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The failure to recollect the incident is astounding. His camp must be glad not to have to deal with a birth certificate question. And an apology as conditional as the one that was offered lacks the requisite sincerity. Short version is that the dubious response to a long ago boyhood incident is revealing about the man who would be president today.
It doesn’t take a decades old bullying incident to illuminate Mitt Romney’s views towards gays. His current public policy positions say enough. Mitt Romney believes that gay people are second class citizens. Mitt Romney believes the humanity of gay citizens is not equal to the humanity of straight citizens. Otherwise, Mitt Romney wouldn’t advocate for denying the basic right for gay people who love one another to marry one another. Mitt hails from a party that often claims government encroaches on religious liberty. But Mitt’s vision of government encroaches on my religious liberty. I am Jewish, and Reform (and Conservative) Judaism recognizes the rights of gay folks to get married. But under Mitt’s governing philosophy, the government would supersede the right of my faith community to recognize and sanction gay marriage. Small government and individual liberty aren’t universal principles within the modern Republican Party. They only apply to those who were born the “right” way.
While it’s true that Science reassures us that the human brain (and some decision making) isn’t mature until age 25, we’re not talking about the average citizen here. We’re discussing the past hate crime behavior of a person running for president of the United Sates of America.
The character of such a person can not, should not, be questionable. Character is developed over time, and, we’re discussing a hate crime.
For me, this is not about a lack of understanding/forgiveness for mistakes (Goodness knows I believe wholly and holy, that mistake making is essential for the growth of the human soul), but this is about choosing from a pool of leaders who have demonstrated, over a lifetime, qualities of honor and strong internal moral compass. We are not running low on a supply of those.
Should he be forgiven? If he is truly repentant from the heart and soul, yes! Should we consider instead OTHER candidates who don’t have hate crime backgrounds (for current and future races), yes! Should our standards and expectations come from a realm of excellence, yes!
One who runs and takes on office at this level should feel that personal honor is everything. And we should expect this. Who we are personally is who we are publicly, and vise versa.
Looking at the big picture here is key. Is this someone who demonstrates a genuine embracing of diversity?
We can elect leaders for whom this isn’t questionable. Our standards will set the standard.
I am in the camp that faults almost everything about this story: its timing–posting it the day after President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage was a thinly veiled effort to link Romney’s opposition to a pattern of bigotry; its placement as a stand-alone piece when the details merited at best inclusion in a longer profile; its strained attempt at making nearly 50 year old events relevant; and its effort to exaggerate the perennial cruelties of adolescence into the systematic brand of bullying that we have become sensitized to today.
That a major newspaper got so many things so wrong is hard to justify as anything other than an agenda. Somewhere along the way, a major section of the press has absorbed the idea that Romney is a hollow kind of character without empathy or conviction, who has sold his soul to a hard-right clique in his party,and whose election would reverse the dawn of a new multi-cultural, tolerant America.
Having convinced itself that Romney is so flawed, much of that press has fed virtually every inspection of his record and past through such an unforgiving filter. The effect is that too much of the coverage of Romney looks exactly like the chain-letter attacks the DNC spits out every day.
Its one thing for a blogger or a columnist to develop a character thesis and dig away at it. Its another thing for an established press organ with a neutral face to go that route.
[Click here to follow the entire RP Debate] My first impulse when I heard this story was, I admit, “Wow, what a spectacular piece off oppo research. Now Mitt Romney can be pigeonholed by people who were never going to vote for him anyway as both a gay-basher and the guy who strapped his dog to the roof of his car.” [Recent self-serving protestations by the WaPo ombudsman aside, no one can deny that there were reasons why playing up particular aspects of this story made sense in the midst of our current debate.] My second impulse, which I shared in a personal message to the RP, was “Having known some rich privileged [jerks] in high school I am not surprised to hear that rich, privileged Mitt Romney was a [jerk] in high school.” Neither of those impulses, however, completely expresses my mature thoughts on the matter. Which gets back to the RP’s original point (and Steve’s) that there is a big difference between the impulsive acts of idiot teenagers and the (hopefully) mature positions of thoughtful adults. Upon mature reflection, the story of Mitt Romney’s actions makes me feel a combination of anger, disgust, and sadness. I attended an elite boys’ high school myself, though it was not a boarding school like Cranbrook, and I graduated high school exactly twenty years after Willard did. Things had changed somewhat in the intervening decades, and have changed even more since then. So the experiences are not identical, but they do rhyme: I saw and experienced the kind of casual sneering cruelty that adolescent boys can mete out to each other in a culture of macho preening and rigid social hierarchy. A few times I was on the direct receiving end of it, though most of the time I was a bystander. Thankfully I never witnessed or experienced the kind of physical attack described in the recent newspaper accounts. Nevertheless, certain memories still bother me 25+ years later, and it is also true that I can never look at some of my former classmates (especially those now more active in public life) without at least some bitterness. If any of them were to be on a ballot, I would have a hard time voting for them. So I can understand that some of Romney’s classmates continue to have ambivalent feelings about him so many years after Cranbrook. Does that mean that one’s behavior in high school reveals permanent and enduring elements of one’s character and should completely shape our view of the adult? God, I hope not. If we can credit other people with “evolving,” then we should all be able to accept that people can overcome the callow idiocy of youth and become more well-rounded and empathetic human beings. But because we accept that people can learn from their youth and grow beyond it, we should expect, even demand, that when a public figure is confronted with questionable deeds and words from his/her past, that public figure will own the past and explain how it fits into the present. Complaining about the story’s publication is pointless at best, and pretending that the past does not matter is even worse. If Mitt Romney wants to run for president, and to make use of his personal history in his campaign, then he has to accept that the darker shades of his personal history will be discussed as well. The challenge for him, and for those who would defend him, is not to get lost in semi-denials and hemi-demi-apologies, but to own his past actions and explain how if at all they contribute to making him the man he is today. Just as the history of nations includes both light and dark chapters, both of which need to be analyzed and understood honestly and completely, an honest assessment of a personal history should not try to evade unpleasant topics. It is Romney’s responsibility to address the past, and the responsibility of the rest of us to listen to his story and decide how to evaluate both the boy he was and the man he is. Forgetting is never the proper approach. Honest, even painful, remembrance of the past is the only way to build a better future.
Well, I know *I* never would write and produce a song like that about Jimmy (much less memorize the lyrics and continue to sing it 25 years later). But we have all done things we regret as teens, particularly in groups. So, given the commonality of this experience, why is it relevant to the presidential race? The reaction to it by Romney is what is most relevant, and can give us some clues about how he views “the other.” Ironically, for a person from an insular and sometimes persecuted minority, he does not seem to have much empathy for the “other” — particularly gay men and women. The last GOP administration suffered greatly from this kind of lack of empathy, and led us into some horrible human rights abuses against Muslims and those perceived to be different. Abu Ghraib and racial profiling at airports were only some of the more obvious symptoms, but that lack of empathy also contributed to the polarized atmosphere in Washington.
The worst and most shameful thing I have ever done was as a teenager. I was the ringleader of a group of friends that wrote, sang and produced a parody song about a younger kid with whom we attended camp. For purposes of privacy, I will call him Jimmy. In those pre-autism, pre-Asberger days, Jimmy was simply considered strange, bereft of the many of the social and inter-personal skills shared by most teenagers. None of our gang ever made fun of him to his face, but in the conspiracy of a friend’s basement music studio, we sang about his perceived deficiencies to the tune of a then-popular song. At the time, it seemed brilliant and hilarious. And today, it reveals itself as unrelentingly cruel. I console myself with the confidence that Jimmy never heard the cassette tape we recorded. (Thank God there was no Facebook). I don’t think he even heard about it. I also understand that my own episode of bullying was related to the extensive bullying I underwent in middle school — both physical and verbal — for my strange faith, my short stature, and my own personality issues. But none of that excuses my behavior. I was wrong. I was awful. I’ve been thinking a lot about Jimmy this week when I heard the story of Mitt Romney’s own episode of teenage bullying. If you’ve been on another planet in the past week, the press has been consumed with the story first reported by The Washington Post that Romney tackled and forcibly cut the hair of a fellow student who reveled in his nonconformity and was presumed gay. In one sense, I am grateful that the story has been revealed. As I’ve written extensively at this site, I believe that gay rights is the most important civil rights issue of this generation, and anything that enables discussion of teenage bullying, and the horrible impact it has on gay children, is a positive development. But while this discussion is important, I do not believe that the story is relevant for judging the character of Mitt Romney. We all have done stupid and cruel things as teenagers. While my own episode did not involve violence, nor did it directly involve the victim, it was awful nonetheless. But I don’t think my character today is defined by that moment. Indeed, science has demonstrated clearly over the past few decades that teenagers are wired much different that grown adults. Their brains are still developing, and they are prone to move more impulsive, emotional and destructive behavior. For those of you who disagree with me — those who think that we should hold this 50-year-old incident against Romney — think about your own Jimmy story. I know you have one. We all do. The important thing is not what we did as a teenager, but whether or not we learned from it. Romney’s record on gay rights and bullying as an adult must be carefully scrutinized. It is very much fair game. But as much as I’m happy that the nation is focused again on the horrible crime of teenage bullying against gays and lesbians, I do not agree that any one should cast a vote against Romney because of this incident. |
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