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À la recherche du temps perdu
Posted by KTK

Mitt Romney is on record defending his membership in an (until recently) officially racist religion by citing his family’s personal experience in combatting racism:

These American values, this great moral heritage, is shared and lived in my religion as it is in yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and love my neighbor. I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.

Except that David Bernstein, in The Boston Phoenix, documents the impossibility of that claim.

It seems that MLK never actually marched in the town Romney claims as the site of this incident, and records of the time show that the elder Romney - then Governor of Michigan - did not attend the one speech (not a march) that MLK delivered in that town, or participate in any of the marches MLK conducted in the state. (He did participate in a march later, without MLK.) Weirdly, Romney’s story seems to be taken from a book by David Broder, published in 1967, which contains one sentence falsely reporting the elder Romney’s participation. (Broder himself repeated the claim - referencing his own book as his source - just after Romney’s trip down memory lane; he has yet to address the challenge raised by Bernstein today.)

Now, when I began writing this post, I was tempted to suspect that Romney had merely confused his memories of past events. King marched elsewhere in 1963, and Romney’s father did participate in a march in Grosse Point, MI, and perhaps Romney ran the two memories together as one event. (Though he could not truthfully say he “saw” either one, since he himself was out of the country on a Mormon mission that year.) Memories work that way, and are notoriously unreliable, especially about emotionally-charged events. I was going to suggest that Romney was merely an example of that phenomenon, and that this was an opportunity to remind ourselves not to attach too much importance to human lapses of that kind.

I should have known better than to give a Republican the benefit of the doubt. Before I could even finish the post, the cat was out of the bag.

Romney had not merely been going around telling the story (repeatedly - most notoriously in his speech about religion); he had claimed documentary evidence for it.

Romney’s campaign cited various historical articles, as well as a 1967 book written by Stephen Hess and Washington Post political columnist David Broder, as confirmation that George Romney marched with King in Grosse Pointe in 1963. . . .

Mitt Romney’s older brother, Detroit attorney Scott Romney, said he recalls his father telling him the elder Romney marched with King, possibly in 1963, but he could not remember exactly when the event took place.

[Romney spokesperson] Fehrnstrom called the Romney brothers’ recollection and the historical materials a “pretty convincing case that George Romney did march with Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders in Michigan.” 

It’s obvious that the story was actually false, but that by itself is not damning: if those mistaken sources influenced him in creating the false memory, he would also be likely to believe that the sources supported the memory, even if both were the result of honest errors. Had he admitted such errors and claimed it was an honest mistake, there would be nothing to criticize.

But that explanation only holds water if Romney himself actually believes it. The story is an honest mistake only if it’s honest. But now Romney is claiming the story was never intended to be true all along.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he watched his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, in a 1960s civil rights march in Michigan with Martin Luther King Jr.

On Wednesday, Romney’s campaign said his recollections of watching his father, an ardent civil rights supporter, march with King were meant to be figurative.

“He was speaking figuratively, not literally,” Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate.

And here he exposes himself as just the kind of mendacious, chicaning, empty bag of wind he has always appeared to be. He told the story over and again. He said he saw the events that never occurred. (I wonder if they were seared - seared - into his memory?) He claimed he had written proof that his story was true. And when it all fell apart he could not even bother to avail himself of the honorable excuse that he made a mistake: instead he says he never really meant it. But he never told the story as figurative; it was always explicitly stated to be factual. And you can’t have documentary proof of a figurative tale; he claimed he did. (Interestingly, he never told this story while his father was alive, though he had often spoken of his own supposed dedication to racial justice.) Again, he could explain all that as mistakes, but he says openly he didn’t intend the story as true. If so, then he can only have intended it as a lie, because he certainly said it was true when he told it - knowing, as he now claims, that it wasn’t.

As with Huckabee’s bizarre rhetorical excursions, and Romney’s double-cross of his own pro-choice campaign promises in Massachusetts, this is a problem of his own making. He chose to make an issue of the matter, and then lied about it. He (and Huckabee, in his case) could easily have told the truth. There was no need to lie; it wouldn’t have hurt him to tell the truth. He dramatized the story to build himself up, then lied about it in a stupid and transparent way.

After lying about issues he didn’t even have to discuss, how can we trust him on issues in which he would be actually forced to make a tough choice about what to say? Why would we trust him about anything?

Oh, but it’s not like he’s not down with racial justice or anything, though. After all:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints changed its policy and permitted persons of African descent to attain the priesthood in 1978.  At the time, Romney says he felt the privilege was long overdue.

“I was anxious to see a change in my church,” he said.  “I was driving home from… I think law school… I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept.”

Of course he did.

December 20th, 2007 General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Race | 2 comments