In my previous discussion of presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, I noted that what disturbed me about him wasn’t that he once persecuted and belittled male peers he suspected were gay, but rather his seeming inability to admit that he remembers doing these things while he was in high school.
While I’m not proud of many of my own youthful indiscretions, I don’t mind admitting or discussing them because they taught me some very valuable life lessons. In fact, over the course of my life, I truly believe I’ve learned more from the mistakes I have made than I have learned from my personal or professional successes. And I hope I never forget those slip-ups, because it is my memory of them that has helped me avoid making even worse mistakes later on in my life.
But if Romney either can’t remember or simply refuses to admit making similar mistakes, then what would prevent him from making even worse mistakes if he is elected President?
Another telling story involves an Irish setter named Seamus, who was the Mitt Romney family’s first pet dog. The story begins in June of 1983 while Romney was a partner at Bain & Company, when he and his family set off for their annual 650-mile summer vacation trip to the family cottage in Ontario, Canada. I made similar 300-mile trips with my own family and our pet dogs to our lake house in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Like Mitt Romney, I also put my golden retrievers in dog carriers for our five-hour trip, and would stop at the halfway point to give them some water and allow them to stretch their legs.
But while I placed our dog carriers in the back of our car, Mitt Romney fashioned a windscreen for Seamus and strapped his dog carrier to the roof of the car. In a recent Fox News interview about this particular summer vacation trip, Romney claimed that Seamus actually enjoyed being in the dog carrier, which he characterised as an “air-tight kennel”.
While it’s possible that Seamus enjoyed riding in an ‘air-tight kennel’ on the roof of a car for 12 hours straight, instead of riding inside the car with the rest of the Romney family, I seriously doubt it. While I can’t read my dogs’ minds like Romney apparently can his, I know from their joyous reactions after I let them out of their carriers that they were very happy to be free from their confines.
Seamus, on the other hand, suffered from diarrhoea at some point on the trip, which forced Romney to stop and wash off the car, Seamus and his ‘air-tight kennel’. Romney then put the poor dog back in the carrier and once again strapped it to the roof for the remainder of the trip.
On the Presidential campaign trail, meanwhile, Mitt Romney wants American voters to buy into the idea that he was an entrepreneurial ‘job creator’ during his time at Bain Capital. But those who worked with him paint a somewhat different picture of Romney as an investment banker. They say he was a good manager, but that he was a data-driven and risk-averse investor who was focused on maximising the value of companies Bain Capital acquired, not job creation.
In fact, the qualities Romney exhibited while running Bain Capital are actually the antithesis of entrepreneurs, who take risks and forgo short-term profits while they build up their companies and create jobs in the process.
I could be wrong, but I believe that when one considers the rather callous way Romney treated his family’s pet dog as well as his focus on maximising profits for Bain Capital, the picture that emerges is one of a man driven by logic rather than emotion. In and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when one considers this in light of his behaviour in high school, it is somewhat worrying.
Next time out I’ll take a final look at Romney, and evaulate once and for all what kind of a person he is.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Political Economy. He previously lectured on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU from 2009-2011.
