By Jonathan Miller, on Tue May 15, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET  [Click here to follow the entire RP Debate]
We interrupt this fascinating and revealing debate with the uber-emotional rantings by this site’s founder.
This debate has torn the scab off two pet peeves that have been the target of some of my most agonized rhetorical fury during my post-political recovery.
First, with due respect to my friend, the Frozen Chosen Mr. Berkowitz — as well as dozens of columnists who’ve weighed in similarly over the past week — I am not persuaded at all that Romney’s reaction to the disclosure of events is troubling. In saying he didn’t remember the incident, I assume he lied. Any good lawyer or political consultant would have advised him to do the same. There was no advantage in him extending the debate by confirming or disputing the story, and no one can prove that he remembered it or not.
I do not think Romney should be blamed for lying about an event that does not deserve punishment today, just as I don’t think Bill Clinton should have been impeached for lying about personal indiscretions, nor that my friend Jeff Smith should have been incarcerated for a year for falling into a perjury trap about a minor campaign finance violation. People lie because they are embarrassed, or because they don’t want to get bad publicity, but if what they lie about is not actionable in itself, I have trouble claiming that the lie is a major offense.
Second, I dispute the notion shared by many of the previous contributors — as well, again, as by many pols and pundits this week — that we can draw some psychological conclusions about Romney’s performance as President based on something he did as a teenager. Of course, if a qualified therapist had Romney on the couch for a year’s worth of weekly sessions, and Romney shared his life story, the therapist could develop some meaningful conclusions about how Romney’s childhood shaped him in the decades that followed. But as any good therapist would tell you, they could not draw the same conclusions simply through reading a series of unrelated press accounts of his six decade life. Indeed, they would tell you: “This is not my patient; it would be irresponsible for me to draw such conclusions.”
This is simply another excuse the press uses to pick apart the dirty laundry in a politician’s private life. This psychobabble does no service to the debate except selling papers and encouraging clicks from readers who love to revel in the misery of the famous, and/or who have been brainwashed by the movies and the media to expect full and consistent narratives about famous people.
And by the way — this particular story matches no narrative of Mitt Romney, the candidate or human being, that I have ever read to date. The dominant narrative — one I have been inclined (brainwashed?) to accept as true — is that he is a politician who would do anything to get elected. In 1994, he was pro-gay in order to run against Ted Kennedy, and stayed pro-gay through his election as Governor of Massachusetts. By 2012 he became anti-gay to appeal to the right wing of his party. My guess he really doesn’t care much about the issue; his sole focus is on getting elected President.
(And even that narrative is unfair. I am sure Romney cares about something — there are some ideas that he would never abandon for political expediency. There simply are no perfectly consistent narratives for us flawed human beings.)
The fact that the 18 year old Romney was an asshole bully sheds no light on anything except the fact that when he was 18, he was an asshole bully. If I were his principal at the time, I would have expelled him and turned over the evidence to authorities to prosecute him for assault.
(Of course, at that time — as well as in my own childhood — incidents like these were quite common and rarely punished severely: “Boys will be boys!” Replace “gay” with “Jew,” and I suffered a similar humiliation on a handful of occasions. Thank God today, society is moving in the direction of treating bullying as the crime that it is.)
However, as I concluded in my introductory post, his stupid, mean, hurtful behavior as a teenager does not disqualify Mitt Romney to be President.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue May 15, 2012 at 10:30 AM ET  [Click here to follow the entire RP Debate]
I’ve been invited to comment and am hesitant because I try to ignore the digging into candidates early lives as evidence of current temperament and clues about leadership style. But I have heard a little about this incident and will try to offer some constructive commentary.
From what I can gather there were several incidents involving a young Mitt Romney, the now-Republican nominee for president, and some pranks that could be interpreted as “insensitive” if not “cruel” to young homosexual males in his class at prep school.
I believe the story goes that Mitt was traveling by car from Massachusetts to Canada and tied a classmate to the roof of the car for the entire 12 hour drive. Presumably it has now leaked out that the reason the boy was tied to the roof of the car wasn’t just because he was a democrat. But because he was gay too.
I find this sort of teen boy prankster mentality offensive and embarrassing but probably not indicative of some deep seated character flaw that Romney possesses. For example, there are other stories—I believe—about Romney routinely traveling with his pet dog attached to the roof of the car. It had nothing to do with the dog’s sexual orientation. Romney simply felt he would sully the interior of the car. I suspect Romney felt the same way about the gay democratic boy.
So, what we see upon closer examination is that Romney wasn’t guilty so much of homophobia but rather a foolish teen prank that was perhaps a harbinger of Mitt’s well documented metrosexual and neatnik inclinations.
Besides, common sense suggests that there really could not have been an anti-gay motive behind young Mitt’s antics. First off the name of the prep school was Cranbrook. That’s a pretty gay name for a high school, if you ask me. And it was an all boy prep school. So clearly, any boy who attended Cranbrook was already either himself homosexual or at least completely comfortable being suspected of being a homosexual. It just doesn’t add up.
Was Mitt an anti-gay bully? Are you kidding? Have you seen this guy? Was he a meticulous metrosexual prankster who feared gay democratic germs being left in his car while he drove to Canada? Probably—and nothing more. And by the way, what was he driving to Canada for anyway? That causes a whole set of other much more serious concerns about Mitt’s fitness for our highest office.
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Tue May 15, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET [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.
By RP Staff, on Tue May 1, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET Delaware Online has the scoop on contributing RP Greg Harris:
 An Ohio former elected official is coming to work in Delaware because he was “awarded a major contract with a nonprofit group in Delaware that seeks to improve public education in that state,” according to an Ohio newspaper article.
Greg Harris, a Democrat, dropped out of running for commissioner in an Ohio county after his firm was awarded the contract, according to City Beat. The story does not name where he’s headed to in Delaware.
I was checking out his Twitter account this evening. He posts a lot about education, including Delaware news. I’m not sure where he leans in the ed reform debate, but he get a retweet from Diane Ravitch on April 2. On the other hand, he’s also tweeted links to theRodel Foundation blog.
By Jeff Smith, on Mon Apr 9, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET  Nice analysis by Virginia Young of the politics/policy behind teacher tenure reform nationally and in Missouri. [St. Louis Today]
By Artur Davis, on Tue Feb 28, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  The Supreme Court announced last week that it will revisit the perennial hot button of affirmative action in the college admissions process. The case, which involves the University of Texas’ admission practices, is a constitutional cliff-hanger: the 5-4 majority in 2003 for the proposition that colleges can treat race as a vague, non-specific factor rested on the now retired reed of Sandra Day O’Connor. Her successor, Samuel Alito, has a history of skepticism toward racial preferences. Adding to the peril for defenders of affirmative action, the court’s emerging liberal superstar, Elena Kagan, has recused herself.
 The Texas plan provides automatic admission for the top ten percent of students in every Texas high school. To fill out its freshman class, the university deploys a formula that does not assign a specific point value to race, but unmistakably makes it a factor. It is precisely the kind of half-measure the court endorsed nine years ago, and which seems to be the prevailing practice in all manner of elite public and private colleges 9 (full disclosure: it’s also the kind of plan that admitted me to Harvard 25 years ago).
Count me as a conflicted spectator who chafes at both poles of the debate.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Race & College Admissions
By Artur Davis, on Thu Feb 9, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  In some alternate universe, President Obama follows up on his reform of healthcare and financial regulations by pivoting to an overhaul of public education in the United States. Instead of spending 2011 on the predictable, partisan ground of raising upper income taxes while growth is weak, Obama might have spent the year making a case that a vibrant economy demands a skilled, advanced workforce and that our outdated method of educating our children is inadequate to the challenge.
Alas, that is not the reality we live in. Obama’s signature plan of incentivizing states to embrace their own reforms, The Race to The Top, is being nibbled to irrelevance; rather than spending political capital to revamp No Child Left Behind, the administration is following the easy course of killing it softly with waivers; charter schools have gone two straight State of the Union addresses without being mentioned; and if the president believes that the stratification in the quality of our schools from one zip code to another is a major contributor to income inequality, he has scarcely said so.
 Had Obama adopted education reform as an agenda item, he would have profited from the Republican inertia on the subject. Whether it was Rick Perry on the days he remembered his pledge to abolish the Department of Education, or Newt Gingrich promising to downsize the department to a clipping service for inventorying data, or Mitt Romney trotting out old rhetoric about “local control”, the GOP presidential field has been one long yawn on the notion of education as a public priority.
It’s a bipartisan omission that signifies the power of each party’s political base. For Obama, bold action on educational accountability seems to be a casualty of a post debt-ceiling reelection strategy that is base reinforcement all the time. On the right, denigrating the public sector is easier work than laying out a foundation to make its elements, including education, more productive.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Obama’s Education Downfall
By Jeff Smith, on Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Given the tenuousness of Democratic control of the U.S. Senate, I imagine more than a few people in Washington are hoping former Sen. Bob Kerrey will run for the seat vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson. As both local andnational sources are reporting, Kerrey is seriously exploring the bid – and Republicans are taking his possible entrance just as seriously. Operatives of both parties seem to agree that he may be the only Democrat who could hold the seat. I hope that he makes the race. But I don’t think he will.
First, some politicos call Kerrey a serial floater. They refer to his frequent Hamlet routine, in which he contemplates but ultimately declines to run for various offices: in 2000 for president, in 2005 for New York City mayor, and in2008 for the last open U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska.
 Second, after a decade in the private sector, I doubt Kerrey is excited by the prospect of a year of retail campaigning. He was famously aloof in his 1992 presidential campaign, which reinforced the regrettable nickname “Cosmic Bob.” As a former aide to ex-presidential candidate Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., I traveled with Kerrey briefly in western Iowa in late 1999 as he helped campaign for Bradley before the caucuses. During a break between events, an advance man suggested that Kerrey shake hands in a small-town square; Kerrey suggested bowling instead. While I appreciated his quirky charisma, obvious intelligence, and willingness to speak hard truths, I found him miscast for the practice of politics. Accounts of his time in the Senate suggest a similar distaste for schmoozing.
Third, he could lose. Nebraska has reddened quite a bit since his last race in 1994. Back then, Nebraska had a Democratic governor and two Democratic U.S. senators; now, Nelson is the last elected Democratic statewide officeholder (and likely would’ve lost in ’12, which was why he bowed out). And surely, his having spent his last decade heading one of the nation’s most liberal universities — located in the lefty bastion of Greenwich Village — would take a little explaining to culturally conservative Nebraska voters. Attempting a comeback in such a risky race, after an unblemished career record of wins, may seem unappealing.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Democrats Can’t Count on Kerry
By RP Staff, on Thu Dec 15, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET Contributing RP Tom Allen, former Congressman from Maine is promoting local efforts to promote math and science education in public schools:
Former U.S. Rep. Tom Allen said providing Maine students with more engaging math and science programs is a pathway to a stronger economy Tuesday during the official unveiling of The Reach Center, a new organization aiming to do just that.
Allen headlined a media event at Southern Maine Community College’s Sustainability and Energy Alternatives Center in South Portland to mark the launch of The Reach Center. The new group comes from a partnership between the Augusta-based Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone, and is funded by a $3.2 million gift by an anonymous donor.
Allen touted the new organization, which hopes to provide individual student mentorships and a central clearinghouse for innovative math and science programs around the state, as poised to play a key role in Maine’s economic future.
Click here to read the full story from the Bangor Daily News.
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Mon Dec 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET  Mitt is like the perfectly-behaved boy with straight As who’s taken the cheerleader on dates every weekend for a year and can’t close the deal, and now the roguish drop-out has swooped in and gained traction despite the urgings of the cheerleader’s parents (i.e., the Republican establishment) to beware.
How can she not realize what a huge mistake she’s making?? This guy is a total dead-ender! I just got admitted to Harvard, and this guy’s got no future….It’s plain as day! How can she not see it?
Mitt has spent the last few weeks trying unsuccessfully to conspire with her parents and it’s backfired – because the more a 17-year-old girl’s parents like a guy, the less she will. Just like tea partiers and the Republican establishment.
With the president’s approval ratings in the low 40s, these voters are feeling their oats. They want to take a walk on the wild side! 
So now young Mitt, usually so cool and collected, is getting desperate. This ad is his most direct attempt yet to show the cheerleader the error of her ways. And I suspect that Republican voters, like the cheerleader, aren’t going to listen to reason. They’re going to have to learn this lesson for themselves.
(Cross-posted, with author’s permission, from Politico’s Arena)
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