn babies everywhere, Romney’s word is a pretty fluid thing.

  By the time he began positioning to run for president—nearing the end of his Massachusetts phase—Romney completely reversed himself on abortion. He wrote in the conservative magazine National Review, “I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. I support the reversal of Roe vs. Wade because it is bad law and bad medicine.”

  Roe v. Wade is certainly bad law and bad medicine. But Mitt Romney is an even worse politician. Seriously, think of everyone you know with whom you have discussed the issue of abortion. Can you name a single person who has held this many divergent opinions on a matter of such profound importance and principle?

  Back during his 1994 debate with Kennedy, while in his Massachusetts phase, Romney also sought to distance himself from Ronald Reagan and the Gipper’s policies, which were dedicated to freedom, prosperity, and personal liberty. Romney would later reverse himself in that area, as well.

  Ted Kennedy must have marveled—and maybe quietly envied—the ease with which Mitt Romney could slide from one bedrock principle to the next, depending on the prevailing political necessity of the moment.

  It’s like the guy never thought anyone kept track of what he said about anything.

  For all of the Great White RINO’s slipperiness on profoundly important issues of deeply held principle, nothing—and I mean nothing—compared to Romney’s unfitness to prosecute the case against Obamacare in 2012.

  In the first two years of his administration, Obama bet everything on health care. With control of both chambers of Congress, Obama could have granted amnesty to millions of illegals in the country; he could have passed legislation through Congress to guarantee abortion rights. He could have passed any minimum wage bill he wanted. They could have soaked the rich and raised taxes to kingdom come. He could have legalized gay marriage.

  He could have shut down every coal plant in the country and outlawed cars and planes. He could have done, literally, anything he and his big-government acolytes wanted to.

  Yet the only thing Democrats really accomplished legislatively during that period was to hijack the nation’s health-care system, which the majority of people were perfectly happy with. But it was a way to raise costs for certain people so that the system could pay to cover health care for other people. It was, predictably, hugely unpopular. Democrats would go on for a thousand-seat skid of losing elections around the country before they hit bottom.

  The 2012 election was the first and biggest opportunity for Republicans to make Barack Obama himself pay for his hubris, tyrannical tendencies, and terrible governing instincts.

  So, who did Republicans pick to carry the battle flag against this monstrosity? They managed to pick the only Republican politician in all of the land who not only failed to oppose Obamacare, but who had actually invented his own version of Obamacare.

  Romneycare. Obamneycare. Republican Obamacare. Whatever you want to call it, it would cost Republicans the 2012 election.

  Back when Romney was still in his Massachusetts phase and supporting abortion with every fiber of his being, he decided it would be a great idea for the government to take over the state’s health-care system to deliver health insurance coverage for everyone.

  This sounds nice, but if you are an actual conservative, you understand that governments are abusive by nature and usually the least efficient way to do anything other than the most basic and fundamental tasks. As imperfect as free markets are, they are still the fairest and most efficient way to deliver services such as health insurance. At least that is what most conservatives believe.

  That would not be Willard Mitt Romney.

  The best Romney could do to confront Obama was to complain not that Obamacare was destroying America’s robust health care industry, but only about the manner in which Obama pulled it off.

  “I like the fact that in my state, we had Republicans and Democrats come together and work together,” Romney fumed during one of the debates with Obama. “What you did instead was to push through a plan without a single Republican vote.”

  Zing!

  Anyway, if there is one thing I have learned covering politics, it’s that when Democrats and Republicans emerge from behind closed doors and announce that they have reached a “bipartisan” agreement on something, you had better grab your wallet and run.

  But even on this point, the ever-evolving Romney could not hold his fire in the same direction for very long. A few years later, in 2015, after the Staples business supply company founder Tom Stemberg died, Romney recalled how Stemberg encouraged him to think up a plan for Massachusetts to take over health care in the state.

  “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney proudly recalled. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So, without Tom, a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.”

  Except, of course, for those who lost it.

  So, just how did the Republicans end up picking such a loser? The 2012 primary was a murderous affair. Every Republican with a pulse was running: Rudy Giuliani, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain. Republican voters in every primary state dutifully tried to fall in love with each one of them. Rick, Rudy, Newt!

  But for every reason under the sun, each was flawed. All the while, coasting along near the top but never the object of love, was Willard Mitt Romney, the Great White RINO.

  At the time, I remember comparing Romney’s efforts to get Republican primary voters to fall in love with him—something akin to trying to stuff a cat into a trash can. If you have ever tried this, then you know what a futile effort it is. Not to mention painful.

  But, eventually, with inexhaustible persistence, the cat got stuffed into the can. And so Republican primary voters made their choice after trying every last other nominee. In the end, Mitt Romney in 2012 became the Republican Party’s John Kerry of 2004 and was dispatched to defeat Barack Obama.

  The primary system had created a sort of Frankenstein candidate that checked all the boxes of the mind yet inspired nothing of the heart. And probably stood for nothing to boot. All stripes of Republicans who thought most any candidate could defeat Obama were in for a terrible surprise.

  Abandoning bling-bling, Romney pursued a campaign on behalf of the Republican donor class. The answer to illegal immigration was amnesty. The answer to China was trade. The answer to terrorism was more wars overseas.

  On top of everything else, Romney was immensely unlikable. It was as if he believed that the whole concept of conservatism is to crap on the poor—rather than provide a system in which anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can climb to the highest heights of wealth and freedom.

  “Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax,” Romney groused to a bunch of wealthy donors during a campaign event. “So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect,” he whined. “[Obama] will be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility for their lives.”

  Of course, the comments leaked. They were huge news, and they stuck to Romney until the bitter end.

  It was the most flaccid, dispiriting prosecution of conservatism in a presidential campaign since, at least, Republican John McCain ran in 2008.

  Meanwhile, President Obama was entering Jimmy Carter territory in terms of the stagnating economy and despair across the country.

  Clearly, Republicans had fielded a terribly flawed candidate who could not even attack the president on the single most unpopular feature of his first term. Because, actually, the Republican nominee had invented it
.

  NOW COMES DONALD TRUMP

  Primary fights almost always make better candidates for the general elections. It is why primaries are always better than brokered conventions. Never has that been truer than it was for Donald Trump in 2016.

  It is impossible to overstate just how much credibility Trump built for himself by going after the entire Republican establishment as ferociously as he did right out of the gate in 2015. It was swift. It was personal. It was vicious.

  Again and again, Trump showed a raw, jungle-like instinct to find the soft spots in his opponents and home in on them with lion-like savagery. And he did this with cunningly sophisticated tools—as if he had a bank of focus groups advising him. He taunted his adversaries with brutal and flawlessly descriptive names that stuck until the end and beyond. He seemed to get it right every time. And his audiences loved it.

  Whether it was illegal immigration or so-called free trade or all the wars around the world, Trump ripped deeply into what had become sacred orthodoxy inside the party that was supposed to be the “conservative” party.

  But there is nothing conservative about failing to secure the border. Nor is granting amnesty. Enforcing duly enacted laws with fairness and integrity is perhaps the single most important tenet of conservatism. If the laws are stupid or unnecessary or unduly harsh, overturn them. Otherwise, enforce them. Nothing degrades a society rooted in equal justice under law more than keeping laws on the books that are ignored or unequally enforced.

  Nor is there anything conservative about establishing vastly complex international trade agreements where our federal government negotiates with other governments to determine which companies in which industries in which countries win and which ones lose.

  Perhaps the least conservative of all the so-called conservative positions embraced by Republicans in recent decades is the notion of spending trillions and trillions of dollars fixing other people’s problems in other parts of the world.

  Trump knew the keys to making America great again: build an unmatched military, control the seas that protect us, enforce our borders, and limit foreign military adventurism to unavoidable operations where our national security interests are obvious and pristinely defined.

  Unsurprisingly, Republican retreads in Washington like Mitt Romney—now in his Utah phase serving as a U.S. senator—have chafed at President Trump’s dismantling of the old, broken GOP agenda they have been driving for so many years. Driving, of course, into the ground.

  Few establishment Republicans were stingier toward Trump during the general election than Romney. It was as if he actually wanted Hillary Clinton to win. But for all his caterwauling and complaining, he mainly just showed voters why he lost so miserably in 2012.

  Some of Romney’s most ardent defenders say that the only reason he lost that election to Barack Obama is that he was wealthy. His idiotic comment about the 47 percent, these people argue, merely reminded people how rich Romney was. What was so disgusting about Romney’s 47 percent remark was not that it reminded people that he has money. Rather it revealed his view that nearly half of Americans are a bunch of freeloaders who need to be taken care of.

  For actual conservatives, the truly sad thing about welfare is not that society must take care of them. The real tragedy is that these are people who might otherwise be making tremendous contributions to the economy, their communities, and our country as a whole if only the government would quit interfering with the free enterprise system by creating incentives for people not to work.

  As for the silly idea that Americans do not like rich people, Donald Trump really put the boot to that. His election proved that Americans actually still like rich people. They just don’t like Mitt Romney.

  Donald Trump’s early entry into Republican primary politics began in Iowa, where he offered kids free rides in his Sikorsky helicopter, the blue one with “Trump” emblazoned down the side. Children loved it. As did their parents. Until Iowa State Fair officials shut it down.

  So Trump just moved the whole operation across the street and offered the rides anyway.

  The whole glorious scene was a reminder that, yes, Americans still love rich people. They want to be near success. They just don’t like fakers and they don’t like rich people who look down their noses at them.

  Donald Trump is legendary for his brilliant and bombastic instincts. One of my favorite incidents occurred at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Trump’s longest-time nemesis, Ted Cruz of Texas, was in a hissy fit and built up plenty of drama leading up to his petty refusal to actually endorse the Republican nominee during the Republican convention.

  Displaying the political instincts of a dead clam, Cruz held what could only be described as a campaign rally outside the convention hall to feed the legions of reporters from around the country eager to describe the supposedly deep disunity of the Republican Party. Bleated Cruz: “In an amazing campaign field of seventeen talented, dynamic candidates, we beat fifteen of those candidates .… We just didn’t beat sixteen.” Then he looked around, displaying his unctuous Cruz pause.

  At that moment, the crowd looked past Ted Cruz and started booing and pointing skyward. Out of the blue emerged a plane—a 757 with gold lettering down the side that spelled “T-R-U-M-P.” That moment—and there would be so many like that—seemed to sum up the formidable mix of brains and stamina and brashness that took this most unlikely candidate to the White House.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  President Trump delivers State of the Union speech on February 5, 2019. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

  THE STATE OF TRUMP’S UNION

  Of all the mistakes people have made about Donald Trump from the time of his arrival on the political stage, none is more fundamental than the effort to stuff him into one of the familiar political molds that dominate the national political power structure. Because everybody in Washington is supposed to fit into one of a handful of proscribed categories, the thinking goes, so must Trump.

  Is he a conservative? A Main Street Republican? A Wall Streeter? A progressive Democrat? A war-mongering neoconservative? Maybe some sort of evangelical? Or even a Blue Dog Democrat?

  As is now clear, the only mold Donald Trump fits into is his own.

  No matter how hard they try, the political pros and pundits have never been able to fit Trump into any one of their preset categories. This is maddening to them. It also leads to a monumental misunderstanding of the man and what he seeks to accomplish.

  Ironically, understanding Donald Trump and his true motives is much simpler than Washington politicians and the media try to make it. And it has become clear that the wisdom of ordinary Americans allows them to see Trump and his motives much more clearly than traditional political experts do.

  From the first moments that Trump emerged on the political scene, it has been clear that he is not a conservative—at least not in the sense that political types think of conservatives. In the first place, conservatives are generally a buttoned-down crowd who don’t tend to break much china. The caricature of them might actually be of one delicately holding a china saucer in one hand and a cup in the other hand, little pinky held aloft.

  If true conservatives value predictability and order and gradual transitions, count Trump out. He moves with alacrity, disdains exhaustive planning, and is perfectly comfortable taking huge risks. He is the original bull in the china shop.

  He called me one time during the primaries when one of his opponents had provoked his special wrath by presenting a complicated flow chart. “A fourteen-point plan!?” Trump bellowed over the phone. “Who the hell needs a fourteen-point plan?” Trump asked, incredulous. “Just do something, you know. Who needs a fourteen-point plan? Just fix the problem!”

  Fair point, I thought. And perhaps a big reason why I liked Trump from the start. Most fourteen-point plans I had ever seen usually obscured far more than was clarified. They usually seemed to be bureaucratic retreats that just kept the problem alive to be debated another
day. For better or for worse, the massive and continuous failure of federal politicians has radicalized me into a bumper sticker man: “Build the Wall.” “Stand Up to China.” “Quit the Wars.” “Cut Taxes.” “Leave Us the Hell Alone!”

  The genius of Donald Trump demanding a wall is that every time he does it, he smokes out all the people who really don’t want to do anything to fix the wide-open border. If their first reaction to a wall proposal is that a wall will not work, or that we actually need a fence, not a wall, or a wall is immoral, then they probably are not all that serious about securing the border in the first place.

  In considering what is at Donald Trump’s political core, you can be sure he did not grow up worshipping at the feet of William F. Buckley and reading National Review. Nor did he go to Hillsdale College, toy with entering seminary, study exotic religious ethics, and spend a year translating Ayn Rand books into three different languages to spread the word of laissez-faire doctrine.

  I know some intelligent people who have done all of these things. Donald Trump just isn’t one of them. Perhaps more than anything, he is and always has been a pragmatist. A bombastic pragmatist.

  You can see this in his reaction to Obamacare.

  As a lifelong, devoted, principled conservative, I am vehemently opposed to Obamacare. I don’t want the federal government involved in my health care, period. The government has a terrible record, to begin with. Just look at the Department of Veterans Affairs or bankruptcy-bound Medicare.

  But more than that, the notion is appalling that the federal government would have some say in how I get health care, how much I pay for it, and at what point I have to start paying for it out of pocket. As much as I may hate my insurance company, I like the insurance plan I worked out and pay for. And I would rather that those decisions remain between me and my doctor and my insurance company. At least with the insurance company I have some leverage. I can always quit my insurance company and shop somewhere else.