Republican Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney made a brutal display of his priorities as a politician this week. While Boston is nearly paralyzed as a result of incompetent construction of the Big Dig tunnels that were supposed to make that city run smooth, Governor Romney has made plans to visit Iowa, to lay the groundwork for his 2008 run for President. Romney has been given the responsibility of overseeing the inspections of the Big Dig tunnels, to make sure that no one else gets killed, but hey, what’s a little boring old public safety when the campaign trail is a-callin?
Let me help you with that campaign, Mitt. I’ve got a strategy worked out and everything. It starts out with the slogan: Mitt Romney will do to America what he’s done to Massachusetts. The strategy: Win the Republican nomination by arguing that the gay bashing and crumbling infrastructure are a model of success for all America.
Hey, it worked for George W. Bush.
Enh, it’s not clear to me what Romney could do to speed things up. He’s not going to go down into the tunnels and inspect things himself. The inspections are going at full speed already; they invoked emergency rules to waive competitive-bid rules and hire as many companies as they could to get inspectors down there. (That’s expensive, of course, but I have no doubt Bechtel et al. will wind up footing the bill eventually.) In a week or so, I expect there’ll be lots of data for Romney’s staff to digest, but, right now, getting the twit out of town is probably for the best.
I agree with you, John. The Irish have a saying that there is no situation so bad that it cannot be worsened by the presence of a policeman. I would add to this, in the voice of experience, the presence of a politician.