".. a bit embarrassed to be consorting with the Santorum true believers in the Republican Party and, for that matter, campaigning against an Obamacare program for which he provided the initial model in Massachusetts, where he governed in the same moderate/populist way George Romney had in Michigan."

Mr. Van Dyke -- who cares if he is embarrassed or not. And who cares about psychoanalyzing either man -- a rather old-fashioned approach in any matter. Maraniss is an upscale gossip, tell-all writer. A Kitty Cunningham in wolf's clothing. Obama and Romney are grown men and we must accept them as is and they must deal with the moment. Their family issues make for good copy, nothing more. What they do counts, and only that.

And the moment says that Romney is no moderate -- he is captured by his party where there are no longer any moderates. George Romney is dead, and so is his party. It is naive on your part, and very dangerous, to believe otherwise. And yes, Obama is still somewhat a mystery. But rather a man part unrevealed than a man with nothing to reveal.

Well said, Swifty.

From the standpoint of a physically disabled senior who lost nearly 70 percent of his income in capitalism's Great Downsizing of 2007-2008 and is therefore damned to inescapable and ever-worsening poverty, it makes little difference which candidate wins.

I am 72 years old and, as a newspaper reporter, covered public affairs for the greater portion of my adult life. When I look behind the deliberately distracting "bipartisan" rhetoric, it is obvious Obama and Romney each intend to serve their corporate masters by murdering those of us who are no longer exploitable for profit.

That's why each candidate intends to terminate the life-sustaining programs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment compensation.

Note how for example how Obama and his congressional colleagues -- who demonstrate their real-world unity by near-unanimous votes to reduce us to sweatshop serfdom and abolish our constitutional rights (NAFTA, WTO, GATT, Patriot Act, NDAA, Trespass Act etc. ad nauseum) -- have already slashed Medicare Part D by about five percent, the cuts effective 1 January 2012.

Ultimately the only difference between Obama and Romney -- given that each is equally a creature of oligarchy -- is the speed of the extermination they will impose.

Romney will kill us quickly via the maliciously genocidal Paul Ryan budget he has already embraced.

Barack the Betrayer will exterminate us more by stealth, nibbling away our life support in small, deliberately unpublicized but ultimately fatal bites.

Either way We the People are the victims, and we the elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished (and therefore no longer profitable) people are dead. Such is life -- and death -- under capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

The Romney of 2008 was an empty suit. He was almost eerie in the way he cast no shadow. But something's happened to him in the last four years. There actually seems to be a Mitt Romney, and occasional flashes of a real personality are there if you pay attention. What kind of a president would he make? I'm not sure; but I, like the author was sure sold a bill of goods with regards to the current president, and like most people, I resent being conned. This very partisan, frequently demagogic, and self-obsessed president is nothing like the uniter, the post-partisan, or the middle class sympathizer we were promised four years ago. And on top of that, he seems to know little, and care less, about how a modern economy runs. He proposes to bring us prosperity by "growing the middle class." Talk about confusing cause and effect! At least Romney understands business, and just as Coolidge observed 87 years ago, that is still the chief business of the American people. We need someone who at the very least understands that; and, at the very least, Romney appears to. Maybe Romney will turn out to be disappointing, too. But with Obama we've already been there, done that, and received the proverbial T-shirt. Time to move on.

"Romney's mother, too, was a stay-at-home, raise-the-klds type in contrast to Obama's often absent, cultural-anthropologist, save-the-world, voyager mother."

She ran for the United States Senate in 1970. How does that play into the June Cleaver picture you paint of Romney's mother?

These ruminations by a wise old head fail to rise above rocking-chair wheezing at the world. Based on years of reading your work, Mr. Van Dyk, I had hoped for better.

Two statements gut this article's premise. The first was, "Having spent many years in the game, none of this should have surprised me. But it did. As millions of others, I had seen what I wanted to see in the 2008 Obama. The man was more complex than foreseen."

The second, following only four paragraphs down, reads, "Thus far there have been no comparably thorough biographies of Mitt Romney who, in any case, seems far less complex than Obama." Taken together, these read like a self-indictment of the article's lack of substance.

Once it's acknowledged that you guessed that poorly about Pres. Obama after your "many years in the game," how should we evaluate the credibility of your one-dimensional speculation on Gov. Romney's character?

No human creature is as uncomplicated as political reporters might prefer -- and yet, having been offered that lesson just three and a half years ago, you ignored it here, blithely assuming (and asserting) that Gov. Romney is no more complex than your tiny store of information might account for. That proposition seems dubious.

I may not think highly of Gov. Romney's stated (not to say "perpetually reconfigured") positions, but I would like to think ABOUT them, given that the two candidates currently poll about even.

When you sit down to take a two-page byte out of the internet, your readers deserve something more than a caricature. Editorial cartoons at least offer a thousand words' worth of picture. It appears that you wrote 2,000 words and came up with nothing but a smear of greasy smoke.

Much has been written about (and by) Barack Obama, but those still seeking insights should read Janny Scott’s excellent portrait of his mother, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. It is well-researched and balanced and it tells you a lot about how and why the boy and young man developed as he did.
As for the Romneys, I’m not sure the son matches up to his father in many ways. I covered Romney at several points in his ill-fated 1968 presidential bid, and had a close friend in his inner circle. We even drove a Rambler—wonderful car. If he hadn’t bailed out after his “brainwashed” statement, I would have voted for him in the Republican primary in Oregon.
George Romney was the genuine article, blunt and straight-forward; his son says what will work at the time he says it. George as president of American Motors was a job- creator; Mitt was a wealth-creator. Neither is a bad thing but they are not the same and they form different patterns of governance. George came up the hard way, only a high-school degree. Mitt graduated from an exclusive prep school and has two advanced degrees from Harvard.
George Romney didn’t pay courtesies to the Far Right of his day, the John Birch Society; Mitt panders to the Tea Party. George joined the civil rights movement at a time when it was considered a liberal thing to do; Mitt pandered to the anti-immigration forces in the GOP primaries, with positions to the right of Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich.
Certainly, the son admired the father—but he’s not the man his dad was. If the elder Romney were transported into 2012 he would be Jon Huntsman, not Mitt Romney.

Extremely well-stated rebuttals by Swifty, Jack, and Floyd to TVD's typically misleading and superficial analysis. How about for once, Ted, looking at the issues rather than engaging in a seance about what voters think and believe? In your he said, she said manner, you say Democrats are portraying Romney as a insensitive to the issues of ordinary voters and a threat to programs benefiting women, senior citizens, college students, public-employee unions, Latinos, and African Americans. Why not look at Romney's and his party's positions on taxes for the non-rich, contraceptive coverage and equal pay for women, social insurance programs for seniors, loan programs for college students, collective bargaining rights for workers, immigration policies affecting Latinos, and voting rights and affirmative action for African Americans? The evidence is there. Take a look at Romney's record and positions. Here's my piece on Romney's positions on Medicare and health care in general. Judge for yourself what the impact on ordinary Americans would be. And BTW, we remember George Romney, and Mitt is no George, not even close. One other point, as a native Chicagoan I can tell you that Barack Obama has little or nothing in common with Chicago machine politicians. Old man Daley would have snorted in disgust at hearing Obama call for "great bipartisanship." This piece is way way off the mark.
http://managedhealthcareexecutive.modernmedicine.com/mhe/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=757580&pageID;=1&sk;=&date;=
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/764555 (free login required)

As compared to TVD I didn't buy the campaign bullshit rhetoric of
2008 for one second, but I understand that it worked so well cause
folks were so sick of the great blustering bankrupter who arrived
with the Enron crimocracy and left office with the nation bankrupt
to the tune of 10 trillion! However, the degree to which Obama welched and did 180 % turns on his promises is still somewhat breathtaking, "doesn't help my emphysema one bit" might be a new way of rephrasing that cliche! As to not trying to be bi-partisan, I would say that he sought to meet the republicans more than halfway often before they had even asked and nearly arrived at the so-called grand compromise with Speaker Boehner [see a convincing long piece in the New York Times Magazine on that of a few months back.] Meanwhile, the "inner Mau Mau" and perennial school kid who played war games on a computer has surfaced to the extent that, as compared to the Crawford Kid, we won't have to look through a barrel full of bad apples before he is brought to trial for assassinations and unilateral cyber warfare. Obama - I may be wrong here - I think had a choice whether to keep the same national security apparatus and whether to follow Stiglitz's advice and nationalize the too big to fail banks so that we had greater
control of our financial destiny or leave it to the Vegas gamblers and
their jet stream, however, Obama ctd. with the same apparatus and ctd. TARP. He certainly is a more interesting person than the one who continued to oppose the anti-Vietnam movement even after
his benighted father had seen that light. I think Romney ought to run
for president of Bangladesh, after all he moved about a million American jobs off-shore during the process known as globalization that will leave the billions of the world earning slave wages. In the process he helped make billions for Bain/ Pain, cost no end of American their jobs, pensions, and as far as I can tell - looking at companies that have been acquired via leveraged buyouts and the loaded with debt and bankrupted - made an ingenious and I would say criminal use of the bankruptcy laws. He ought to have Michelle Bachman as his running mate, who calls for the elimination of the minimum wage so as to create jobs! It would indeed and we can all move into shacks in new Hoovervilles.
Judging by the way Ronmney seems to have governed Massachusetts he accommodates himself to the middle of the road, whatever and wherever that middle leads at the time.

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Some unaccountably angry and bitter comments here. A couple unangry responses.

A bit puzzled by Lewis' assertion that the fact that I, as many others, misread Obama in 2008 should be a disqualification for any observations about Romney in 2012, I watched George Romney during his time as governor/candidate (in fact, put research files together on him when he was a potential GOP presidential nominee) and have similarly watched Mitt Romney during his time as governor and two-time presidential candidate. My information base may be tiny compared to Lewis', whatever that might be, but I believe I have observed Romney enough over the years to have reached a conclusion that he is a straightforward 1950s specimen.

Romney governed successfully as a Republican in Massachusetts, perhaps the country's most liberal state. Before that, he gave Ted Kennedy a real scare in his race for Senate reelection (Until the state rallied to him at last minute, I can tell you, EMK feared his career had ended). He will be the national nominee of the 2012 Republican Party, perhaps the most conservative in many years, despite being targeted by the other principal GOP contenders and its most avid
constituencies as not sufficiently conservative. Those things took some skill and savvy. He can't just be written off as a pale imitation of his father, who lived in another political context, or as some unfeeling rich guy insensitive to ordinary folk. (We've had our own Demo presidents and presidential nominees with wealth equal to or above that of Romney's).

Yes, George Romney properly resisted the paranoid John Birch Society of his time. But in no way did it compare in influence to the Tea Party/Santorum social-issue influences in the GOP today. Like comparing a pea to a medicine ball. You know better than that, Floyd.
By the way, I agree with you, Floyd, that the Scott bio of Obama's mother is excellent. I read and reviewed it for Crosscut. That book, the Maraniss book, and a couple others by independent authors/journalists are helpful in understanding Obama. Far superior to books by candidates themselves, their boosters, or detractors.

I observed, knew, and dealt with the original Mayor Richard Daley. He
would have been the first to warn that you should not run on one platform and then govern on another. He also would say that
the way a great city, or country, gets lasting things done is to mobilize a consensus behind them. If it mattered to Daley, he did not just enlist his ward captains. He made sure he had the business community, reform types, and others at least partly on board. It had nothing to do with some fuzzy concept of nonpartisanship. It had
to do with getting an agenda accepted and, then, governing successfully. The Chicago-style politics that I find unacceptable is the ward-level roughing of political opponents that is reducing
the credibility and standing of the White House and, thus,
the President's capacity to tackle a national agenda. The country is still seeking in 2012 to get past the angry polarization that Obama pledged in 2008 to end. It's not just the fault of "oppositionist Republicans" but also the Obama White House. Partisans can fool themselves into thinking otherwise but it just ain't so.

When it comes to policy, my worries go most greatly to what I see
as Obama's still wobbly grasp of finance and economics, and to Romney's clearly incomplete grasp of international affairs outside
finance and economics. Just to this point McCain boilerplate. Both guys, as I said within my piece, are well within the mainstream of
our politics. I've seen worse as candidates and as presidents.

Now, a word about approach. I started as a journalist, then got
sidetracked for a time into intelligence analysis, then got into
national policy and politics for several decades with particular emphasis on issues and their content. The most important thing I learned through all of this was that big mistakes get made when objectivity and perspective get lost---as, for instance, they got lost during the Vietnam War period or during the second Gulf War. During my time in government and politics, I always expressed what I thought was the truth of a matter--even if my views were not in line with the party or government line of the time. I got along with those leaders who valued that approach, less well with those who wanted only validation or agreement.

I take the same approach to anything I write for publication. Former journalists, in particular, should understand that context. I've always liked the form letter crusty old Ohio Sen. Steven Young used to send to acquaintances who sent him rude or insulting letters. "Dear Friend," the letter went, "you should know that some rude and angry person is sending me letters and signing your name to them. If you find out who it is, tell him to stop. Always happy of course to hear from you." Looking forward to continuing, positive dialogue as the campaign year moves on.

TVD, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigned hard on health care reform. They both presented detailed health care proposals 18 months before the election. Democratic voters desperately wanted health care reform, and polls during the 2008 campaign and early in the Obama administration showed the general public also wanted health care reform. There's no way anyone can credibly say Obama campaigned on one platform and governed on another. You are incredibly stubborn about refusing to recognize how obstructionist the Republican Congress was from Day One of the Obama presidency. I and many other people who have covered health care reform closely have seen and reported on the overwhelming evidence that the Republicans absolutely refused to consider any form of Obama's and the Dem's health care legislation -- even refusing to respond to Obama's offer of medical malpractice restrictions. As to old man Daley, you've got to be kidding about mobilizing a consensus. I lived in that city most of my life and there was no effort to mobilize any consensus. Ask the African American and Latino communities and the white reformers. Daley and the machine rammed stuff through, with little or no accountability. Please don't speak of things you know nothing about.

Anyone attempting to psychoanalyze political candidates might want to look up the Goldwater Rule in psychiatry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule

In 1964, mental health professionals of various stripes, having in common a dislike for Barry Goldwater, wrote about their opinion of his mental health. This got written up in a now-defunct magazine called "Fact Magazine" (heh).

The article was so scurrilous that Goldwater sued for libel. Do you know how hard it is to prove libel when you're a political figure? I find it of interest that Fact magazine gave Goldwater a cash settlement.

The American Psychiatric Association learned it's lesson, and adopted an ethics rule that persists to this day, named after the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate.

kilgoretrout: A juicy recollection. I remember Fact in fact.
There was another frequently told story about Goldwater in 1964.

A voter was interviewed after the election about his vote. During that campaign, by the way, our Johnson-Humphrey ads and speeches warned that Goldwater was a dangerous guy who could lead us into war.
The voter said: "I was warned that, if I voted for Goldwater, there
would be an escalated Vietnam war and hundreds of thousands of American troops would be sent there after the election. Well, I did vote for Goldwater and that was exactly what happened."

TVD'S confession, here, that he was once
in "intelligence" elicits the following scenario:

1] "It is Friday afternoon, "Mother" and secretary
Ninochka are starting to make out on the couch
in his office; there's a nice blaze going in the
fire place; the bear skin rug looks more inviting
by the moment, when there is a call. The call is
from Sec.State, Sec. State has a problem, there is someone
she promised to get their son into intelligence, but
he really needs to be put into "stupidity", it is not
the first time she has had to apologize. "I'll take care of it,
says Mother, can it wait till next week?" "No, I'm
afraid it can't, I am seeing his parents over the weekend
big donors, and I need an assignment where he will do no harm."
"O.K. send him in."

2] TVD has left "Mother's" office and been shown
into the waiting room to await his assignment.
"Mother" and Ninochka roll their eyes heavenwards.
"Heavenly mother of Stalin, he bought
Obama hook line and sinker and he thinks that Daley
was a consensus builder in Chicago," Ninochka turtle-doves
in her best Russian accent.
A pause.
Mother: "Too bad we can't send him to Siberia,"
Ninochka "Samleya Zeta would be perfect..." She nuzzles
Mother "I have an idea, Bokina Farso, the one African
country where he can do no harm and no one will harm
an idiot."
Mother "Can't do, look at his sheet, the guy can stand neither the heat
nor sun."
Ninotchka "Costa Rica, the only patch of ground south
of the border that is a possibility."
Mother "Did I just say something about heat and sun."
"I'm so sorry, moy dah-rah-gohy, it's that blaze in the
fireplace...."
Mother "There has got to be some small patch of ground
where we can let him loose where the guy's utter squareness,
will neither offend, nor get him or us into trouble.
"Lichtenstein."
Mother "Is represented by Switzerland."
"Andorra!"
"Is represented by Spain."
"Monaco San Marino Montenegro Vatican City
Malta Luxembourg."
"Vatican City! You are joking, my love. Montenegro
is crawling with Balkan nasties, Malta is even worse,
the whole of the Mediterranean killer bees summer there
in winter. San Marino is represented by Italy. But
Luxemburg.... Luxenburg sounds right, Luxemburg is an operetta of a
country, there's even an American musical with an ambassador in Luxemburg I think, he will think he is in an American musical
when he gets to Luxemburg. Go tell him that Luxemburg
it is and that we'll attach him to the embassy there."
Ninotchka, unmusses her skirt and leaves, "Mother" calls
Sec.State and tell her that after a long hard search
they are assigning TVD to the Luxemburg embassy.
"Wonderful, he should get along perfectly with Robert Mandell,
the Florida Real Estate developer who is our ambassador there."
"We will assure him, that Luxembourg is at the crossroad
of European Intelligence, near Brussel, HQ of the European
Union, hop skips away to all the capital. Most important
you would have to be brilliant to do any harm in Luxembourg."
Sec. State "You are such a bumble bee, Mother, what would we
do without you. Kiss to Ninochka."

"George Romney left no inheritance for his children but expected them to make it on their own, as he had."

Spare me please! George Romney gave Mitt the equivalent of $400,000.00 in stock while he was living, no doubt to avoid the estate tax. Ann Romney mentions drawing these funds as the young couple "struggled" to get through school. And then borrowed the money from his father to buy a $42,000 house in 1971.

http://www.samefacts.com/2012/01/income-distribution/mitt-romney-and-ann-the-students-struggling-so-much-that-they-had-to-sell-stock/

I hardly think that was making it on his own.