Why Not Just Settle for Romney?

The lesser of two evils

By Zach Foster

Here are two quick insights I wrote on Facebook on why Ron Paul supporters such as myself will not support either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama this November.

The first was a response to a pen pal of mine and close friend of Mitt Romney, Don Huber, who invited me to “Feel free to reapply and rejoin this winning bandwagon for ‘my old but still younger friend of half a century, Tim Yenmor’... a.k.a. the Honorable W. Mitt Romney... when my other friend Dr. Ron and Carol Paul endorse MR!”

Don, I highly appreciate your generosity and your continued kindness, but there's no way I can support Romney. I can't support a candidate who's taken multiple contradictory positions on the sanctity of life, the individual mandate, TARP bailouts, and deficit spending. There are certain things I hold sacred which I cannot and will not sell out on in order to settle for the lesser of two evils.

If the situation was hypothetically reversed I'm sure Governor Romney would endorse my candidate, and you'd support him as well in order to elect anyone but Barack Obama. On my end, I'm not voting for a candidate per se, but rather a set of principles I can't compromise on and still walk tall afterwards.

The consistent Constitutionalist

The second, a general statement:

Dear Mitt Romney supporters, all the ad hominem attacks and false rumors in the world are not going to make us stop supporting Ron Paul. It's not just the man, but the ideals that we believe in.

--The racist newsletters were NOT written by him. Period. His actual record has proven him a non-racist.

--He ran as a Libertarian in 1988. So what?! He never sold out on his IDEALS. It's about ideals and philosophy, not about having a D or an R next to your name.

--You all make a big stink about supporting our troops, when more than half of the troops (such as the one writing this letter) are tired of a decade of war and support Ron Paul.

--I'm sure Romney's a kind man and a wonderful father, but he's flip-flopped way too many times on key issues like abortion, deficit spending, bailouts, the individual mandate, and the Bill of Rights for us to take him seriously. He literally says one thing, does another, and says something else after that.

So this is not a challenge or an egging on in any way, but rather a brief but clear explanation of our position.

And I’d like to follow up with a reminder that the “lesser of two evils” is still evil.  The greater evil gives us all someone to rally against because we know that we’re united in opposing him.  The lesser of two evils is the one who makes us makes us abandon our sacred principles, and instead of the people telling the elected officials what they will do, it becomes the elected official telling us what we must settle for.

No more.

Romney image courtesy of Gage Skidmore and Ron Paul image courtesy of Jamie Kelso. Both used via Wikimedia Commons and the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 Unported.