WHY MITT ROMNEY DOESN'T TRUST HIS PANTS
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In her piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“Strassel: Mr. Romney, Trust Your Pants”) Kimberly Strassel begins by recalling that in “the classic 1968 film ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ a villainous Henry Fonda shoots one of his lackeys, in part for the sin of wearing both a belt and suspenders. How do you trust a man, muses Fonda, who ‘can't even trust his own pants?’"
Strassel continues: “Mitt Romney is slipping in the polls because, when it comes to his own policies, he is once again wearing a belt, suspenders, and even some elasticized waistbands. The bold Romney who picked Paul Ryan as a catalyst to run on ideas has been ousted by the return of the careful Romney who wants this race to be about Barack Obama. And America is unwilling to trust a man who seems unwilling to trust his own agenda.” She cites repeated instances in which Mr. Romney fails to reveal the substance behind his plan to produce jobs and restore the American government to fiscal probity, and urges him to “unhitch” his pants and “earn the votes” by satisfying Americans “hunger for political change.”
There’s only one problem with this prescription.
Romney doesn’t “trust his pants” because to reveal the details of his policies would mean having to explain how returning to the same Reagan/Bush policies that got us into this mess (low taxes for the rich, no regulatory restraint for predatory corporations and more “long wars”) would get us out. Demonstrably, such policies succeed only in making the rich stupendously richer, the poor desperately poorer and the middle class lose ground, prompting them to take on catastrophic amounts of debt to keep up with the American Dream. Americans do, indeed, “hunger for political change” but “back to the future” ain’t it.
As long as she’s advocating full disclosure, why doesn’t Strassel advise Mr. Romney to unhitch his tax returns to dispel the suspicion that he took advantage of the amnesty granted to holders of undeclared Swiss bank accounts in 2009?
www.the-predicament.com