Romney: Right now, with the kinds of issues we got in this country, I’m not going to get involved with a flag like that. That’s not a flag that I recognize so that I would hold up in my room.
The people of our country have decided not to fly that flag. I think that’s the right thing.
(Applause)
My own view is that this country can go beyond that kind of stuff, and that instead we can do as a party what we need to do, which is to reach out to all Americans.
Every time I listen to someone like John Edwards get on TV and say there are two Americans, I just want to — I just want to throw something at the TV, because there are not two Americas. There’s one America.
We are a nation united. We face extraordinary challenges right now. And Democrats dividing us and tearing down this country are doing exactly the wrong thing.
We’re succeeding in Iraq. We’ve got tough challenges. We can overcome them. But we do not need to have that kind of divisive talk. And that flag, frankly, is divisive, and it shouldn’t be shown.
Cooper: Governor Thompson? Excuse me, Senator Thompson? Maybe one day.
Thompson: I know that everybody who hangs the flag up in their room like that is not racist. I also know that for a great many Americans it’s a symbol of racism.
So, therefore, as a public place — he’s free to do whatever he wants to in his home. As far as a public place is concerned, I am glad that people have made the decision not to display it as a prominent flag, symbolic of something, at a state capitol. As a part of a group of flags or something of that nature, you know, honoring various servicepeople at different times in different parts of the country, I think that’s different.
But, as a nation, we don’t need to go out of our way to be bringing up things that to certain people in our country that’s bad for them.
Thank you, Gov. Romney. You may sit down now. Thanks for coming out.
I was disappointed in Sen. Thompson's reply, however. He should have spoken to The New York Times and the NAACP (starting with Kweisi Mfume, who came in to pick up the pieces at the NAACP after all their internal scandals and demoralization) about their using someone else's symbol as a hate-puppet and a bloody-shirt issue, to chum up the black Democratic vote.
Sen. Thompson might have better replied that it was simply a diversionary "bloody-shirt" issue.
He need not have added, either, that the whole purpose of the Confederate flag issue is to try to split conservative Republicans living in the upper Midwest -- in the battleground states -- from conservative Southern Republicans.
Split the conservative vote and get 'em to stay home, and bring black voters to the polls with phantasmagoric visions of lynchings and George Wallace working a crowd of "crackers" -- that is exactly what that issue is about.