What Will Mr. Say Anything Say About the Storm?
Dollars to donuts that Romney comes out in the next 48 hours with some huge statement about the storm, trying to seem presidential, making some big promise about what he'll do if elected. I mean, it's his way, isn't it?
What can we assume? Well, obviously, we can assume that he will completely contradict the right-wing position he took earlier about privatizing FEMA, and will attack Obama for under-funding FEMA, which of course is not true, but the fact that it's not true makes it perfect Romney material. You might recall, in fact, that in September 2011 it was congressional Republicans who were willing to end FEMA disaster aid funding over a GOP-proposed cut that Democrats were resistant to.
The recipe is pretty simple. Just take reality, invert it, and that's what Romney is likely to say. It will be well-calibrated in that to people who don't know the record and don't know what a president can and cannot do by fiat, it'll sound plausible and even leaderly. Much of the media, credulous toward such empty declarations because they assume the American people to be equally credulous about such things, will eat it up.
Axe & co. better be ready for this. It will be Mitt's most shameless move yet, which is saying something.
About the Author
Michael Tomasky
Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
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