Exposed: Mitt Romney really did have a staff (of at least one)

It's a well-known fact. No one voted for Nixon in 1972. Others voted for Nixon in 1972, but no one voted for Nixon. Ask around. You'll see that I'm right.

I thought the same ghostly miracle had happened in, to, and for, the Romney campaign; it all just sort of came to pass, no one was actually responsible for that mess, or, at the very least, no one would ever take the discredit. It was merely an abstraction; an 'SNL' spoof of lower politics; an Edgar Bergen skit of Mortimer Snerd on the stump; or, perhaps, darkly, a Dickensian undigested bit of beef, a fragment of underdone potato stuck in our national amygdala.

Hence my shock upon seeing this tag line in a NY Times 'Business Day' commentary: "N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign."

That disgrace of an economic whodunnit or rather who'lldoit mystery game or maybe it was a 'You Bet Your Life' roulette-wheel thing had an adviser? An economic adviser? An economic adviser from Harvard? And he's willing to be identified, by name?

One of the many benefits of tenure.

The commentary itself is as useless, as unoriginal, as unthoughtful, as drearily Romneyesque as the Romney 'campaign'--a tedious kind of Jeffersonian riff on heart vs. mind, only in Mankiw's version, it's Obama the Liberal debating Obama the Moderate about fiscal choices. In short, it's a waste of time. But it's Sunday, a good day for that sort of thing, so here's the link.

Anyway, I salute N. Gregory Mankiw for 'fessing up in the tag. Perhaps others will now do the same; and some may even confess to having voted for Nixon in 1972.

Comments

[Peter G]

Ah tenure! A wonderful system designed to hammer down any deviation from orthodoxy by young academics until any shred of creativity disappears, at which point they get a license to be an ass. Not sure what advice this man had to offer but the evidence from the campaign is that if that advice was any good, the campaign didn't take it.

[mdblanche]

I asked my father. He said he didn't vote for Nixon. I believed him. He was traveling across France in the summer of 1971 getting a warm reception everywhere he went by speaking fluent French with a charmingly rustic Quebec accent, and tipping everyone a shiny new American quarter. Then one morning he opened a newspaper, read that Nixon was pulling the US out of Bretton Woods, and made a quick rush to the nearest currency exchange. He never voted for any Republican ever again.

I asked my mother. She said she couldn't remember who she voted for. I didn't believe her.

[majii]

I don't find it surprising at all, PM, that no republican admits to voting for Nixon since none of them seem to remember that George Walker Bush was President Obama's immediate predecessor in the Oval Office. I do remember voting happily for McGovern, though. Many republicans seem to have an unusually well-refined ability to forget the things that make them uncomfortable.

[janicket]

In 1972 I was proud to put on my car a bumper sticker reading "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts."