Newsitorials like this generally make me laugh, but there may be a reason for this:
By any measure, Mr. Romney, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is a master pitchman and presenter, bred in politics (his father, George, was the governor of Michigan), enriched in business and battle-tested in the Republican pariah colony of Massachusetts. He is relentlessly upbeat (“I’m feeling incredibly optimistic about our future,” he says at campaign events.) His polished “presidential bearing” has been marveled upon, a package of great hair, sleek suits and dreamy smiles well matched to podiums and magazine covers.
But can he connect with voters? While he is climbing in the polls, some people who have seen him close up at recent events describe him as impressive but somewhat detached. He struggles at times to convey a sense that he is an accessible mortal — that he can be spontaneous, that he bears scars and can appreciate at gut-level the struggles of ordinary Americans.
“He doesn’t really seem to be like the rest of us,” said Denis Joyal, a machinist from Belmont, N. H., who heard Mr. Romney at an American Legion hall in Alton, N.H. He called the candidate “sort of high-class” and “a little too perfect.”
I dunno. Maybe spending a year flip-flopping on any and every issue depending on the audience has him a little disjointed. That is an awful lot to juggle, and could lead to a touch of detachment
Rome Again
Yeah, because everyone knows, it’s the suit that makes the man.
This is all it takes to be President these days?
jake
Did someone really say that Romney has a nice package?
Thank goodness, we wouldn’t want a catcher for president.
But seriously folks WTF does this mean?
Does this mean Mass. is a colony of Republican pariahs or does it mean the writer is so smitten with Mittens that he can’t think straight?
Huh? Wait.
OK. I checked a few other stories by Leibovich and it appears he’s just a snarky bastard.
Rome Again
If I remember correctly, when I was a child and asked what a politician was, the definition I got as “someone who will say anything to anyone to get elected” or something close to that.
Perhaps the only way we’ll find out how Mitt actually feels about anything is to throw him in front of two opposing groups (say Christianists and the Have-Mores) and see whose contributions he chases after. We’ll at least know at that point who he feels is more important to his career.
This I think is a problem we’ve seen recently, with GOP picked audiences for Bush town-halls, they all basically believed the same thing, first on the list was “Bush is God’s spokesman”.
ThymeZone
What RA is saying.
Fuck.The.GOP.
Fuck it and its voters and the horses they rode in on, very much, with prejudice.
Tsulagi
Vote Mitt Romney, a man of
hisyour convictions with good hair. Sounds like a winning theme.Looking forward to the next Pub debate. Last one he said he’d double Gitmo. Got big applause. So with immigration likely to be in the next debate, you pretty much know the steely eyed lifelong varmint hunter’s solution. Not only would he build the fence, he’d make it twice as high. In fact, he’d build two fences! One behind the other.
The crowd? Those Prayze Jeezuss creationists will go batshit crazy in their cheering. They can count on Mitt to stay the course. Known truth.
Rome Again
Fixed! Sorry TZ, they’re not riding horses these days, at least not yet!
whatsleft
Is it wrong that I always think of Hymie from “Get Smart” when I see Mitt?
Bubblegum Tate
Time to make a series of attack ads to show that a flip-flopping, effete elitist from Massachussets like John Kerry Mitt Romney is in no way, shape, or form fit to lead the country, right, wingnuts?
Sirkowski
Will it be poetic justice if the Republicans chose a John Kerry clone for candidate?
demimondian
Naah — Mitt Romney bought his way out of Vietnam, unlike that coward Kerry, who actually served and was wounded.
grumpy realist
Wasn’t there some comment some time back about Romney during the debates giving the impression of “being a great hairdo with a pair of chattering teeth attached”?
Heck, I’d vote against him simply because of his total lack of respect for Massachusetts even when he was the head politico there. If it’s such an awful state, why didn’t he just RESIGN and LEAVE.
raj
battle-tested in the Republican pariah colony of Massachusetts
Say, what? I’ve been living in the Boston area since 1979. Republicans have held the governorship from Jan 1991 until Jan 2006 (Weld, Celluci, Smith, then Romney). If MA is a Republican pariah colony, it is because of Romney.
Weld in the early 1990s had enough Republicans in the state senate to sustain a veto. Romney didn’t when he came into office in 2002, but for the 2004 election, he invested millions of dollars to try to elect Republicans to the legislature. But, by that time, Romney had made himself so unpopular in the middle of his term as governor that he managed a net gain of minus three. They even lost Republican votes on the anti-same-sex-marriage amendment last Thursday–two Republican legislators in the Constitutional Convention switched from yes to no.
Keith
Everyone’s just jealous of his broad shoulders (that you could land a 737 on), manly chin, and supremely perfect hairdo. If only he had Fred Thompson’s voice, he’d be able to devour entire worlds and be known as…GALACTUS!
Chuck Butcher
I’m particularly impressed with his ability to remanufcture recent history (no inspectors in Iraq made us do it) and get off scot free
caustics
Not going to play well with base, I’m afraid. What they really want a plain-spoken, rough-around-the-edges, confrontational prick. It’s the sort of idealized template hate-radio and winger bloggers have imprinted into their tiny little brains as the Final Solution candidate.
So far Rudy fits the bill, but FT may turn out to be The Spoiler depending on a few breaks and how convincingly his newbie handlers can spin his pandering.
This is of course academic…no way in hell can the GOP win a gott-dam thing for the next 20 years at least.
Pb
Heh… why does this remind me of The Daily Show…
Bruce Moomaw
Every time I watch Romney, he reminds me unnervingly of those SF stories in which the Presidential candidate turns out to be a robot.
CaseyL
Romney’s such a classless bastard, trashing the state that elected him Governor.
I’m not sure what’s worse, if he’s telling the truth or just feeding bullshit to Wingnuttia because he knows they love the taste.
If he’s telling the truth, why did he want to be Governor of a state he hates so much?
If he’s lying to win the hearts of Wingnuttia, then what’s he going to do in the general election, if someone asks him how he feels about the 60-odd percent of Americans who don’t want more of the Bushist-style divisiveness he’s selling? Either he says, yes, he really does despise most of the country; or he says, gosh no, he just said that to get the troglydites in the GOP to support him. (And if no reporter asks him, the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, can have a lot of fun doing so.)
srv
How do Mormons Triangulate?
They’ve forgotten how to, since it’s illegal now.
mclaren
Translation: When he puts his classified ad in the BSDM gay sex paper, he advertises himself as “Superb top prefers leather boy for fun or??? I pitch, you catch.” A pitchman indeed.
Counting down to relevation of Mitt Romney’s decades-long crystal meth addiction while romping with underage gay hookers in…3…2…1…
Mitt Romney is a strong candidate. Unfortunately, smell isn’t everything.
Tulkinghorn
People in Massachusetts did not hate Romney. They just ignored him. There is no greater contempt than that.
ATS
Kind of a mixture of windbaggy William McKinley and jut-jawed Steve Garvey.
Romney is just a hole in the air.
The Other Steve
you guys be quiet. I want the Republicans to nominate Romney. It’ll be great fun.
Hell, actually it’s going to be great fun no matter which candidate they run.
ThymeZone
Great point, good post.
And the answer to the question, of course, is that first and foremost, like most of the “candidates” we are looking at these days, he’s an opportunist first, and always.
The thing I’m looking forward to in 2008 is how the party that sold its soul to the devil of diviseveness, and pimped the idea that America’s true enemies were its own citizens, fares when all those chickens come home to roost. Will Americans decide that despising other Americans really is the pinnacle of Americanism? Well, they might, and they might just decide that the ones they despise are the despisers, the Republicans.
“ . . . Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”-Gal. 6:7.
Yeah, baby. Reap time.
Rome Again
TZ is quoting Bible scriptures? OMG, look out everyone, Armageddon is surely come.
Rome Again
They’ll “tri” anything.
Look at Warren Jeffs, that Mormon who ended up behind bars recently for arranging polygamous marriages between older men and minor girls, and was also accused of having sex with minor girls himself. He was still doing it, even if it is “illegal”.
I saw an interview with one old man who he arranged a marriage for, the guy was saying Jeffs was a great credit to the faith.
George B.
Never underestimate the Democratic capacity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, though.
Ted
Agreed. Romney appears to be running Operation VaccuSuck.
Also agreed. A Romney candidacy would be hilarious.
Bubblegum Tate
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Tax Analyst
Well, yes…it could happen – a lot more easily than any of us wish, too…although it’s still very early what I’m seeing in the polls is that for all the well-deserved enmity that the Republican Party has built-up with the general voting populace…on the face of these it appears that a Democrat would win in a landslide…that is until you actually attach a name and a person to that “Democrat” designation…at that point it appears that all the mountains of over-cooked Anti-Hillary Right-Wing noise has taken a subliminal effect and people start consider Rudy G as though he weren’t an even bigger potential authoritarian martinet than our current “Decider”. Now Hillary might not be my first choice either, but I do not believe we would be riding hand-baskets to Hell if she were to be elected…and I do not believe she would be anywhere near as reckless, feckless, dismissive and indifferent to the current and future well-being of the general populace as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al or any of the current “leading” Republicans appear to be. It bothers me that the media seems to accept “Double-Gitmo Anti-Evolution” pandering as a policy equivalent to the positions, however incomplete they might currently be, of the Democratic Party candidates. Whatever faults the various Democratic ideas have they at least SEEM to be trying to address a situation that has been mismanagement and bungled so completely that asking for an acceptable “solution” would be laughable if it weren’t so God-damned fucking tragic and sad. So, when you read about Hillary being “calculating” what are you to think? “Calculating”…as opposed to…what? If the answer is “Unthinking” or “Knee-jerk hot-button sound bites”, or just plain “Moronic” or the apparently more fashionable “Totally Detached From Reality”…I’m thinking “Calculating” doesn’t look so bad…as long as the “Calculating” isn’t solely about getting elected and then maintaining power, which, by the way, appears to be the only “Calculating” the current Administration has ever given a flying-fuck enough about to ever do.