Romney Feeds the Crocs
“If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin?” So asked Bryan Fischer, a radio host with the American Family Association, after claiming credit for Richard Grenell’s scalp.
Grenell is the openly gay former foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign. Before that, he worked for Ambassador John Bolton at the United Nations, easily the most revered diplomatic official among the base of the Republican Party since Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Jonah Goldberg
Bio | E-mail | Recent columns
I don’t think Fischer deserves the “credit” he’s claiming, but it does remind me of the old line from Winston Churchill about how an appeaser is someone who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. The reality be damned, it certainly appears that the Romney campaign fed Grenell to the crocs.
The political idiocy of Fischer’s culture-war whoop over Grenell’s resignation should be apparent. If you want a politician to adopt your position, you shouldn’t then mock him for adopting your position. That’s not smart politics or lobbying; it’s public bullying as theater: “Ha ha! I made you do it!”
As for the reality, after talking to several people in and around the Romney campaign, I’m convinced it’s just not true that Grenell was dumped to appease the religious right, or at least it’s more complicated than that.