Mitt Romney as Eddie Haskell | Consortiumnews
Exclusive: The conventional wisdom has spoken: Mitt Romney trounced Barack Obama in the first debate. But there was a squirrely sneakiness to Romney’s behavior as if Eddie Haskell from “Leave It to Beaver” had grown up and somehow won the Republican presidential nomination, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
In the first presidential debate in 2000, Democratic nominee Al Gore famously sighed in frustration over the ill-informed comments from Republican nominee George W. Bush – and the national press corps went wild saying that Gore’s sighing proved that he was an obnoxious know-it-all. Gore also insisted on getting time to counter Bush’s misstatements, showing how pushy the Vice President was.
Obviously, other factors contributed to the debacle of Election 2000 – when Gore’s narrow victory was overturned by five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court – but one of the reasons Gore’s popular vote margin was only about 500,000 was that key journalists made Gore their whipping boy to “prove they weren’t liberal.”
Actor Ken Osmond as he played "Eddie Haskell" on "Leave It to Beaver," a TV show that ran in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
So how did that work out? At the end of Bush’s know-nothing rule, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans were dead along with thousands of U.S. troops; the U.S. economy was in freefall; millions of Americans were losing their jobs and homes; the federal budget had gone from surpluses to $1 trillion-plus deficits; and serious threats to the future, like global warming, were ignored.
I was reminded of that history when I watched the instant analysis – now congealed as conventional wisdom – that Mitt Romney was the decisive winner over Barack Obama in the first presidential debate of 2012. Yet, Romney had presented all the oily charm of Eddie Haskell, the sneaky sidekick on the “Leave It to Beaver” show of the late 1950s. The GOP nominee offered one squirrely prevarication after another.
With his eyes blinking and his weight shifting, Romney even mixed in an insult comparing the President’s honesty to Romney’s five sons repeating falsehoods hoping they would eventually pass as true. In other words, behind his forced smile, Romney was cleverly shielding his own lies behind the preemptive attack of telling the American people that the other guy was the liar.
It seems that Eddie Haskell has grown up – and he is Mitt Romney.
Read more: http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/10/mitt-romney-as-eddie-haskell.html
Original Post here: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/10/05/mitt-romney-as-eddie-haskell/
