Blog: Playing 'King of the Hill' is a Rough and Tumble Game

And I had the black and blue marks to prove it, in that children’s game. The object of which is to stay on top of a large hill or pile, while other players attempt to knock the current King off of it.

Ordinarily, pushing is the most common way of doing it, but there are rougher variations where punching or kicking is allowed.

And I can recall instances when fair play included pulling off the shoes of others and pulling hair in scrambling to reach the top.

The name of that game has become a metaphor for any sort of competitive activity, such as that currently underway among the wannabe nominee for president in the Republican Party.

Now, while Mitt Romney reigns as the King of the Hill going into the battle royal within the Republican Party and conservative movement in South Carolina, he could still be toppled from his lofty position by a series of gaffes and overconfidence by believing he’s already the de facto nominee, no matter how ferociously those biting at his heels may wound him there and in upcoming primaries.

And given that state is known for its anything goes in its negative ads campaigns, and has been the graveyard for many frontrunners-a la presidential candidate Sen. Mc Cain, who after winning handily in New Hampshire, suffered a crushing defeat there to G. W. Bush, due in large part to the scurrilous accusations hurled at him by unscrupulous sources, like alleging that he had fathered rather than adopted a black child, or that he was “off his rocker” as a result of his imprisonment in Vietnam.  

But perhaps the biggest hurdle he has to overcome if he is to remain in the “cat-bird seat” are the charges of his doing more flip-flops from his earlier positions-on abortion rights, stem cell research, gay rights, gun rights, and universal health care-than Olympic gymnasts ever do in the floor exercises competition.

And therein reveals the glaring differences between him and his father, George Romney, who also went from the boardroom to the presidential campaign trail.

For he was a hard-core centrist, who as his former campaign aide Keith Molin said of him, that he “never tacked back to the right and faced charges of flip-flopping as his son has.”

But then again, as writer Roberto Loiederman points out in the op-ed page of the Jan. 5 edition of the Baltimore Sun, that “Mitt Romney has changed his prior moderate views on hot-button issues because it would have been political suicide not to do so.”

He then goes on to say, “that whereas George Romney showed courage in changing his pro-war stance on the Vietnam War-claiming that military brass had brainwashed him into believing rosy predictions about its successful conclusion-his son has taken the expedient route by telling voters what he thinks they want to hear.”

That he chose to do an about-face on his heretofore stated principles reminds me of several apt quotes:

“The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.” (W. Summerset Maugham)

”The moral losses of expediency far outweight the temporary gains.” (Wendel Wilkie)

”Expedients are for the hour, principles for the ages.” (Henry Ward Beecher)