Is the silent majority really alive and well?

  Republican operative Mark Weaver, Mitt Romney's lawyer in Ohio, joined the few wagon-circlers that formed in the debris of the candidate's attack on President Obama over the violence in Libya and Egypt with a spin that I haven't  heard in political talk for years.   At an Akron Press Club luncheon, he said Mitt was merely saying what the "silent majority believes."

There it is. Silent majority - the term that fell from Richard Nixon's lips back in the darkest of ages.

After the session,  I asked Weaver to clarify his  response to Romney's widely criticized intrusion into foreign policy at the height of an international  crises.

I should have known better. He shrugged off the critics as representing the "liberal media" That's a dog-eared-term kept alive by the Mark Weavers of the world when no other useful explanation serves their side.

So I mention, um, Peggy Noonan , the Wall Street Journal columnist and  once the speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who accused Romney of "not doing himself any  favors" with his bluster.

He dismissed her, too.  "Peggy Noonan is part of the Republican establishment," he sniffed.

Sorry, Mark.  We miss so  much living way out here in ihe Akron area.



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