AMC's week in review: how Mitt Romney and Rafalca both lost

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/10/amc-week-in-review-mitt-romney

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Throughout the week, news junkies like yourself are weighted with information the way the women of the US Olympic team are weighted with medals. But what is any of that worth? An Olympic medal can fetch up to $15,000 (US swimmer and eccentric hottie Anthony Ervin gave the proceeds of that sale to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami), but, as with political stories, most of the value invested in a medal is purely sentimental. This week, a brief look at a couple of stories you know about – and what they really mean. (PS Romney show horse Rafalca came in 30th. Fact.)

When did you stop killing that man's wife? By now, if you're the kind of person who's reading this article, you're probably one of the half-million people who've seen the controversial Priorities USA ad featuring a man laid-off from his job after Bain Capital took over the company. The Obama Super Pac has yet to pay anyone to air the ad, but it is by far the most-talked about piece of campaign propaganda this season.

You probably also know why that is: building upon the Obama campaign's most successful lines of attack – linking Romney to Bain to people losing their jobs – the spot adds at least one other loop of logic to the chain, joining Romney to Bain to job loss to cancer to death.

The Romney team has been trying to point out that the trail of facts that connect Mitt Romney and steelworker Joe Soptic's tragic story are more complex and less concrete than the Obama ad implies. They're not wrong. In 993, Bain bought a steel mill in Kansas (adds Romney: he wasn't running Bain at the time!). Soptic became unemployed (Romney: he was offered a buy-out!). Soptic lost his health insurance; his wife lost her health insurance (years after Soptic lost his job!). She was diagnosed with cancer (far into the disease's progress); and then, yes, she died. The Romney camp has a point, but the Obama ad is ingeniously devious beyond a mere twist of facts – indeed, it's downright Rovian. Romney may be running a repeat of McCain's 2008 campaign, but the Obama team is channelling Bush's in 2004.

There's the obvious: as far as political knife-fights go, once you start arguing about whether or not your candidate killed a man's wife, you're already losing. Then there's the way that debating the details of Soptic's story has kept Romney and his surrogates from hammering Obama on the economy.

The sheer audacity of the ad has also forced the Republicans to resort to one of the least attractive tactics available: whining about what's fair. Americans don't like dirty politics and negative ads, it's true, but it can hardly sit well with the Republican base that Romney now wants to hand over control of the debate to the mainstream media, complaining to one interviewer that "the various fact-checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they're wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them."

Yes, by all means, let's make campaigns pull every ad deemed inaccurate by journalists! Neither side would have many left.

What's more, Romney campaign helped the Obama cause along by at first underscoring their point: given how many Americans die every year because they don't have cover (45,000), it's important to have health insurance! So important, in fact, that some states mandate it. The inappropriateness of Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul reminding reporters that Mrs Soptic would have had insurance if she'd lived in Massachusetts made some analysts wonder if the whole ad was some kind of trap wandered into by an increasingly rudderless campaign.

No less than noted authority on bedside manner Mark Halperin has said that the "cancer ad" oversteps some invisible line in political etiquette, though I have no doubt that should Obama win (ads are only in bad taste if the candidate loses), the line will simply move. Should journalists take a stand on whether an ad "goes too far"? Is "who will kill more people" a useful metric for deciding one's vote? Should how they die matter? (Uninsured getting sick versus execution by armed drone?) I have no answers to these questions, which is apparently just fine because that's not the debate we're having.

These are not the vice-presidential candidates you're looking for. A further question: stopping the media from speculating on veep selections – is there an app for that? The only good thing about reporters tossing out names of possible vice-presidential candidates is that you can't accuse them of needing to do more reporting on it. It is functionally impossible to report on who Romney will pick to fill out the ballot because VP choices are one of the few modern political decisions that are truly personal. Polling data and focus groups play a role, but in the end, the nominee has to go with the person who feels right. As much as analysts say that carrying a home state matters, "regional balance" hasn't been a factor since the last civil war veterans died off. Thus, I've been arguing that the most important thing Romney's pick will tell us is what Romney thinks about himself. Call it an X-ray of the soul, though I suspect Romney's might be more an X-ray for a soul.

If anything, the most chattered-about names – Paul Ryan, Tim Pawlenty, and Rob Portman – probably have less of a chance than they did before we started talking about them. Having a high public profile is pretty much a negative. On Friday, Romney spokesperson Eric Fernstrom told reporters asking about the process to "download the app". My gut feeling is that in Romney's perfect world, the VP would be the app.

And now for something completely different. American Conservative senior editor Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans […], drew my attention to a story that's gotten very little attention outside Catholic circles, but is an interesting counterweight to the media coverage of the band of nuns protesting Romney's policy regarding the poor – and speaks to the future of the Catholic political tradition in the US.

"For the first time since the Vatican announced a crackdown on the organization, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious – the umbrella group that represents 80% of America's Roman Catholic nuns – met for its annual conference. For an organization under fire from Rome for its alleged theological heterodoxy, LCWR's choice of a keynote speaker was unusual: Barbara Marx Hubbard, an elderly New Age guru whose vacuous nostrums bring to mind a nitrous oxide aficionado who just rollerbladed in from the Venice boardwalk. Hubbard called the nuns 'the best seedbed I know for evolving the Church and the world in the 21st century'. Good luck with that."

Dreher contrasts the "narcissism" of the nuns' religiosity with the religious liberalism from generations past. Reflecting on LCWR's decline, he writes:

"The problem with today's religious liberalism is that it privileges individual desire and individual experience so radically that it gives away any solid ground from which it might stand to move the world and to change it. For that matter, how in the world are these nuns going to be the seedbed for any kind of change when they can't even convince anyone to join their own ranks?

"US membership in Catholic women's religious orders continues to plummet: 90% of American nuns are aged 60 or older, and only 5% are under the age of 50. Perhaps Marx Hubbard expects that desiccated seedbed to grow magic beanstalks. In any case, the LCWR conference at least somewhat gainsays the popular narrative that the American nuns are innocent victims of a Vatican Inquisition seeking to impose rigid doctrinal orthodoxy on kindly old ladies who only want to serve the poor."