NPR Surprise: Two Media-Elite Reporters Make a Pro-Romney Point

March 9th, 2014 7:43 PM

NPR’s Diane Rehm show had a little bit of Mitt Romney on the brain on Friday. Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post felt compelled to point out that if President Romney had implemented all these delays in Obamacare mandates, the Democrats would be having fits.

In the show’s second hour, James Kitfield of National Journal was even more generous. He suggested “maybe Romney was right” about Russia being America’s number-one geopolitical foe.

Tumulty spoke in the first hour, the domestic-policy week-in-review hour with journalists:

KAREN TUMULTY: I do think, you know, there's a point here though. And that if -- you know, if there had been a President Mitt Romney and he had unilaterally decided, as President Obama did, that for instance small businesses between 50 and 100 employees didn't have to comply with the mandate on time, the Democrats would be, you know, just raising a ruckus. And so, you know, at some point you do wonder -- you know, there are parts of the law that just are not working the way they should.
 
And the problem is that there is no political way to go back and fine tune the law with congress, which is the way it should happen and the way in normal politics it would happen, the way it has happened in every major social program in the past.


Kitfield appeared in the second hour, where journalists discuss foreign affairs:

JAMES KITFIELD: I keep going back to this idea that sort of there is a tint or a whiff of the Cold War blowing back in. Because we have seen that Russia, for its realist interest, is willing to countenance all of the things the UN report puts up with, dropping barrel bombs on civilian neighborhoods, slaughtering men, women and children indiscriminately and doing it for years. And this is something Russia's fine with.
 
And we need to -- you know, if Russia's going to act like this 19th-century power that Secretary Kerry keeps saying that, you know, the time has passed by, then we're going to have to start rethinking how we deal with Russia. The reset clearly is by the wayside but we've seen Russia's real colors in Syria. And we're seeing them now in Ukraine. And it's going to require a very serious recalibration of how we view them. You know, I hate to go back to the election but maybe Romney was right. Maybe they are our single adversary in the world right now.