The Conscience of the King

There are nights, no doubt, that President Obama has a hard time sleeping. The wearying weight of a nation and the world seem inconveniently thrust upon his shoulders. Hercules knew as great a burden, but held it for far less time and without the hounding of the press or an opposition party.

One is in the uncomfortable position as President of the United States, of being called upon to serve many masters and many needs. Over three hundred million Americans, of disparate backgrounds, look to him to run the country, and have widely varying degrees of opinion on his work. He is at times savior, at times pariah; sometimes a champion, many times a loser. He no doubt knows the dastardly truth: there is no success in being a President in our modern era. It will not be until fifty or more years hence that America fully realizes what it had in him, beyond his race.

Mitt Romney: The Man Who Would Not Be King

You may know this situation, from one side or the other: a child faces an adult. The adult asks the child questions. the child is evasive. The adult is insistent. The child lies. The child hides things. The child is evasive. No parent is truly fooled by a child who is seeking to hide their transgressions. It doesn't stop the child from trying; they have no idea that their parents probably played out the same tableaux when they were children.

In the Digital Information Age, there really is no hiding anything. Though the Internet has yet to absorb the sum total of human knowledge over the centuries, enough exists in great enough detail for the last fifty years that hiding what you have said and done, if you are a public figure, is nigh impossible. Every utterance on tape, every expostulation before the camera, every missive in newsprint, can now dog you wherever you go. The track of your career can be plumbed in great and gory detail, mined for every iota of potential inference as to your character or position, not just by those who seek to know more about you, but by those who wish to tear you down.

Mitt Romney is in the unfortunate position of having much of his life laid bare, and not just in his biography, but by all those he has interacted with throughout the years. In his business capacity, or as a Mormon leader, or as Governor of Massachusetts, or even trying to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics, he has left a trail of evidence to be followed in now accessible records. Very few parts of his life are truly closed to prying eyes.

In his second go at becoming President, he has attacked the problem of disclosure by not -- not, that is, disclosing anything. Not answering questions. Not outlining detailed plans. Not releasing tax information. Limiting interviews, and in those few, remaining evasive. On top of this, he seems to have surrounded himself with a staff whose main function is to attack every fact with a thousand counter-charges, to muddy the waters as much as possible, or to distract through impudence and irreverence.

While one can point to any number of positions he holds -- or does not, as the wind blows -- as a reason to avoid voting for him, no specific set of facts is really necessary beyond the fact of his ability to lie with seeming impunity, even in the face of facts to the contrary, and his desire to keep so much of his life hidden from the citizenry, the very people he is attempting to cajole into voting for him.

Mitt Romney is a child. He is the child who has broken his mother's favorite lamp, hidden the pieces, and now stands before her, questions being hurled at him left and right, tossing off rejoinders, spewing evasions, and clasping his hands behind his back with fingers crossed, even as he denies all knowledge of the lamp and what happened to it, a slight smirk barely perceptible.

It does not matter what his tax plan is, though it would appear to be nothing different than that which got us into our financial mess. It does not matter what his immigration policy is, because it is whatever it needs to be depending on your heritage. It does not matter that he wishes to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Day One of his presidency, failing to realize that he can do no such thing. It does not matter his stance on same-sex marriage, because it will come and he will not be able to stop it.

No. None of that matters.

What matters is that the man is slick, he is evasive, he prevaricates at the drop of hat and is unrepentant about it. What matters is that the man is seeking the highest, most public office in the country, and he still tries to hide behind his privacy, as if people have no right to know who the real man is, that they should just elect him on adulation and "trust" him.

A President who chooses to keep secrets is then a slave to them. A President does have secrets to keep, national secrets, but those are things in the interest of the nation. To have personal secrets, which may or may not have value to someone with ill intent, or to be hiding some sort of malfeasance that might considerably darken his already dim character, or trying to paper over some financial embroilment that would reflect badly on him personally, is not the mark of a person we should trust with the keys to our military and our country. While we cannot hope to find perfect paragons of integrity running for President, we can expect those people who do run for the position to be completely open with us. If they cannot do that, they have no business sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Mitt Romney is the man who wishes to be king, to be seated upon the throne before the adoring masses. He runs a campaign that is part inept circus sideshow and part homage to what he clearly feels is a fait accompli. He is busy taking his victory lap before the race is even run. A man with such a sense of entitlement, combined with his obvious detachment from the world he flits through, makes no sense as President of the United States, a position which has aged and torn down more than one man with its rigors. Mitt Romney has gone as far as devil-may-care conservatism can take him, and America is not looking for a king.

The Man Who Will Never Be President, Take Two

In April of this year, I outlined why Newt Gingrich will never become President. Now it is December, and after the implosion of several Republican candidates for President in varied and fantastic ways, we see something which makes me wary of the true intellectual capacity of the American voter: Mr. Gingrich at the top of the polls, challenging Mitt Romney for supremacy at the top of the GOP heap.

Perhaps it has been too long since he last held the national spotlight, and maybe you who have thrown yourselves in his camp have forgotten, so let me bring up a few things about the peripatetic Mr. Gingrich which you might deign to consider before you continue to support him...

• We can start, of course, with everyone's favorite peccadillo, the divorce of his cancer-ridden wife for a new model, punctuated by his coming to her hospital bed to discuss how the divorce would proceed. Though much hyperbole has been attached to this happening, the bottom line remains the same: Newt was busy "trading up" as his current wife lay sick in her hospital bed. Mind you, this is the same man who so zealously pursued impeachment against President Bill Clinton for an ill-advised White House dalliance.
• We could mention -- if it is not too inconvenient -- that he was and is the only Speaker of the House to be brought up for ethics violations
• We might note the peculiarity of his taking millions of dollars from Freddie Mac for consulting work, an agency he spent a good deal of effort trying to close and which used to suggest that certain members of Congress be arrested and tried for malfeasance because of their support for it.
• It may be noted that for someone who has taught history and claims to be steeped in it, his historical knowledge is many times, to put it politely, badly flawed.
• Even one of his strongest character traits -- his ability to buck GOP convention -- becomes a weakness, because he is too willing to change course for the sake of pandering. Look at how he called out Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan for what it was, bad, and then proceeded to apologize when the party backlash became too strong.
• For every cogent theory that he manages to come up with (health care reform), there are several that defy description (ending child labor laws). He is, in essence, a slightly less cantankerous, slightly less insensitive version of Ron Paul, with better bona fides in the Republican Party.

Now, probably about the only person other than a Gingrich supporter who is happy to see Newt at the top of the polls is President Obama. It would not be much of a stretch to say that the ethically-challenged former Speaker and his wild-and-wacky roadshow would be easy meat for the cerebral and well-spoken President. Still, if the GOP ultimately manages to install Newt Gingrich as its 2012 Presidential nominee, it will be solid proof that the Grand "Old" Party has lost complete touch with modern reality. Dragging up a GOP icon of the 90's with questionable personal and political ethics and using a patchwork agenda that relies on tired tropes of the same era, Republicans might be better served attempting to reanimate the fetid corpse of Ronald Reagan.