Vin Suprynowicz

I’m not a hop-up-and-down political champion of Mitt Romney.

As an individual, Mr. Romney is a talented and decent man. It’s interesting to note the times he’s gotten in the most trouble with our left-leaning press, all they’ve been able to “get him on” is telling the truth in an incautious manner.

Oh, the horror!

My concerns with Mr. Romney involve his willingness to compromise with the welfare state. You’d think his free-market background would make him a strident voice for slashing government, but he’s not.

You’d think that, in turn, would make him the most acceptable possible Republican nominee to our state-socialist mainstream press. Considering the way they would likely have characterized Rick Santorum as a “fundamentalist fruitcake” or reviled Ron Paul for “wanting to hand out free heroin and machine guns to schoolchildren,” you’d think they’d greet the comparatively minimal policy differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney with a yawn and a shrug.

Instead, most of the American press is so far in the tank for Obama that even Democrats are starting to notice, as Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review learned by watching Romney’s Sept. 12 news conference with a mixed group of voters at a local diner. (http://tinyurl.com/9alr7pm)

To our mainstream press, GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney is “struggling” to recover from “a cascade of missteps,” Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post reported on the front page of many an American newspaper last Wednesday.

In the narrative being relentlessly promoted by most of the nation’s mainstream newspapers and TV networks, Republicans have nominated a foot-in-mouth goon whose every statement is either a “gaffe” or a “misstep,” making them wish they’d turned to a more sober-minded statesman on the order of Dan Quayle, Jerry Lewis of Martin-and-Lewis fame, or maybe Professor Irwin Corey.

Let us recall a few of this parade of “gaffes” and “missteps.” On his European swing back around the time the London Olympics were kicking off, Romney — who presumably had some expertise, based on his successful staging of the Salt Lake City games (though he did illegally ban the perfectly legal “open carry” of firearms by Utah permit-holders, there, so as not to disturb foreigners who might otherwise have realized they were visiting a free country) — was asked by English reporters how preparations in London appeared to be going. He pointed out what anyone who’d read a London newspaper had to know — that organizers had come up short of security guards and were having to race out and hire hundreds more, on short notice. This was a concern, Romney said.

“Gaffe!” the American press shouted. “He insulted the British!”

We’re all happy the London games went off without a major hitch, I presume. But imagine if Romney had said “Everything looks fine,” and then there’d been some awful terrorist assault. Wouldn’t this same press corps have immediately thundered: “But Romney said everything looked good! Couldn’t he even read the newspapers? And this guy thinks he’s ready to be president?”

Then Mr. Romney visited Israel, where he said the capital of the tiny nation is Jerusalem.

“Gaffe!” the American press shouted again. “He offended the Arabs!”

In fact, Jerusalem has been not only the official but also the de facto capital of Israel for decades. Pretending otherwise is mere political posturing to placate those who wish to see a second Palestinian Arab state (Jordan is the first) formed around the fringes of Israel, presumably including a slice of the ancient city. (Under this policy, the Arabs declare war and attack Israel whenever they want. The Israeli army obligingly kick the Arabs’ butts and seizes lots of Arab territory, including Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Then American “negotiators” step in and make them give most of it back in exchange for “peace.” Wait 10 years and repeat.)

Furthermore, there’s no evidence Romney’s statement was some off-the-cuff remark, immediately regretted.

Florida is a swing state in the 2012 election, and there’s a fairly large Jewish voting bloc there. Jewish Americans increasingly are concerned that Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was raised in a Muslim family and whose Indonesian stepfather was Muslim, has been cozying up to the Arabs and leaving Israel to spin in the wind. Thus, Romney’s remark was clearly calculated, in advance, to make inroads among Jewish voters, particularly in toss-up Florida. Where’s the “gaffe”?

WAS HE WRONG?

And now comes a video of Gov. Romney — apparently speaking off the record to a group of donors but posted on the Internet by hard-left Mother Jones magazine — explaining his electoral strategy.

In it, he describes 47 percent of Americans as “people who pay no income tax,” who are “dependent upon government,” who regard themselves as “victims” who are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it.”

Since those 47 percent are determined to vote for Obama. Republicans have no chance of wining their votes, and must adopt a strategy designed to appeal to independents and the undecided, Mr. Romney appears to have been explaining.

Now, I sincerely wish Mitt Romney — or someone able to advance an even more rousing and spirited defense of free markets, small government, and increased personal liberty, someone more like Ron Paul or Libertarian Gary Johnson — were in the process of sweeping to a 43-state, 65-percent-of-the-popular-vote, Nov. 6 landslide.

The problem is, the poll-takers tell us anyone predicting such an outcome today would have to be either a comedian or delusional. (Though, for the record, I suspect Mr. Romney will take a few more states than the desperate, in-the-tank-for-Obama media are willing to admit.)

Do we believe a vast majority of Americans are going to wake up on election day, slap themselves upside the head, and go, “Wait a minute, Barack Obama is a millionaire lawyer who in his own book says his mentor as a youth was Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis; his parents both appear to have been communists; his job in Chicago was as a rabble-rousing ‘community organizer’; he’s closely associated with that Bill Ayers guy who’s never apologized for building bombs to blow up police stations; he took over General Motors, shafted the bond-holders, and turned over ownership to the very unions that drove the company to the brink of bankruptcy — I think this guy might be up to no good!”? Because unless you believe that, Democrats have a lock on some 47 percent of the popular vote, and the race will be decided by how the 5 or 6 percent identified as Independents or “undecided” swing a few battleground states including Florida and Ohio — just as Mitt Romney said.

And why will those 47 percent of Americans vote for Barack Obama? Because he has nicer shoes? Because they agree with his policy on Azerbaijan?

Those committed to vote Democratic do so because they believe we need government bureaucrats, lots of them, to intervene and stop greedy employers and dangerous right-wing zealots from making the lives of poor folk a living hell — and/or because they enjoy (or plan to soon be enjoying) the “benefits” of government largesse to which every Democrat since FDR has told them they’re “entitled.”

Just like Mitt Romney said.

Do 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax? True. Do at least that large a percentage of Americans oppose a substantial reduction in the size of government, on which they have become dependent?

In fact, the number is much larger. Just poll your neighborhood, asking people if it would be OK with them for government to shut down the public schools, freeing us from the property tax but also requiring parents to pay for their own children’s education. I suspect you’d be lucky to get 6 percent of Americans to agree with such a proposition — though our current model for tax-funded, coercion-based schooling wasn’t imported from Germany until after the Civil War, sometimes at bayonet-point, and has been resulting in dumber and dumber graduates ever since.

Not only was Mr. Romney’s “47 percent” statement true on its face, it’s so unexceptional that if any on-air commentator had said the same thing — perhaps prettied up with a few euphemisms — we’d all be stifling a yawn: “This guy just figured that out? Where’s he been?”

Yet the press wants us to believe Mitt Romney might as well call it quits, because he’s been caught telling the truth once again.

BUT OBAMA CAN DO NO WRONG

How far is the press in the tank for Obama? They certainly don’t seem to be worried about how they’re going to sew back together any reputation for even-handedness after Nov. 6.

Where are the stories pointing out that the Obama camp looks increasingly desperate as the candidate runs around telling American businessmen “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” and “The private sector is doing fine,” while his vice president treats a predominantly black audience to “(Romney) said … he’s going to let the big banks write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

Gaffes? No, no, the press races into a song and dance rivaling the rituals of some Amazon shaman to explain how “right-wing kooks” have merely “taken these remarks out of context.”

And how about that moment, back in March, when reporters heard Mr. Obama ask Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to give him some space on missile defense negotiations?

“The exchange was picked up by microphones as reporters were let into the room for remarks by the two leaders,” ABC News reported:

“President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

“President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you. …

“President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

“President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

That’s not a gaffe. That’s a promise to Vladimir Putin that once he no longer has to worry about American popular opinion, Barack Obama, raised at the knee of Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis, can be counted on to further sell us down the river, unilaterally gutting our missile defense.

The economy is in shambles. The policy of appeasement of Muslim radicals and the “Arab Spring” has the Middle east in flames and an American ambassador dead, reportedly sodomized before he was dragged through the streets of Benghazi where Hillary Clinton had declined to provide him with a Marine bodyguard so as not to “offend” anyone. A missile defense sellout to the Russians awaits only Mr. Obama’s re-election in seven weeks.

But it’s Mitt Romney who’s “struggling to recover from a cascade of missteps”?