SUNDAY FEATURE: ROMNEY REFLECTS ON THREE YEARS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

On August 26 2012, then-candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were profiled in Parade Magazine,  on subjects ranging from their Mormon faith to Mitt’s seemingly stunted emotional range. Speaking of their practice of tithing, the future First Lady shared with interviewer Lynn Sherr:

“When Mitt and I give that check, I actually cry.”

 “So do I,” Mitt quipped in trademark fashion, “but for a different reason.”

 Three years later, President Romney follows up with Parade in this essay, reflecting on the country’s progress in the Romney-Ryan Era:

Looking Back: A President Glances Over His Shoulder

As my first term comes to a close, I think of how the nation has changed and grown, and about the progress we’ve made by turning back the clock, to a time before “progressive” ideas like stem cell research, and regulated industries, and women’s suffrage took hold of our nation.

It’s sobering to recall what life was like during the Hell-storm of Democrat-enforced social freedoms that preceded me.

Back then, women were accessing birth control and getting raped and having abortions without a second thought. For many, it was like buying shoes, or going to the dentist. In fact, if women had been as enthusiastic about regular dental visits as they were about getting raped and having abortions, gingivitis would be a thing of the past.

Today, after 3 years with the Romney Ryan management team, I can proudly say that unwanted pregnancies are booming. We owe a big part of this growth to arbitrary limitations on access to birth control, as well as the fact that women are denied legal abortions under any circumstance. And although some children may be unplanned or painfully unwanted, these beautiful surprises can go on to become a president or a playwright or severely disabled with no hope of a meaningful existence free from pain.

I also recall the plight of our senior citizens under the previous big government administration. Our aging population was seeking medical care at an unprecedented rate, and eating freely, contributing to an epidemic of elder-obesity. Now, thanks to elimination of food assistance programs and rapid dismantling of the Medicare system, seniors are living shorter, less nourished lives, free from the control of government-imposed body-mass recommendations.

Finally, I look at the heart of America. When we shredded the social safety net strangling our nation, we released the hunger and desperation waiting in all of us, but hobbled by the threat of a progressive tax structure similar to the one that cursed us in our darkest economic hour–the 1950s. At last, we have come together in a spirit of powerful and avaricious resignation, a sense that each of us is in it for ourselves, because we can’t count on anyone for anything.

Thanks to the Romney-Ryan Plan for a New America, we are richer in our poverty, more secure in our paranoia, and more united in our intolerance.

Thank you, and may God and GlaxoSmithKline Pharma bless you.