This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
We were all waiting for the hammer to fall. It was bound to happen. It was just a matter of which of us on The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board was going to draw the short straw.
It was the fall of 2012, and one of us was going to have to write the editorial endorsing Mitt Romney for president.
(What's that? You though I was talking about layoffs? Well, that's was always hanging over us, too. But I'm here today because three generous, empathetic — or, perhaps, sick of the grind — colleagues took buy-outs/early retirement before the angel of death could come for me.)
We in the opinion shop were fully expecting the order to come from on high that our 2008 pick, Barack Obama, had had his run, and that Romney, as the savior of the Salt Lake Olympic dream and adopted Utahn, was to be our choice.
Then that video came out. That surreptitious recording of Romney talking to a roomful of rich donors — and one bartender with a smartphone — describing an America that was nearly half lazy, no good dependents. In Romney's own words, "the 47 percent," whom he would ignore as a candidate and, presumably, as president.
That changed everything. In our bullpen, and a lot of other places besides. Now the word was that there was no way our board was going to back a guy who would disparage such a large group of Americans, including people we knew and loved who happened to be on Social Security and Medicare.
Vern Anderson, then the editorial page editor of the Tribune, had been prepared to take the task of writing the Romney endorsement upon himself, if only to save the rest of us. Now he had the pleasure of writing the editorial backing Obama, focusing on our disappointment with Romney's hard-to-pin-down positions and his swing from practical leader to a creature of the heartless right.
The headline was "Too Many Mitts" and it was, for a long time, the most popular article on sltrib.com. It made news around the world. I even got to go on a BBC radio program to explain it.
Last week, Paul Ryan got it.
Ryan, congressman from Wisconsin, Romney's running mate and, for the past few months, speaker of the House, made a speech to House staff that was widely reported as a critique — attack is much too strong a word — of the divisive and crude presidential campaign of his own party's frontrunner, Donald Trump.
Ryan's remarks were very different from those leveled against Trump by Romney a couple of weeks before. Romney hammered the New York tycoon hard, and by name. Ryan spoke more positively, and without mentioning Trump by name. Or Romney, for that matter. But the speaker tried to separate himself, his institution and his party from both the Donald and the Mitt.
Ryan went out of his way, in the course of bemoaning a coarsening of American politics, to take no small measure of the blame upon himself and his brand of politics.
He specifically recanted his former description of a nation divided into "makers" and "takers." The takers being those who rely to one degree or another on public support. The, though Ryan didn't quote the figure, 47 percent.
Clearly, though Ryan didn't explicitly say it, and Romney went nowhere near realizing it, the 2008 nominee's way of dividing the American electorate into us and them, if only behind closed doors, wasn't all that different from the 2012 front-runner's cruder, more brazen approach to campaigning on the resentments of old, white, xenophobic curmudgeons.
A great many Republicans want to stop Trump from winning the nomination. Some are truly repulsed by his manner and his politics. Some just fear that having him at the top of the ticket would take Senate and House candidates down with him, now and for years to come.
The Republicans' other problem is that the only active candidate who might deprive Trump of a first-ballot nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz, is hardly any better. His history of engineering government shut-downs and his calls for police sweeps of "Muslim neighborhoods" should make him just as toxic to the Republican brand as Trump.
Maybe Paul Ryan sees that. Maybe, despite his own protestations, he is positioning himself to win the Republican nomination at a deadlocked convention.
Maybe he is even, dare he dream, going for The Salt Lake Tribune's endorsement.
Just keep apologizing, Mr. Speaker, and we'll see what happens.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, would really prefer to endorse Neil deGrasse Tyson for president.