Once Upon a Romney

A progressive, sensitive and highly rational Romney? Yes, but you have to skip Mitt and go all the way back to the words of his father George to make the connection.

As Republican presidential contender Mitt’s campaign surges forward, Harper’s Magazine publisher John MacArthur pauses to attempt to understand where his disjointed political legacy comes from. And Mitt, MacArthur reveals, appears to be anything but his father’s son. —ARK

John MacArthur at Harper’s:

Romney is nothing if not open-minded, for this very successful businessman acknowledges that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the devil himself to many of Romney’s wealthy allies, “correctly recognized that by the late 1920s industrial, financial, and agricultural power had become excessive.” Roosevelt, he writes, “found it necessary to lead a peaceful revolution by creating a countervailing economic power” in the form of stronger labor laws and empowerment of unions, which corrected “indefensible abuses in American industry.”

To my mind, Romney sounds like someone a liberal like me could wholeheartedly support. But there’s a catch. The progressive, sensitive, and highly rational Romney I’m quoting is George Romney, not his son, Mitt, and George, as well as his brand of enlightened Republicanism, has been dead for quite some time.

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Wikimedia Commons, Richard L. Holzhausen

George Romney in 1986.