I am in Omaha, Nebraska today to speak at the Hilton Omaha where Mitt Romney will be raising cash in a private fundraiser for his campaign. It will be interesting if he is pressed on this story picking up steam this week. Romney has been accused of former school chums from his elite all-boy boarding school of attacking a presumed gay student and cutting off his hair. Since in many states the attack on the now-deceased John Lauber would be a hate crime, it is a serious charge even if it was so many years ago. The witness turns out to be a former prosecutor who says that he has been haunted by the act. This week Romney reaffirmed that he opposed same-sex marriage as a personal matter. Update: Romney has apologized for incidents in his youth.
The Washington Post spoke to five students, including one who said that Romney had it out for a younger boy because of his long bleached-blond hair in 1965. The witness say that Romney led friends in tackling and cutting off Lauber’s hair. The witness is Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor. Romney is quoted at the time as declaring “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!”
The response from the campaign was a bit weak under the circumstances. The campaign simply said that Romney had no recollection of the event: “The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”
I have met Romney and even flew across the country on a flight back to Washington. He has struck me as a particularly friendly and decent person despite our disagreement on many issues. However, despite the long passage of time, the leading of an attack on a gay student is a serious matter as it would in a racist or anti-Semitic attack. I would have expected a clear recollection that such an attack could never have occurred.
Four other students recalled the incident, including some who admitted to participating in it. Also troubling are accounts like this one: “In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, ‘Atta girl!'”
While Romney may claim that it was not an anti-gay attack but just a prank, one would expect him to have an equally clear memory of the event at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Certainly the memory stuck with Lauber who spoke to some of the witnesses years later. For my part, I am equally troubled by the claim of a lack of any recollection of such events.
Romney however appears to be trying to get ahead of the story and the confirmatory accounts of former friends. On a radio show, he said “Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that. I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize.” However, he still denied any recollection of the attack on Lauber: “I don’t remember that incident. I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s so that was not the case.”
Do you think this is a viable campaign issue given the passage of time? If he was a bully decades ago, does it have bearing today on the man running for office?
Source: Washington Post
OS,
congrats to your daughter!
Excellent link shano. It looks like Romney just doesn’t understand that being a punk when you are young is one thing, but if you don’t own up to it when you are his age, something is very wrong.
shano, May 10, 2012 at 3:56 pm: “However, those I knew back then who did were bullies from the first grade onward, and REMAIN bullies in one form or another today”
I was bullied by a gang of four. I really try not to take joy in their many incarcerations, two for domestic violence and assorted other assaults, The third guy inherited a thriving business and drove it into the ground while he tried to be a political power broker. He went away for fraudulent business practices .All three each have at least two strikes.
Number four was doing pretty well as some type of commodity trader in Houston. Haven’t heard anything about him since Enron went kaput.. He was one of the smartest guy in the room, doncha ya know?
I didn’t get it nearly as bad as some others they bullied. The family with the gay kid moved to another town after a particularly nasty incident. No one tried to stop them. No one ever did. Nothing ever happened to the bullies. They came from the best (wealthiest) families and were star athletes.
I’m coming up on a half century of missed high school reunions. Classmates ask my family members why I don’t attend. I never say, but it’s because I remember every damn thing they did — or didn’t do.
Forgot to add.. Stay tuned.
Yep. Thanks for that, shano.
Romney campaign now beating the bushes to find high school ‘friend’ who will make Romney seem more normal. Not going that well, hmmmm
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-friend-stu-white-says-campaign-wants-him-to-counter-prank-accusations/
“According to White, he knows of several other classmates that have also been approached by the campaign to counter the article. White declined to name the fellow classmates.
Romney often mentions White on the campaign trail as the friend who threw the party where Romney met his wife Ann, whom he has now been married to for more than 43 years.
One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s – who refused to be identified by name – said there are “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook who have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as “evil” and “like Lord of the Flies.”
The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember it.
“It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?” the former classmate said.”
If he hadn’t done it, he would have simply denied it outright rather than weakly saying he didn’t recall the incident. So yes, he did it.
As for it being so long ago… Think about the people you knew when you were young. I never bullied anyone nor acted like that. However, those I knew back then who did were bullies from the first grade onward, and REMAIN bullies in one form or another today.
Want to know why Romney can’t relate to people? This might be one very good indicator- he was immune to the feelings of others as a youth, and he NEVER grew into an understanding of them as an adult.
This is NOT a man who should be president.
I would say that it is just another item in the list that shows Romney as unable to empathize or sympathize with anyone. I watch some of the stuff he says and how he says it and wonder if he is a high functioning autistic? Perhaps Asperger’s?
Bron, now I do think that Santorum would have rallied the democratic masses like nothing else. No one wants these religious fanatics anywhere near the levers of power- witness Sarah Palin.
I do think it will be a close race, but hopefully Obama will prevail over Romney and the vote will be a clean & fair one. I know, that is a hell of a lot to hope for.
I don’t think Romney is a introvert. No, I think he is so privileged, like Poppy Bush, he is afraid to make that cash register mistake- you know, where Bush marvels at bar code technology in the supermarket. Mitt is just watching his step with his lizard brain warning him when he is on unfamiliar territory…
Mike S., your observations and those of Tony and several others are spot on. As the old proverb goes, zebras don’t change their stripes. Psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser, developer of Reality Therapy, worked for years with troubled youth. Based on his observation and research, he opines that one’s basic personality is pretty well set by the age of ten years. If they are cannot be reached and changed by that age, the personality is amazingly resistant to change after that.
Interesting personal observation. My youngest daughter was one of those kids who was not afraid to stand up to bullies. When she was in the sixth grade, I saw her insert her tiny self between two high school boys and a chubby kid they were picking on. She gave them a tongue lashing that would not wait. The one time she was bullied, she had us take her down to the courthouse where she swore out a warrant to have the boy arrested on assault charges. Personality traits running true to form, she is now a sworn law enforcement officer, currently working as a correctional officer. She loves her job. Some of the bullies she used to know are now guests at her “bed and breakfast inn.”
Wege:
“Since we all know the Republican rank and file is repulsed by Mormon Mitt, who are Mitt’s anonymous defenders?”
Probably everyone who is going to vote against Obama. Mitt will be the first president ever elected because of voting against the incumbent rather than voting for the candidate. Almost 100% of people voting for Romney are doing so as a protest vote against the democrat party and the incumbent. It has nothing to do with Mitt’s attractiveness as a candidate. Had Paul and Gingrich left the race early, Santorum would have routed Romney. And he would have beaten Obama.
So democrats ought to be thanking their gods that Romney is the nominee, he will be a RINO who is good with money but he doesnt have any conservative instincts. He will fake them till he makes it to the big white house at 1600.
I dont think it is the privileged childhood, I think it is the Mormon in Mitt. I have known a few and they seem to look down on other people. I guess when you are going to become a God/king on your own personal planet it goes to your head. I have no idea if that is Mitt’s problem.
The other possibility is that Mitt is an introvert and doesnt do well in crowds. I went to a function 5 or 6 years ago and Romney was there but he wasnt mixing it up and that was in a restaurant full of friendlies. Any politician worth his salt would have worked that room and taken names and numbers.
Being an introvert is not necessarily a bad quality.
Having a car top carrier for a dog is in no way indicative of a personality disorder. If the carrier is safely secured what is the problem? He has never eaten dog.
By the way has anybody seen First Dog Bo lately?
Wege,
If you didn’t see the following article last week, you might appreciate it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/04/mitt-romney-homeland-security-massachusetts_n_1467940.html “Mitt Romney Homeland Security Record In Massachusetts: Domestic Spying, Wiretapping” by Andrea Stone
Excerpt:
To Carol Rose, executive director of the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union, that “penchant for secrecy” characterized Romney’s administration. Shortly before he left office, for example, his aides quietly erased all of his administration’s electronic records.
Romney has said that as president he would continue to develop the fusion centers “and other innovative systems to collect and systematically analyze information about domestic activities.” That confirms the worst fears of Rose, whose organization issued a report on surveillance in Massachusetts that raised concerns about the growing “intelligence network” the former governor established.
Rose said that while the Obama administration has done little to shrink the national security bureaucracy that Bush built, Romney “was an affirmative, unapologetic proponent of building a domestic surveillance infrastructure” that is “really focused on ‘the enemy within.'”
“I haven’t seen a lot of evolution in terms of his thinking on homeland security,” Rose said. “He still seems to be stuck in a hyper-militarized, hyper-surveillance mindset.”
By September 2003, Romney decided that average citizens had “fallen into complacency” against terrorism. He said he wanted to enlist Massachusetts residents into an “intelligence network” to help prevent and detect future plots.
As the co-chair of a National Governors Association task force on homeland security and as head of a national Homeland Security Advisory Council task force, he urged state and local agencies to join the federal government in stepped-up intelligence gathering.
”The eyes and ears which gather intelligence need to be as developed in our country as they were in foreign countries during the Cold War,” Romney said in 2005. ”Meter readers, EMS drivers, law enforcement, private sector personnel need to be on the lookout for information which may be as useful.”
Civil liberties groups objected. Two years earlier, Congress had rejected a similar program that would have encouraged cable installers, home contractors and other citizens to spy on neighbors.
Yet in 2010, soon after a street vendor alerted police to a car bomb in New York’s Times Square, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano launched a variant of the idea, the “See Something, Say Something” campaign. One of her top counterterrorism officers, John Cohen, was Romney’s senior homeland security adviser in Massachusetts and has also been involved in DHS monitoring of social media sites including Facebook and Twitter.
As a Bush appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, Romney also advocated wiretapping mosques and spying on foreign students in a manner similar to the widespread surveillance of Muslims by the New York Police Department recently uncovered in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Associated Press.
“Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping? Are we following what’s going on?” Romney asked in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in September 2005.
The governor also stressed the need for community policing and working closely with local leaders to detect radicalization before it turned dangerous.
…..
Said Rose in an interview: “Romney’s instincts are to use fear of difference as a way to justify using the power of the state to conduct domestic surveillance of people — not because they’ve done anything wrong — but because of who they are or where they worship.”
Romney is an elitist jerk and evidently always has been. I was teased and picked on as kid for being short and having a lisp. While I never got my hair cut, people who were abused and picked on do tend to remember those incidents. I might have endured more if my brother, who was/is over 6 feet, hadn’t saved my ass more than once.
“Do you think this is a viable campaign issue given the passage of time? If he was a bully decades ago, does it have bearing today on the man running for office?”
Yes. No. I have mixed feelings about this. The amount of time that has passed in conjunction with the “offense” does not make it an issue for me personally. However, I agree with other posters that the way he is responding to the incident does reflect on his character now, and therefore makes the issue relevant. How does the old cliche go…”It’s the coverup, not the crime.” something like that.
I have done many of stupid things up until my early 20s. But then again, I am not running for POTUS. So strange how the 24 hr media and instant information age has impacted politics. Just think in 25-30yrs, candidates will have well more documented lives (e.g., twitter, facebook, etc.). Will only the squeaky clean be running for well-known public office? I digress.
Reading and rereading these comments, I can’t help but notice that there are a remarkable number of anonymous comments that are quite hostile and which assume certain liberal traits previously known only to viewers of Fox News.
Given that Gov. Romney belongs to one of America’s oldest religious cults, I think it would behoove our host to assign an intern to the comments to check to see if there is a sudden influx of Utah-based ISPs involved.
Paranoid? No, I just doubt very much that Mitt’s peers would bother to leave comments like those. (Hire an indie contractor to leave comments, maybe.) Since we all know the Republican rank and file is repulsed by Mormon Mitt, who are Mitt’s anonymous defenders?
AY, regarding the DSM. Yes, the latest version will the the DSM-V. It had to be updated due to recent discoveries in psychological and psychiatric research. New technologies in brain scans, especially functional scans such as the PET and fMRI are to mental health as the Hubble telescope has been to astronomy.
Geeba Geeba, well I certainly can identify with the victim here since anyone who was an ‘outsider’ at school can.
We were usually studious introverts who avoided people and cliques like the groups Mitt would rally in order to beat us up, steal our stuff or play other ‘pranks’ and ‘hijinks’ on us.
Yea, we know these people. We never wanted to beat the crap out of anyone, we just wanted them to leave us alone.
Didn’t they Btw just revamp the DSM criteria…
OS,
At least he doesn’t do a comb over….
It was fifty years ago, and his classmates seem to have grown up enough to be ashamed of their behavior. Not Mitt. Mitt Romney is a child of privilege who grew up thinking of others as his inferiors.
As bitterly disappointed as I am in Barack Obama, I would leave this country if we elected Romney president (or any other leading Republican, all of whom are incapable of engaging with reality, preferring instead the bubblicious world of Fox News).
Eight years of Bush-Cheney was hell enough without electing a man who thinks of the Bushs as white trash.