Last week following the latest Republican Debate (#435 if my count is correct) the airwaves in the Boston area were buzzing because of Mitt Romney. Now here is someone who had run for Senator previously, claimed Massachusetts as his home state, and even been Governor for four years which included 2004 – and yet he failed to identify the most commonly used number in the state back in ’04 : 86 years.

Yes, as noted here, Romney pulled a Bill Buckner and claimed to be a ‘long suffering Red Sox fan’ and then talked about the 87 years that Sox fans had to wait. He might as well have have said that Bobby Orr was on the ’67 Sox team or that Steve Grogan was the one who waved the home run into fair territory in the ’75 series. With a single number he became a universal joke in Massachusetts – it was no longer just the talk radio people taking him to task for realigning his entire political agenda to fit the Republican agenda that would get him funding and hopefully the nomination (as opposed to the agenda he had to get liberal Massachusetts to elect him in the first place). No – now it was everywhere.

But why? Why over such a little thing? Quite simple – he lost any credibility that remained. Ordinary people understand changing their stance on political issues, even if they suspect most politicians of doing it to score political points rather than due to actual thoughtful research. Heck, how many people have watched their own opinions of almost everything related to the government change over the last 8 years … much as they did two generations ago with Watergate. But what angers folks and really set them off is when you show them that you are disingenuous – it would be like having a politician you had known years before address you personally and talk about your wife and kids by name, but then also hear that he has people piping that info into an ear piece. It destroys believability.

Remember when Mike Dukakis rode in the tank and looked like a complete idiot? Or when George Bush senior told folks that a job was a job, whether it was potato chips or computer chips? Those sorts of moments lose people elections. But there are other moments – like when GW Bush was trying to ‘get personal’ in a grocery store and was amazed by scanning technology and had no idea what was happening … so much for any pretense of being a ‘man of the people’. It is the sort of thing that we laugh about when it is Paris Hilton being bewildered about the existence of a laundromat, but it is something entirely different when it comes to the people who run our towns, states and country.

And that is the real thing for me – I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney even knows that the name of the baseball team in the state he governed was called the Red Sox, but I *do* care that he tried to use it for political capital and then immediately when into spin control mode when confronted with reality. Why do I care? Because I am a citizen, a parent and a gamer. As a citizen I cannot stand being lied to anymore – about the reality at home and abroad. As a parent I am tired of our children being pawns in a political game between the local, state and federal levels, all of whom are shouting ‘teach the children’ from the rooftops but none of whom will ante up the funds, leaving parents to pay more and more and towns to provide less and less. And as a gamer I am tired of watching a hobby I have loved for nearly 35 years since first knocking that little white square between two white lines with my brother, getting assaulted by people who see nothing but votes and polls at stake – oh, and the opportunity to say that they are the ones to ‘save the children’.

Give it a rest, all of you candidates – I would be extremely surprised if Romney doesn’t start to free fall now, and I hope he does and that it sends a message. Not just to fact check, but to say what you believe and believe what you say. It is what I do, and what I tell my kids to do. It is what we should expect of our leaders. If that were the case, I’m sure we would still have laws being proposed to limit or ban video games, but the prospect of engaging in intelligent and thoughtful debate is actually exciting … ass opposed to dealing with the fallout of political grandstanding and a sh!tstorm of inflammatory soundbytes.

Tags: Misc