This article cross-posted from The Nation
Readers of Tom Paine's The American Crisis
will have a hard time finding the line referenced by Mitt Romney in his
Florida victory speech: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
A very hard time.
I've lectured on Paine at major universities, keynoted Paine
commemorations across the country and written books that review and
analyze his writings, and I never came across Romney's quote in my
examinations of the pamphleteer's essays or letters. But, just to be
sure, I contacted my friend Harvey Kaye, the great biographer of Paine,
and asked him whether he was familiar with Romney's "lead, follow..."
line. Kaye's response: "I never read anything by Paine that sounded like
that -- doesn't even sound like him."
The same responses came from other Paine scholars and enthusiasts.
No surprise there. Anyone familiar with Paine's canon knows that the greatest of the founding fathers did not peddle empty platitudes of this sort.
But there was Romney mis-attributing the line to Paine, as part of his primary night attack on President Obama.
"In another era of American crisis, Thomas Paine is reported to have said, "lead, follow, or get out of the way,'" chirped the Bain Capitalist. "Mr. President, you were elected to lead. You chose to follow, and now, it's time for you to get out of the way."
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If Romney cannot get his recollection of the past right, it is hard to take his assessment of the present seriously.
Of course, it should not be all that shocking that the candidate who
has never been able to shake the trappings of aristocracy that so
offended Paine would neither known nor understand the author of American
revolution.
If Toryism has a contemporary face, it is that of Mitt Romney.
Everything about this millionaire son of privilege
says he would have chosen the security of King George III and the
British Empire over a dangerous alliance with the radicals who rejected
the divine right of kings and declared "all men are created equal."
But even if Romney had strayed into the revolutionary camp, it is a safe bet that he -- like the effete John Adams -- would have been ill at ease with real revolutionaries like Tom Paine. Unlike the "sunshine patriots" that he decried in The American Crisis, Paine was not satisfied with the casual reordering of society.
And that reordering would not have favored vulture capitalists.
It was Paine who argued, in his last great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, that taxation of the rich with an eye toward redistributing wealth should be seen as "an act of national justice."
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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
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