By Thomas J. Curry
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 have 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.http://blogs.providencejournal.com/ri-talks/this-new-england/2012/10/thomas-j-curry-romney-as-governor-liar-and-a-phony.html