Opinion: Mitt Romney Lie-O-Rama Tour Continues
Yesterday, Mitt Romney walked away from his right wing campaign record and claimed that he would not act to restrict a woman's right to choose.
Specifically, Mitt told the Des Moines Register that "there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda."
Romney's message is clearly coded for his rightwing base: you do not have to worry about the Supreme Court. Relax, I'm with you, but I'm running for president for Pete's sake.
Instead, Romney said that he knew of no legislation in Congress – despite vowing to defund Planned Parenthood as president; despite the platform of the party he leads that leaves no exception for rape, incest or life of the mother; and despite the uproar over Congressman Todd Akin's comments about rape and pregnancy.
Akin's comments were tied directly to federal legislation to restrict a woman's right to chose that his running mate supported. It is called federal personhood legislation. And it is legislation that Mitt Romney supports.
That's right, Mitt Romney supports personhood legislation that would not only eliminate a woman's right to choose, even the victim of rape or incest or a mother who might die in the process and leave her children motherless.
Personhood would also ban the most used forms of birth control and threatens to ban in vitro fertilization.
Let's face it: Mitt Romney lies easily and often, especially these days.
And this lie, like so many other Mitt Romney lies, is so easily provably false.
The fact is that Mitt Romney does not stand with the majority of women.
Not only will he be the owner of the ten working digits the Tea Party wants in the White House to sign what Congress sends him but Romney has vowed to repeal Obamacare.
The Affordable Care Act stops insurance companies from discriminating against women who are, for example, pregnant – which is treated as a pre-existing condition. So he will also work to deny pre-natal care to women.
Earlier this year I wrote about the experience my wife and I had with Assurant Health and our first pregnancy. We had an individual policy with a pregnancy rider and, spoiler alert: they fought us tooth and nail to deny coverage despite the fact that they were doing so in violation of the law.
The Affordable Care Act, among other things, also ends health care discrimination in pricing against women and treats birth control, appropriately, as preventative medicine.
In the past few days the old Mitt Romney can only be found on the side of a milk carton. Everything that he has said to date is now discarded. After all, he was running for the nomination of the Republican Party and had to hold the base for Pete's sake.
Now he needs independents and he needs women without losing his base.
He is, after all, running for President for Pete's sake and he can't be held to the radical rhetoric he has adopted over the past five years in perpetual pursuit of the Presidency.
Reportedly the family has taken over the campaign. Apparently the weapon of choice for the coup was an Etch-a-Sketch.
Romney is trying desperately to rewrite his record and hoping he can maintain the rouse for five weeks.
Four years later he quit in the face of certain defeat so that he could focus on running for President -- something he has done for the past six years.
Team Obama should be loaded for bear in the last 28 days, they should be prepared for this tactic.
The idea that Romney thinks he can paper over his right wing rhetoric with a provable lie is remarkable. Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think America is?
About Bill Buck
Bill Buck is a Democratic strategist, President of the Buck Communications Group, a media relations and new media strategies consulting business based in Washington, DC, and Managing Director of the online ad firm Influence DSP. He has over twenty years of international and national communications experience. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.
