Mitt Romney and the Fallacy of Political “Authenticity”

by Rich Yeselson on February 13, 2012

I think all you pretty much need to know about the alternative directions Mitt Romney’s possible presidency might take can be distilled into four words:  “Democratic party”, uttered in an interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace from December of last year, and “Democrat party” spoken just a couple of weeks ago on CNN to Soledad O’Brien as part of his already famous, “I’m not concerned about the very poor” episode.

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Rich Yeselson guestblogging

by Henry Farrell on February 13, 2012

Rich Yeselson will be writing a couple of guest-posts for us over the next couple of weeks. Formerly an organizer with Change to Win, Rich is the smartest public intellectual that you’ve probably never heard of – his work prevented him from playing a public role, but hasn’t prevented him from being a crucially important person in all sorts of less public conversations, brokering ties between the worlds of labor organizing, electoral politics and intellectual debate. First up, a take on Erving Goffman and Mitt Romney …

I’m amazed by the turns this issue has taken. I posted about it two weeks ago. My post had problems. Among other things, I slighted legal issues to focus on what I took to be really going on, motivation-wise. This was because I took the legal issues to be relatively clear-cut. Obviously, for Scalia-endorsed reasons, you can’t just give everyone the private right to nullify any public law, piecemeal. Religious liberty doesn’t mean that. But, apparently, it does? [click to continue…]