Deconstructing Romney

Mitt Romney has a problem. Apparently Obama’s health care act looks a lot like the plan he implemented in the state of Massachusetts. In fact, Obama admits to ‘modeling’ Romney’s program. This makes Romney look like he’ll be less effective helping Republicans repeal Obama’s health care act. I think this is a real problem. He can either stand by his past actions or back away and appear shifty. Recently however, I’ve heard several republican loyalists defend Romney by accusing Obama of ‘stealing’ the idea. Now I don’t believe this is a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue. I think what I’m hearing is a native function of human memory. We retain our own interpretation of events better than actual events. Psychologists say that memory is more of a ‘heuristic’ than ‘algorithmic’ process. It tends to follow the rules of predicate logic, which are looser than those of Cartesian logic. So I looked at how the Romney defense plays out in terms of predicate logic:

Notice where the terms ‘principle’ and ‘democrat’ appear on the network path. For sake of efficiency, I believe memory often drops what’s at the periphery and focuses on the primary action (i.e. model). From there it’s a short step to re-interpret the action ‘modeling’ as ‘stealing’ and forget it’s a democrat ideology to begin with. As crazy as this may sound, it makes Romney’s actions appear much more consistent with republican loyalties. I’m not playing partisan politics here. I believe members of both major parties rationalize events this way.