THE QUOTABLE MITT – AT 8:41 A.M. ET:  I've always been amused at who gets quoted in politics.  The press has its favorite quote providers.  In the fifties it was Adlai Stevenson, the losing Dem presidential candidate in 1952 and '56.

The press loved to quote him.  It hated quoting President Eisenhower, believing that he garbled his words and had nothing to say.

Ah, but history intervened.  Stevenson is forgotten, his quotes essentially pedestrian but well delivered.  Eisenhower is now quoted routinely.  He was a poor speaker, but he was filled with substance.  His farewell address to the nation was one of the great presidential speeches.

We come to today.  The press loves to quote Obama.  They've got his words chiseled on monument that exists in the reporters' own minds.  Mitt Romney?  When is the last time you heard him quoted?  And yet, Romney, like George W. Bush, can deliver a fine speech.  The commencement address he gave at Liberty University last week is well worth noting.  His subject was culture:

You enter a world with civilizations and economies that are far from equal. Harvard historian David Landes devoted his lifelong study to understanding why some civilizations rise, and why others falter. His conclusion: Culture makes all the difference. Not natural resources, not geography, but what people believe and value. Central to America’s rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition, with its vision of the goodness and possibilities of every life.

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family.
The power of these values is evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Senator Rick Santorum brought to my attention. For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2%. But, if those things are absent, 76% will be poor. Culture matters.

COMMENT:  Those are good words.  They were quoted on Power Line, but ignored by most of the media, which doesn't think them good words.  Romney, of course, is on to something.  Culture does matter.  Look around you.  Don't you see it every day?

It is up to the alternative media, like Power Line and Urgent Agenda, to provide the good words that will be buried by the mainstreamers, who prefer the speeches of Barack Obama, a man who, like Adlai Stevenson, speaks beautifully and says so very little. 

May 14,  2012