Another Romney run would repeat first failure

As a replacement for a troubled Chris Christie, who is reduced to scrubbing away at his voluminous dirty laundry, GOP has resurrected Mitt Romney as a possibility for 2016. Romney is back in the news, blaming his 2012 loss to Obama on his own campaign mistakes. His loyal wife chips in her admonishment of America for not electing a great leader, while implying that Obama is a failed president. Romney and his supporters still fail to recognize that it was his policy positions that cost him the election. Actually, the GOP understood that it could not win on its policies, but thought they could win by state legislative actions suppressing the vote in these concentrated pockets of Democratic voters in key states like Ohio and Florida. But these unconstitutional draconian measures were overcome by heroic voters who stood in long lines for hours to exercise their right to vote. They understood what a disaster a Romney-Ryan White House would mean for the nation.

In another run for the presidency, Romney may modify his campaign tactics, but he will be dragging the same old policy baggage. He still favors the Paul Ryan budget that contains tax loopholes and further tax reductions for the top 1 percent, maintains subsidies for big oil, eviscerates regulations, and reduces the debt with cuts to health care, unemployment benefits, food stamps and education.

In the 2012 campaign, Romney declared that on his first day as president, he would issue executive orders abolishing Obamacare and privatizing as many federal government agencies as possible. The Affordable Care Act, in place as law, found constitutional by the Supreme Court, could not be disturbed by a signature. Privatization would only multiply the serious problems already experienced with private military companies, privatized prisons, and the private contractors who do 70 percent of the work of the NSA. Snowden worked for one of these NSA contractors. A grace note for Romney: He remains dismissive of the struggles of the middle class and those falling into poverty, including them in his contempt for his invented lazy 47 percent.

Denton May

Dolores