January 24, 2012The soul of brevityAs a good Mormon, Romney should remember from his days in Sunday School the "two-and-a-half minute talk" (no kidding, that's what it's called). Okay, if he's elected president, he gets to increase the time allotted one order of magnitude. Promise to keep the State of the Union (and all other excuses for meaningless gas-baggery) to twenty-five minutes and he's got my vote. Seriously, that kind of discipline alone would speak volumes.
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 I think Romney could govern in the spirit of "Silent Cal" Calvin Coolidge. He could but I see little evidence that he would. Romney's Achilles heel is he is too hungry for the praise of his peers. His reputation is too valuable to him to just let things be.
The celebrity of politics is too tempting. We need a quiet, reserved President but the expectations of the press and the political advisers dictate the President must always say something, anything, and to say it often. As Kate points out, the conviction, beloved of screenwriters and speechwriters and journalists, that lofty rhetoric alone can change the world on a dime is pretty much nonsense in reality.
Rush Limbaugh gets to the heart of the matter when he says that his job is to articulate what people already believe. Of course, that requires knowing what people already believe. Romney needs to figure out what conservatives believe, or at least not make it obvious that he doesn't. |
