{"id":12488,"date":"2011-12-26T20:06:17","date_gmt":"2011-12-27T01:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=12488"},"modified":"2011-12-26T20:06:17","modified_gmt":"2011-12-27T01:06:17","slug":"fascinating-backgrounder-on-mitt-romney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/12488\/fascinating-backgrounder-on-mitt-romney\/","title":{"rendered":"Fascinating Backgrounder on Mitt Romney"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Next Tuesday Iowans will begin the process of nominating a Republican challenger to President Barack Obama.\u00a0 Since just about everyone thinks Mitt Romney will be that man or at least the runner-up, it\u2019s worth reading a revealing <em>New York Times<\/em> article describing how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/12\/25\/us\/politics\/how-harvard-shaped-mitt-romney.html?_r=1&amp;ref=politics&amp;pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">Romney\u2019s time as a Harvard law and business student made him into a pragmatic problem solver<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re pressed for time (and with the holiday season here, I hope you are), <em>Commentary<\/em>\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commentarymagazine.com\/2011\/12\/26\/romney-harvard-insights\/\" target=\"_blank\">Jonathan Tobin<\/a> provides a good summary on what the <em>NYT<\/em> report tells about Romney\u2019s current place in the Republican field:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What his classmates saw at Harvard are the same qualities that both attract and repel voters today. His economic expertise and pragmatism make him the most electable Republican in 2012, while his lack of ideology makes many conservatives long for anyone else to lead their party. Had a more credible conservative appeared to challenge him, Romney wouldn\u2019t have had a chance. But in the absence of such a paragon, Republicans will probably have to make their peace with the man who seems to be very much the same person who excelled at Harvard four decades ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Next Tuesday Iowans will begin the process of nominating a Republican challenger to President Barack Obama.\u00a0 Since just about everyone thinks Mitt Romney will be that man or at least the runner-up, it\u2019s worth reading a revealing New York Times article describing how Romney\u2019s time as a Harvard law and business student made him into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3260,2026,487,160,1784],"class_list":["post-12488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-campaign","tag-election","tag-harvard","tag-mitt-romney","tag-republican"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12488"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12492,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12488\/revisions\/12492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}