Newspapers have been endorsing candidates at all levels of the political process for years. People running for President, for instance, covet the endorsements of newspapers, both in the general election and the primaries. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen anything quite like this, before, though.
The Concord Monitor, in Concord, New Hampshire, ran an anti-endorsement of Republican Mitt Romney.
Their headline? “Romney should not be the next President.”
Their conclusion? “If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we’ll know it. Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.”
The editorial runs down the reasons for why Romney is unsuited to be President. The reasons have entirely to do with Romney’s inability to take a stand on anything and his willingness to pander for any vote. “If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you’d swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you’re left to wonder if there’s anything at all at his core.”
The probability of there being any possibility of my casting a vote for Mitt Romney approach zero anyway. His speech earlier this month on the role of religion in government showed a man who was, like many of the political right, ignorant of the religious inclinations of the Founding Fathers, and he promoted the bizarre notion that “freedom requires religion,” a viewpoint that is offensive to the millions of American non-theists who consider themselves free without the shackles of religion, to say nothing of the doctrine of the separation of church and state. In short, Romney’s viewpoints on the role of religion in American governance are so at odds with American history that he demonstrated his unfittness for the position that he seeks.
The Concord Monitor anti-endorsement addresses none of that, and in reality there’s no reason for their editorial board to have done so — there’s enough in Romney’s record that contrasts so sharply with the platform on which he is running and the positions that he professes that he’s clearly unfit to be President without dealing with his lapses on American political and social history.
Mitt Romney isn’t fit to be President.