Romney to City: Drop Dead

My fine colleague Terrence Heath has been riffing out a new concept to explain the latest turn of our right-wing friends: "drop dead conservatism." As in the infamous 1975 New York Post headline, "Ford To City: Drop Dead," reporting on the 38th president's avowal that he would rather see New York City go bankrupt than approve a bailout of its finances. The latest such voice is Mitt Romney, opining from atop the New York Times op-ed page in a nasty workout against the management of the Big Three automakers to Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.

What's going on here? Partly, obviously, a bid to appeal to the conservative activist base in the early innings of the 2012 Republican nomination fight. Partly, perhaps, what he claims it to be: a good-faith public policy argument about how best to save the auto industry in a way that moves the American economy forward. (It's easy to forget that before he began palling around with ideological terrorist Ann Coulter he yoked his candidacy to a semi-progressive vision of Republican industrial policy, opening his campaign with a hybrid car as a backdrop, pronouncing, "We have lost our faith in government--not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government."

But part of it may simply be Oedipal. (Did you know the Washington Times recently pronounced me one of the "Top Five Armchair Shrinks to the Famous," alongside the Norman Mailer who theorized that what made Hitler evil was over-fastidious toilet training?)

This argument isn't complicated. Mitt badly besmirched the progressive Republican legacy of his father the late Michigan govern George Romney, a stalwart and brave civil rights supporter who gave his all to fighting the Republican Party's lurch to the far right. Maybe Mitt's Big Three-bashing is a belated debt offered to dad, who, as I've written about before has been saying "drop dead" to the big three since the 1950s:

o industry was only getting what it deserved, George Romney, then chairman of American Motors Corp., would thunder "wherever he could find a soapbox," as Time magazine put it in a 1959 cover profile. He would pull a toy dinosaur from his briefcase: "This fellow here is triceratops. He had the biggest radiator ornament in prehistoric history. It kept getting bigger and bigger until finally he could no longer hold up his head. He had a wheelbase of nearly 30 feet."

Dramatic pause.

"Who wants to have a gas-guzzling dinosaur in his garage?"

Mitt's bid to honor George should perhaps be welcomed as a promising first step. Next he should acknowledge along with his dad that the right-wing cult of "individualism" is actually, as Romney put it in a speech to the Republican platform committee in 1964, "nothing but a cover for greed".