Romney as governor: a very practiced liar

By THOMAS J. CURRY
SWANSEA, MASS.

I am an independent with no party affiliation but from an ideological viewpoint, I am well to the right of center. Still, I cannot support Mitt Romney for president. While Barack Obama has not performed to expectations for a variety of reasons (some of which are his own failings), the dilemma in this election is that the alternative to Obama is Romney.

Having worked directly with Romney during his term as Massachusetts governor, I can tell you that there is nothing authentic or genuine about him. He'll tell you what he thinks that you want to hear and pretend to be what he thinks you want him to be.

He's an ideological chameleon who will say anything to get your support and then do whatever he wants to favor the rich and privileged; he's a caricature of the stereotyped Republican Party.
He lies frequently and convincingly, and has elastic principles, if any at all. He's fundamentally dishonest, while presenting an image of goodness and light.

He didn't run for a second term as governor because he knew that he would have been soundly defeated by the voters who experienced what he was really like. He'll be lucky if he gets within 20 percentage points of Obama in Massachusetts in this election.

Romney doesn't say much about his governorship, and those things that he does say are either lies or extreme distortions.

Most recently, the "binder full of women" gaffe is an example. He neither sought nor assembled that binder of women that he was boasting about; rather, it was brought to him and his opponent during the gubernatorial campaign by a bipartisan women's group that wanted both candidates to consider those in the binder for possible appointments whichever one of them was elected.

Another example is him bragging that, while he was governor, he balanced the budget without raising taxes, which is true. What he doesn't say is that in Massachusetts it's the law that the budget be balanced. That is, every governor and legislature has to balance the budget!

His assertion about not raising taxes is even more deceptive because instead of raising taxes he raised every conceivable fee one could think of and further cut state aid to the cities and towns so that they had to raise taxes to survive. The bottom line is that it cost residents considerably more t live in Massachusetts after he got through "...balancing the budget without raising taxes...."

He brags about the excellence of Massachusetts secondary schools, implying that it was his stewardship that caused this. The facts are that the secondary-school reforms were well underway years before he became governor and that he really didn't have anything to do with them.

He also talks about the excellence of higher education in Massachusetts as if he had something to do with that. What he doesn't tell you is that during his term as governor, he drastically cut the funding for public higher education repeatedly such that the state colleges and the University of Massachusetts had to raise fees to function, which resulted in tuition being a small fraction of the total cost to attend.

The split between tuition and fees for a Massachusetts student staying at UMass (then) was such that the tuition was less than 10 percent of the cost of attending!

That is, he drove the fees for public higher education through the roof, placing a greater burden on the middle-class students and their families who could not afford to go to the private schools. During his tenure, Massachusetts support for higher education was among the worst in the nation!

I could go on with many more examples, at many levels; but I think that the picture is clear. I cannot vote for someone as dishonest as Romney. I'll stick with someone who has more integrity and is more sincere, even if his performance did not meet expectations.

Thomas J. Curry, now retired, was an aerospace engineer and later, at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, was dean of the College of Engineering, provost, vice chancellor for academic affairs and director of the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center there.