Romney paid tribute to his mother's grit and integrity. Noble it was. But, as is so often the case with Romney, it was style, not substance.
Lenore Romney belonged to what is now an endangered, if not extinct, species: the liberal Republican. She criticized the counter-culture, but opposed the war in Vietnam. She was put off by the women's liberation movement, but worked with the National Women's Political Caucus to advance electoral opportunities for women. She shared a stage with Martin Luther King, supported a national health-care plan, and opposed industrial pollution.
And she was pro-choice — as Romney himself has often pointed out.
In casual and candid meetings when Romney was running against the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, and again during Romney's campaign for governor, he spoke passionately and convincingly of his mother's support for Planned Parenthood, and of how, with his mother's blood coursing through his veins, he could never repudiate a woman's right to choose as delineated in Roe vs. Wade.
You won't hear that from him this time around.
Now, the nation is quickly coming to know Romney as the transcendental prevaricator he is. No one would expect Romney to blindly follow his late mother's political beliefs. It is, after all, possible to love deeply someone with whom you politically disagree. But Romney's manipulation and distortion of the political tradition within which he grew up is nothing short of dancing on his mother's grave. It is the greatest whopper of them all.
