Romney Clueless on Veterans

I stopped listening to people running for office a long time ago. They can be coached on what to say, when to say it and how to pretend they know what they're talking about, but the problem is, they can't be coached on how to really care.

With veterans the easy answer is turning them over to private companies. When politicians talk about it they hope the veterans think of the problems they have with the VA and drop the wondering. The problem comes when the veterans think about the simple fact private companies are in it for profit, for the money, and not in it for them. The easy answer is to destroy the VA so they can feed their buddies stock portfolios. The right thing to do would be to fix the problems in the VA, which would cost a lot less but offer a lot more CARE to veterans.

Romney Clueless on Veterans
Posted: 11/14/11

Ashwin Madia
Interim Chairman of VoteVets.org

Just before the weekend, Mitt Romney held a Veterans Day event in South Carolina. A nice photo op, for sure. Yet, it wasn't the pictures, but his words, that made news. At this event, ostensibly to show support for veterans, Mitt Romney told them that as President he'd be open to tossing them into the private care system, from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

He said:

"Sometimes you wonder, would there be some way to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them and then they can choose whether they want to go on the government system or the private system and then it follows them, like what happens with schools in Florida where they have a voucher that follows them. Who knows?"

What's so interesting about this is that it's not an official policy statement. In fact, Romney hasn't issued any policies on VA care. It would be one thing if he did, and you could chalk the position up to him kowtowing to the conservative GOP base, which seems to think anything with government involvement is evil. You could say, well, maybe he doesn't really believe it, like when he flip-flopped his position on a woman's right to choose. But, this was a stream of consciousness, and tells us that when it comes to veterans, Mitt Romney is absolutely clueless.

Could he learn and be coached? Maybe. But I wouldn't hope too much for that. Not when his chief veterans advisor is Jim Nicholson -- the same man who, as Secretary of the VA, requested billions of dollars less than the VA needed, and then had to run to Congress to beg for emergency funding to keep the doors open, because of his blundering as head of the department.
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