The AP today appears to have found another Romney flip-flop: He loved Hillary’s “Village” before he was running against her.
Or has it? For what it’s worth, here’s the discussion they are referring to (he was talking about public-private partnerships to the Boston Globe, in a conversation feature, ”For City Problems, Future Solutions,” 3/1/98, while he was still at Bain Capital); I include more rather than less for context (ellipses are the Globe’s:
GUZZI: Mitt Romney, from your position in the private sector, what do you see as the key challenges?
MITT ROMNEY: I would underline, with a very heavy marker, the failure in education. Our kids are not educated to compete in a worldwide marketplace. They are not educated to compete even in the United States, and it’s going to get worse. I just came back from a trip to China, and I went to a factory of 5,000 workers making bread makers and mixers and so forth. And 5,000 Chinese, all graduated from high school, 18 to 24 years old, were working, working, working, as hard as they could, at rates of roughly 50 cents an hour. They cared about their jobs; they wouldn’t even look up as we walked by. I said to the plant manager, “Why don’t they look up at us? We’re Americans, we look funny, they’ve never seen folks like us walk through this factory.” They said, “Because work here is very important, and they concentrate on their work.”
We’re competing globally, and our kids aren’t ready, and we’re turning kids out who haven’t even got high school educations. What are they going to do? How are we going to employ these people? We have massive concerns as we look at the future of the work force for our citizenry. And cities – our whole country – have to wake up, and wake up quickly and aggressively. . . .
If you want to get capital and jobs in the cities, we’re going to have to make cities attractive places to invest, and that means an educated, empowered work force. It means safe streets, it means tax advantages, it means terrific infrastructure, it means investing in places where there are competitive advantages in cities. I don’t believe that we’re at a disadvantage if we’ll knock down some of the bureaucracy, red tape, corruption, and so forth that’s been historically part of our city environment.
GUZZI: What more can we do about education and children?
MARIAN HEARD: There are a few things that I think are extremely concrete that individuals can do, but let’s take a broad brush perspective in terms of education. As we have all confirmed now, whether it’s the latest research about how the brain develops until age 3 or what takes place in a child’s life until age 6, these early years are critical. We must make certain that there are appropriate child care facilities. . . . Think about how many people have now left the welfare rolls and who need increasing slots for child care. The child care facilities must be well-maintained, they must be staffed with people who have been provided reasonable wages and support systems, and they must have outreach efforts for parents.
So, we start at the early years. We will send children to school ready to learn. All of us in this room know that teachers most generally weren’t trained as social workers, to address all of the problems, the myriad issues that children now bring to the classrooms. Single-parent families, people struggling in an economy – we believe that while the economy has been good for some people, it has not been good for everyone. And when you think about the economy lifting all boats, I will tell you that I’m talking about people that don’t own a boat.
CUOMO: What this nation was always about was never that there was a guarantee that you would get a certain income or a certain job. We never said that. What we said was opportunity for all, and there’s an income gap now in the nation. But the way you solve the income gap is by solving the opportunity gap, close that opportunity gap. And we’re getting to the point where people are put at a disadvantage from birth, if they’re going to go to a public education system vs. a private education system or a suburban education system. And that is repugnant to the concept of this nation. . . .
When you lose the education system, you lose that ladder, and that’s why it would fundamentally erode the promise that is America. And we are getting there now. The cities’ education system is an inferior education system to the suburban education system and the private education system. And if you are left behind by that education system now, you will be left behind for a lifetime. . . . The information superhighway is a very exciting but also a dangerous tool. It moves very fast, if you’re on it. If you’re not on the information superhighway, it can leave you behind at 100 miles an hour. Some kids are going to school in the first grade, and they’re playing on computers with Pentium chips. You have other kids going to schools where the most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment is the metal detector that they walk through when they walk into the classroom. That is a repugnancy that you can’t allow to exist in this nation. . . .
By their nature, cities are dealing with challenges that the outlying suburbs themselves are not. They are older, their infrastructure is older, they are poorer, their tax base is less, they’re dealing with problems that the suburbs aren’t.
GUZZI: What are the companies looking for? What are the prospects for jobs in the inner city?
ROMNEY: I saw an article recently in Commonwealth magazine where Michael Porter from the Harvard Business School said that he goes around the country talking with leaders in different cities, and he sees a lot of people working together trying to find common solutions, but that in Boston, unlike any city he had visited, he said something troubling to me, he said our sectors don’t work together. We seem to view each other with suspicion and skepticism. And I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but if it is, that’s a scary thing because there is a lot we have got to do together. . . .
There are repellents we put up in cities. As Secretary Cuomo said, you realize how much easier it is to go cut down 50 acres of trees next to a pure stream and build a factory there, than it is to build a factory in the downtown area where there have been abandoned buildings and crime and rats and infestation. That’s impossible, that costs a fortune, that’ll take years of red tape to do. But cut down trees, no problem at all. We’ve got an upside-down world here. . . .
Hillary Clinton is very much right, it does take a village, and we are a village and we need to work together in a non-skeptical, non-finger-pointing way. . .
The Romney campaign adds this for a fuller candidate picture:
Governor Mitt Romney: “My department of public health has recently asked whether we must rewrite our state birth certificate to conform to our court’s ruling. Must we remove father and mother and replace them with parent A and parent B? What should be the ideal for raising a child? Not a village, not parent A and parent B, but a mother and a father. Marriage is about even more than children and adults. The family unit is the structural underpinning of all successful societies, and it’s the single most powerful force that preserves society across generations, through centuries.” (Committee On The Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Hearing, 6/22/04)