How Mitt Dodged the Draft

May 1966.  Mitt Romney is just finishing his first—and only—year at Stanford.

About a quarter of a million young American men are already being abducted each year to fight the rapidly-escalating Vietnam War.  Many college students, however, are protected by their 2S student deferments, which blatantly discriminate against all those millions of other young men unable to afford college.

Since the 2S deferment is contingent on relatively high class rank (meaning, of course, academic class rank), they argue that this unfairly discriminates against some of the “best” students, i. e., all those attending schools like Stanford.  A man in the bottom quarter at an elite university might end up being drafted, even though he might be more “intelligent” than a man in the top quarter of some state college.

Enter young Mitt Romney, right on cue, waving a sign denouncing the anti-war students.   He, like his fellow almost all-male participants in this pro-war demonstration, fervently argued in support of the war and the draft.  But not, of course, for himself.

Although the Selective Service Exam radically reduced the chances of college men, especially those with the test-taking skills of most Stanford students, to be conscripted into the Vietnam War, it was no guarantee of long-lasting deferment.  There were other, surer, escapes from the Vietnam nightmare.   One of the very best was the ministry. 

So instead of returning to Stanford, Mitt went off to become a Mormon missionary in France, where he would spend the next two and a half years—while Vietnam became a slaughterhouse for the Vietnamese and many Americans drafted to slaughter them.

So who says that Mitt Romney is inconsistent?  After all, what may have been his first recorded public political act was supporting the draft for ordinary Americans, forcing them to participate in a war waged in the interest of his own class.