Romney revels in silence of the lambs

The Republican candidates for president offered myriad nutty moments in their "debate" the other evening on CNN.

There was the assertion that an American of the Muslim faith should not have the constitutional freedom of religion to be eligible for appointment to the president's Cabinet. There was another that we could restore the American economy by doing away with environmental regulation.

There also was Newt Gingrich.

But surely the goofiest moment of all was when the other six candidates gave supposed front-runner Mitt Romney a pass on being the phony that he most certainly is -- on, indeed, deserving to have his blatant phoniness installed as the Achilles' heel of this his second well-financed run for the nomination.

For once we missed Mike Huckabee. As if to prove that he is not entirely absurd, Huckabee had a knack for scoping out Romney's hypocrisy and getting under the stiff-shirted Mitt's skin about it.

Active offenders among the actual candidates in the debate last week were Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain. The others were passive offenders.

Pawlenty simply wimped out. There is no other way to put it.

The former Minnesota governor had gone on a television show the day before and delivered a surely carefully conceived term, "ObamneyCare." It cleverly represented that the new federal health care reform bears remarkable resemblance to health care reform that Romney helped impose in Massachusetts when he was a center-left Republican governor there.

It is a swell little quip, fair and appropriate, one that, while not altogether catchy in its multi-syllabic burden, could get some currency.

But that would be the case only if Pawlenty had the chops to back it up, indeed to use it to Romney's face in a debate.

Pawlenty didn't. He wiggled. He waffled.

He tucked tail and crept under the porch.

Afraid of Mitt Romney -- goodness, what a woeful line on one's resume.

Pawlenty mouthed the word only under duress when pressed by the debate moderator and then only to say he was mainly meaning to criticize President Obama and cite the president's own statement that the national health plan had been drawn in part from Romney's measure in Massachusetts.

First of all, Obama didn't really have a plan. He let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid design the health reform bill. The president simply signed it.

Second, Romney's explanation is lame and ripe for exploitation by foes more genuinely conservative and rhetorically competent.

He says the president should have called and asked him about the Massachusetts experience, in which case he would have explained the fatal flaws.

But a real conservative, possessed of chops, would happily crow that he need not endure a public policy experiment, nor go along with Democrats on a single liberal public policy initiative, to know that the government has no business ordering people to buy health insurance.

How many doomed liberal experiments might Mitt go along with as president until learning better? Or so Pawlenty might have asked.

Romney got such a pass on health care that the debate moderator asked the other six candidates if any of them wanted to challenge the general authenticity of this man who once was pro-choice and once was pro-gay rights and once was anti-gun.

What happened next was the silence of the lambs until one of them, Herman Cain, said "case closed."

Romney's vulnerability has now been officially and permanently erased. No wonder he became so giddy a couple of days later that, while posing with a waitress, he playfully feigned as if she had goosed him, which she hadn't.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His email address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.