Mitt Romney: Will his career and views on gender
issues do him in?
Early Obama Missile Fire Wounds Romney (Excelsior, Mexico)
“It seems Obama
has taken the measure of his Republican opponent on many issues and is
vigorously taking him to task. ... Obama may gradually be becoming impervious to Romney's slander.”
It seems Obama has taken the measure of his Republican
opponent on many issues and is vigorously taking him to task. On his Web page, Obama for
America, grave charges are made concerning Romney in his capacity as a businessman
in the 80s and 90s, when his vast fortune, calculated to be around $300
million, was made in part at the expense of the labor rights of workers who
were laid off by him and his partners. In a video [watch below] testimony is
offered from former GST steel workers, including a man named Dade Behring, and with
documentation, some hard facts. Romney is accused of buying companies through a
subsidiary of Bain Capital, inflating the prices of their stock, selling them when
they were at their peak, earning millions in profits, abandoning them to their
fate and bankruptcy - and then firing their employees. In their testimony, the
victims of these operations report that over 9,000 workers of three companies were
let go, leaving them without severance pay or insurance of any kind.
Apparently, it was another case of savage, winner-take-all capitalism, a lack
of ethics and bad management, which is so well exposed by Tony Judt in his book
Ill Fares the Land.
If Romney were not the virtual Republican nominee, these stories would portray
just another case of unscrupulous speculation, of the type that went a long way
to causing black September 2008, and that plunged the European Union into a
recession that now complicates Obama's re-election.
However, these records also paint a portrait of a frivolous and
arbitrary politician, which may well turn him into another indifferent
candidate for Republicans, as was the case with Sarah Palin when she ran with
John McCain in 2008. Based on Romney's bleak business practices, one can
speculate about why many moderate Republicans were wary of his becoming a
candidate, as he lacks the moral authority to denounce Obama's struggle with managing
the economy. Thus his argument, that he is a good candidate for having been a
successful entrepreneur, could crumble at any moment.
Obama has also gone an offensive on another front. On May 9,
he declared in an interview, “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.” This
position, even without the legal repercussions and according to The New York Times, for the time being perhaps without many shock waves among
the population, is nevertheless extremely courageous - on top of being historic.
For the first time, a president has expressed himself decisively about this
controversial issue. Electioneering or not, it forced Romney to declare himself
staunchly against it, “Marriage is a union between a man and a woman,” the
former governor declared.
This is certainly a risky bet for Obama, but offers him at
least three advantages: 1) It hems Romney in and binds him to his own ideological
base of extreme Tea Partiers, while forcing his to openly deny the legitimate
civil rights of a large minority (homosexuals), which have the sympathy of a
majority of social sectors like women (51 percent), young people (63 percent),
liberals (68 percent), moderates (56 percent) and White non-Latinos (47 percent);
2) It seeks to expose Romney as an extreme right-wing bigot who doesn’t recognize
that what is at issue is the claim for civil rights of a minority that,
although socially accepted, still has no legal guarantees when it comes to
cohabitation; 3) Obama, as a representative of a racial minority, is like a
lightning rod again positioned at the center of a debate, forcing Romney to
withdraw, or if not, to present himself as an insensitive clod who doesn’t
understand the gender issues of the 21st century.
Obama, in contrast, reaffirms himself as a sensitive figure who is open on the issues, and perhaps, gradually, becoming
impervious to Romney's slander. On both managing the economy and civil rights,
it seems that Romney
will have an uphill fight as long as there is evidence on the table that up to
now he has shown himself to be a devious politician with little sensitivity and
scarcely qualified to become a true statesman.
*José Luis Valdés Ugalde is a researcher and
professor at National Autonomous University of Mexico and holder of a Chair of
Professorship at OUV, Metropolitan Autonomous University
