There will not be a Republican politician like Romney again, the pundits keep saying, and as far as I’m concerned this is not much of a loss. Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney was a bog-standard GOP Business Representative born a generation too late. Apart from a few belated spasms concerning Trump’s distastefully parvenu behavior, his voting record was indistinguishable from the GOP mean (in every sense of the term). He’s certainly old enough to retire while he can enjoy bullying just his extended family, and if my closest work colleague was Mike Lee(… roy Jenkins!), I’d quit too.
I never will get past how Willard deliberately ran against his only real achievement in government.
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 14, 2023
But let’s hear from another and far more eloquent Masshole:
… Politics has been such a disappointment to Mitt Romney. There always are so many…people involved.
He ran against Ted Kennedy, and those…people turned him down. He became governor of Massachusetts, passed a health-care law, and then tried to muscle Republicans into the state legislature only to have…people return more Democrats than were in there before. So, having lost interest in his day job, he ran for president in 2008, only to incur the profound dislike of his fellow candidates and the resounding loathing of the…people in general. In 2012, he thought he had it won only to have those…people deny him his rightful place at the pinnacle of power. Then came Trump, and Mitt Romney lost all hope in common humanity and got elected to the Senate from Utah, where he at least voted for both impeachments of the former president*. Now, he leaves the scene secure in the wisdom that has guided his entire public career — that there are two kinds of Americans: Him, and Everybody Else.
He was as maladroit a public politician as I’ve ever seen. And it took me while to realize that it wasn’t a lack of natural skills that accounted for that, it was the fact that Romney decided never to learn them. He was rich and he was handsome and he was the son of a beloved liberal Republican, and that was always enough to insulate him from the grubbier aspects of his chosen hobby. And he could always walk away.
This time, of course, he has legitimate reasons for walking away. He’d be over 80 by the time his next term was over, and his re-election campaign was going to be tougher due to his public opposition to the former president*. It was going to require some serious retail politics, and the Romneys haven’t paid retail for generations. But he will stand in history as a great missed opportunity. He had a lot of the wherewithal needed to keep the Republican Party from itself, if he only cared enough to do it.
Mitt Romney being marginally less awful than his Republican colleagues—whom even a spineless empty suit like him finds abhorrent—does not detract from the fact that he is a shitty person.
“Biden can’t lead, Trump won’t.” Screw this purposeless patrician hack. https://t.co/NRYLG6RICM
— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) September 14, 2023
Annie Karni, at the NYTimes — “Six Takeaways From Romney’s Tea-Spilling Biography”:
… Publicly, Mr. Romney has long been on an island in a party subsumed by Trumpism. Privately, he reveals, many of his colleagues, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longtime Republican leader, are actually on the same page when it comes to his dim view of Donald J. Trump.
“Almost without exception,” Mr. Romney told Mr. Coppins, “they shared my view of the president.”
Mr. Romney kept a tally of his colleagues who approached him to privately express solidarity when he publicly criticized Mr. Trump, often saying they envied his ability to air his views. At one point, he told his staff, the list reached more than a dozen.
Mr. Romney also recalled a 2019 visit Mr. Trump made to the weekly Senate Republican lunch in the Capitol. The senators gave the president a standing ovation and were attentive and encouraging during his remarks about what he called the “Russia hoax.” They nodded when he said the G.O.P. would be known as “the party of health care” after they moved on from impeachment. But as soon as Mr. Trump left the room, the senators all burst out laughing…
Mr. Romney, who unsuccessfully sought the presidency twice, was tempted to make a third run in 2024, this time to mount a kind of anti-Trump, kamikaze mission possible only for a politician with nothing to lose.
“I must admit, I’d love being on the stage with Donald Trump … and just saying: ‘That’s stupid. Why are you saying that?’ ” Mr. Romney said. He dropped the idea once he realized the project would only help ensure another Trump victory.
He then toyed with forming a new political party with Senator Joe Manchin III, the centrist Democrat from West Virginia. His working slogan for it was “stop the stupid,” and he saw the goal not as running a likely doomed third-party candidate, but as endorsing “whichever party’s nominee isn’t stupid,” Mr. Romney explained. It is not clear if the plan has moved beyond the back-of-the-envelope stage…
(Spoiler: No way in Mormon Gehenna is Mitt Romney spending any significant amount of time with Joe Manchin, ugh.)
They seem to forget who is the real Willard Mitt Romney. Mr "Binders full of women" & "47% of Americans love free stuff" is the same as the people in his party. He pushed self deportation as his immigration policy. He's does his dirty works with more "class" and in secret.
— King Tampon I™ (@AfricanPrincess) September 14, 2023
So did Sen. Romney share this account with the January 6th Committee, who spent a year doggedly piecing together what happened on 1/6 and in the days & week’s prior? How is it courageous or responsible to withhold this info from your congressional colleagues investigating this? https://t.co/tA8gJsf8oS
— Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) September 14, 2023
“We turned to racism and fascism because you guys were mean to a multimillionaire who called half the country “worthless”” is not the argument you think it is.
— ?? (@jackfishemoji) September 15, 2023
Interestingly, Republicans deciding that they are entitled to the presidency and to special treatment they'd never extend to others to such a degree that they opted for trying to break Constitutional democracy while rationalizing it as someone else's fault is also the criticism. https://t.co/IP21HFqsDJ
— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) September 15, 2023
Republicans talk about the 2012 election like "we stifled our demons once and offered you a relatively decent human being and you scoffed at our generosity, you gave us no choice but to become irredeemable fascists, hope you're happy."
— Not up for trouble, please stop asking (@agraybee) September 15, 2023
The part of Romney’s final speech that landed with a thud for me was when he tried to “both sides” it with Biden and Trump. As far as I know, Manchin and Synema haven’t had to pay for round the clock security because they’re afraid rabid Joe Biden fans will murder them https://t.co/NDUaUkSiUK
— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) September 14, 2023
There’s something very morbidly funny about the fact that towards the end of his Senate career, Romney preferred to work with colleagues he saw as sincerely insane over those who were cynically faking insanity pic.twitter.com/oymvrXKgRI
— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) September 13, 2023
it is always strange to me when people's reason for believing a politican "honourable" boils down to "they knew what they were saying and doing were wrong, but did it anyway because they wanted to win".
— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 14, 2023
AlaskaReader
There is not one Republican who has any redeeming value.
Citizen Alan
I feel terribly sad when I think about George Romney, perhaps the last Republican to run for President who I might have voted for, looking down from whatever afterlife he’s in … and feeling utterly humiliated by the man his son grew up to be.
Odie Hugh Manatee
George Romney was loved by many at American Motors and yet the company failed him. That’s the lesson son Mitt took to heart as a child. This led him into a career of buying up American companies, burying them in debt, screwing over the suppliers/vendors/workers and then cashing out, leaving the wreckage in his wake.
I think his own father would disown him now.
Msb
“And he could always walk away.”
and that’s just what he did. Point out a serious danger that he had unique advantages to combat – and then take his ball and go home. The gutlessness of R men is amazing. Only Liz Cheney has stood and fought.
Viva BrisVegas
Wasn’t Romney eager to rush to a grovelling audition for the role of Secretary of State for Trump, only to have Trump publicly burn him so badly even I felt slightly sorry for him?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Msb:
I’m pretty sure that testing will show that Liz Cheney has more testosterone than every single male Republican in congress.
Combined.
ETA: Word is that Sen. Floating Mansion (Disgusting-WV) is pushing to reinstate the Senate dress code. Gotta look good when starving kids!
Betty Cracker
History is written by the victors, and the fate of our republic is uncertain. But Romney was the last pre-Trump Repub nominee, which is the most notable thing about him, and his dithering responses to Trumpism are uniquely emblematic of his party’s weakness.
There are/were worse people — discarded true believers like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, cowardly converts like Ted Cruz, amoral power mongers like Mitch McConnell and craven weathervanes like Lindsey Graham.
But Romney saw the danger, articulated it, and then…wimped out. Over and over. His pained expression in that 2016 dinner photo with Trump, the latter’s leering visage transformed by candlelight into a modern portrait of Mephistopheles, is Romney’s rightful legacy.
So it’s fitting that his career ends on another missed opportunity to serve the republic. He could have stood in the well of the Senate and denounced the cult that is breaking the country. But instead he handed off journals to Coppins and called Biden and Trump too old, as if their age is the goddamn problem.
In conclusion, fuck off, Mitt.
piratedan
cripes these guys…. and Romney is the ethical paragon of the party?
so is the best the GOP can do…. Neutral Evil Romney, Lawful Evil Liz Cheney and Choatic Evil DJT?
it would be nice if they actually thought of us as people
p.a.
I believe Mitt did better in the Pres vote in NYC than TIFG did. Nobody knows tRump better than New Yorkers, and they preferred a Utah Mormon empty suit business-parasite to the Orange Shitstain.
mrmoshpotato
@Betty Cracker: Bravo.
Pittsburgh MIke
Great summary.
To me, the clearest evidence that Romney was an old style “give the rich more money” Republican came from his 47% comment, and his turn against his own health care act in Massachusetts.
If you just listen to the tape of his 47% comment, you realize that he truly believes what he said: that nearly half of all Americans, the lowest paid at that, don’t deserve even the meager wages they earn. IRL, you don’t need great powers of observation to realize that the people at the bottom of the economic ladder are pushed around by the government and their employers to a degree that Mittens has never experienced, whether it is uncertain part time hours, lack of benefits like health insurance, or generally inflexible work places, turning even something as simple as a car not starting into an unemployment risk.
Romney also ran against the ACA, even though he was definitely smart enough to recognize how well virtually the same plan worked in Mass. Even today, with the ACA, states like NY and CA have uninsured rates of 5.2% and 8% respectively, while in MA, the rate is 2.9%.
Romney’s willingness to make health insurance harder to obtain, given he knows how well ACA-like program work, pretty much comes from either cowardice in the face of Republican loathing of the ACA, or greed in the face of the ACA’s 3.8% tax boost for capital gains. In either case, it’s pretty despicable.
mrmoshpotato
@piratedan:
What do you think we are – corporations?
LiminalOwl
@Odie Hugh Manatee: It would be so nice if people would stop attributing male biology to women, when the intention is to celebrate the women’s strength/courage/etc. (Yes, I know that female bodies also contain androgens, albeit in typically smaller amounts. To that extent, I suppose attributing “testosterone” is better than ”testicles.” But the cultural connotations are still the same.)
Geminid
@Msb: I’m not sure Liz Cheney did anything Adam Kinzinger didn’t. She just had a more famous name because of her father.
Cheney definitely excited more fury from the Republican right, though. Some of that is because of her father. A lot of these radicals have retrospectively disowned Dick Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration.
The Cheney-hatred is also greater because she is a woman. That’s one reason I think Kinzinger could still have a political future while Cheney does not, besides him being younger and a veteran.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
“Let Detroit go bankrupt.”
“I like being able to fire people!”
“Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process, let it run its course and hit the bottom.”
“The banks aren’t bad people, they’re just overwhelmed, right now.”
“Banks are scared to death, of course. They are feeling the same
thing you’re feeling.”
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
“If I were elected and were Congress to pass the Dream Act, would I veto it.”
“self-deportation.”
“We went to the company and we said, ‘Look, you can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake! I can’t have illegals.’ ”
Described his 3,000 square foot, beach front mansion, valued at 12 million dollars, as “very small”.
“The trees are the right height [in Michigan].”
“You can focus on the very poor — that’s not my focus.”
mrmoshpotato
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Stop trying to make Mittens look as repulsive as the rest of the GOP by using his own words!
Oh wait. Sorry about that. He is! Carry on!
Baud
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
I’ll give him the trees. They’re perfect.
Baud
@Geminid:
She was co-chair of the committee. She had a more prominent role.
LiminalOwl
I have probably said this before, but it bears repeating: An aspect of “Romneycare” that nobody seems to remember is that Mitt tried very, very hard to get the MA state legislature to exclude all psychiatric meds from coverage. (They refused to cooperate, thank goodness.)
This was promoted as a cost-saving measure (spoiler alert: it wouldn’t have been; psych meds are costly, but hospitalization far more so). But LDS church theology says mental illness is a result of/punishment for sin, so I am thinking hard about my patients who called Romney’s office to comment and were told “well, if your meds are important to you, you can pay out of pocket.”
Romney has always been a Dominionist. I think Mormons often fly under the radar on this because they are less numerous, and less noisy about this, than mainstream evangelical and Catholic fascists.
Geminid
@Baud: Sure, but one reason Cheney got that role was the political prominence of her family. If she had been Liz Jones, it might have been Kinzinger up there because he was a veteran.
Baud
@Geminid:
If her name were Liz Jones, I bet she would have ended up a lounge singer.
Matt McIrvin
It’s remarkable that even the “sane” conservatives think “look what you made us do” is anything other than abuser talk.
Tony Jay
Christ. Mitt frigging Romney and his outsourced, out of touch, out of ideas campaign to be anointed Most Successful Mormon Of All Time, that takes me back.
Too stiff to bend with the times, too weak to stand strong when needed, he was the Republican President only the News Media wanted when everyone else was either happy with the smart black dude or casting yearning eyes towards an empty podium marked with a Reserved For ‘He Who Will Lead Us In Hatred’ sign. As with every other figure on the Right of American politics he was a major part of making Trumpism possible and a minor roadblock when it finally came to town.
Fuck him.
Baud
I was really happy when Romney lost. Even more than in 2008.
hueyplong
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: If I recall correctly, on Jeopardy the first person who buzzed in on those quotes said, “Who is Andrew Mellon?”
The first day he fails to spend that $5000 on security, and only then,will he become a martyr.
trucmat
I spent about $800 back in 2012 on Google ads in battleground states that just said “Romney favors super-rich” and linked to a story about him calling Americans lazy on cbs.com. Got over 700k views. Didn’t care if people clicked through because I just wanted the headline on their page.
Baud
@trucmat:
Awesome.
Geminid
@Baud: I wonder if anyone ever did a deep dive into Republican turnout in 2012 to see if there was an “undervote” among conservative evangelicals. I noticed that their leaders’ support of Romney was tepid in comparison to their more effusive praise for Trump four years later.
satby
@Betty Cracker: Just going to note my deep appreciation for this entire comment. Charlie Pierce level evisceration there, kudos.
Baud
@Geminid:
Good point.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Agree with @satby.
RandomMonster
Now the Republican Party has no reliable source of boxes and boxes of women.
satby
@Geminid: I’m sure they were unenthused voters, but Romney was the white candidate against a black President. I’d be surprised if there was an undervote. IIRC, Trump added new, disaffected voters to his total in 2016 while the 30 years of propaganda against Hillary added to the Russian disinfo campaign and general misogyny depressed votes for her. And she still won the popular vote anyway.
eversor
@LiminalOwl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse_Prophecy
The Mormons have a prophecy that when the constitution is about to fall one of them will assume power and save the US. To Romney that fall would be socialism. The only thing that differs between him and the other sects of Christianity that make up the GOP voting base is who’s going to be on the top.
What little compassion Mitten’s had came from the fact that his sect of that horrible ideology and cult was bullied by the other sects of that ideology and cult and run out of the country to Mexico. Don’t forget we also got Glenn Beck and Mike Lee out of that group. McMullen seems like a good enough guy though.
Mitt’s a tragic figure but the tragedy is all of his own making. Fucks like that are a dime a dozen. I know people that worked in consulting for DHS, proud liberals all, but when it came down to chosing a mid six figure pay check and enforcing Trumps ICE vs making less and not doing it they went to work and then donned their pink pussy hats after work and were the resistance.
trucmat
@Baud: Thanks. Except it was McCain in 2008. The two candidates seem to have merged in my apparently malfunctioning mind. Comment updated.
RandomMonster
@RandomMonster:
On edit: Rats, it was “binders full of women”.
satby
and AL up top: “… exits, stage right.”
Stephen Colbert’s writers would like some tips, if the strike ever ends.
Betty Cracker
@satby: & @Baud: Awww, thanks guys!
JML
This whole post is a delightful evisceration of a bog-standard right-wing hack, who only looks decent, honorable, and/or reasonable in comparison to the rest of the klown kar kompany running around in elected office as the Republican Party.
Would I rather have a bunch of Mitt Romneys in Congress? I supposed so, just based on the bare fact that you could probably prevent total meltdowns and might have something resembling basic functioning government. (Romney and his ilk could probably be persuaded to deal, especially if they could claim credit for something) At the same time, they’d be promoting dreadful, reactionary policies and constantly going after anything that would have helped anyone who wasn’t rich AF…and the moronic, disastrous, borderline treasonous DC media would be cheerleading for them the whole time as being “moderate compromises”.
No, I will not miss Mitt Romney, the epitome of the rich guy asshole. About the only thing he accomplishes to this point is helping keep up the facade that the GOP is anything but an extremist party that caters and enables the worst instincts and policies of its supporters.
mrmoshpotato
@RandomMonster: You found the error of your ways. Wish Mittens would too.
Geminid
@satby: I’m fairly sure that at least some evangelicals were unwilling to vote for a “Mormon,” despite their general affinity with his party and its policies. I was wondering how many, and if anyone had researched the question.
Betty
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Don’t forget the dog story.
EarthWindFire
Asking me about Mitt Romney vs. the rest of the GOP is like asking if I’d prefer death by sudden heart attack or by pancreatic cancer. I’d take sudden heart attack any day but I’d still be dead. Ultimately it’s a distinction without a difference.
BellyCat
@Betty Cracker: Upvoted as well. Some fine wordsmithing!
trnc
*To clarify, he signed a bill passed by the veto proof MA democratic legislature but vetoed several sections of it, only to have the legislature override the vetoes.
BellyCat
Romney cleary regrets his one success: healthcare improvements for Massachusetts.
EFG’em…
BellyCat
@trnc: This makes more sense. Did not know the actual history.
Anyway
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Amen. This is Mitt’s legacy.
Btw who is AGHamilton (tweet that complains he wasn’t treated well)? That is so lame.
eversor
@JML:
Well, we also have good Christians but since nobody is going to point out the flaw in that I’ll give Mitt a pass.
Chris
You know, this Big Lie is one of the most infuriating parts of Mitt’s legacy.
I was there in 2012. The media was completely in the tank for Romney. The only major pundit who predicted good news for Obama was Nate Silver, and he was pilloried in the entire media with things ranging from “yeah but Nate Silver’s a statistics nerd” to “yeah but Nate Silver’s a homo.” Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom was crap like “I feel like Romney’s going to win because I saw more lawn signs for him in my upscale neighborhood.”
I remember how absolutely shocked speechless every Republican I knew was in 2012. It’s not too much to say that they were just as stunned by 2012 as we were by 2016. And for good reason – everybody, and not just their own media, had been telling them for months that they had this in the bag. Despite the fact that unlike 2016, the polling was fairly clear for a long time, and there was nothing yet to indicate that it might become unreliable.
satby
@Geminid: Don’t know of any studies, and my gut sense is as unreliable as anyone elses’. But since the evangelicals setting up “Christian academies” to thwart desegregation in the 60s was a factor in their growth, I assume (and could be completely wrong) that “Caucasian” trumped “Mormon” in 2012.
And Hillary’s early law student work going undercover as an interested parent to expose the Christian academies as racist, not religious, probably boosted evangelical turnout against her.
Geminid
@satby: I think you are talking about conservative evangelicals as a group, but they do not all act the same. Anti-Mormon prejudice is very strong among some of them, and I’m not positing that some voted for Obama, but rather that some stayed home or left the Presidential line blank.
MisterDancer
Dude. It’s On Tape.
Netflix’s Mitt Documentary (direct link) starts with the campaign seeing the Election night 2012 projections that they lost. They didn’t prepare for it at all. Mitt has to ask “so how do you write a concession speech?” and “does anyone have the President’s phone number?”
They fully expected to win. The camera shows they expected to win. And yes, you’re right — we’ve collectively forgot this even happened this way, swept it under the rug of Forgetting Mitt Romney.
Chris
@Pittsburgh MIke:
The really revealing thing about Mitt Romney’s campaign isn’t just that he said things like the 47% comment, but that those were the only times when he ever seemed to come alive.
He was pathetic whenever he waded into the culture war stuff, whether it was to reassure the conservative base that he was a real teabagger, or to reassure general audiences that he wasn’t a real teabagger. He was incredibly stiff-assed and tone-deaf whenever he tried to reassure people that he felt their pain about the recession. And, of course, he was ridiculously awkward when it came to pressing the flesh with ordinary voters, the one thing politicians are supposed to be good at. Because he didn’t want to do any of that, and while he was smart enough to realize he had to, he also never stopped resenting having to put himself on display for the rabble like that.
But whenever you got him talking about economics and class and how unfair and unappreciative it is to the rich and how most of the plebs out there are too lazy and ungrateful to appreciate everything he does for them, then he’d finally light up. I’ve never seen him more earnest and sincere than when he’s explaining to his big donors that 47% of the country are lazy and worthless. You could tell it was something he really believed in and cared about. In the same way Ted Kennedy was really passionate about universal health care and John McCain was really passionate about bombing the Middle East, Mitt Romney was really passionate about giving the rich their proper due and putting the ungrateful plebs back in their place.
At the height of the worst economy since the Great Depression, Republicans decided to run Mitt Romney: Your Dickbag Boss.
tokyokie
I don’t like Mittens, but I’ll sadly acknowledge that every last one of his GOP Senate colleagues is even more dreadful. And although he failed to achieve the nation’s highest elected office, I’ve long believed his eyes have been upon another high office: president of the LDS church. The current occupant, Russell Wilson, will turn 100 in early January, and by deciding not to run for another term in the Senate, Mittens frees his calendar to work behind the scenes and line up support for the position when it comes open in the very near term.
Scout211
In California, the LDS church came out strong in their campaign for proposition 8 (banning same sex marriage). They did not fly under the radar at that time one bit, using all their members to actively campaign in their communities all over the state. They got seriously burned for it and public opinion of the church in California really deteriorated at the time.
After the proposition was overturned and same sex marriage started to become legal in more states and then nationwide, the LDS church leaders found ways to talk publicly about same sex marriage that seemed much more accepting (it really wasn’t). They just learned their lesson and have gone back to flying under the radar.
That’s Mitt Romney also. The affable fellow that looks and acts so nice is really an ideologue but keeps that under the radar. And his one strong public stand (voting to impeach TIFG) did not get him the results he expected (praise for his leadership) so he will retreat back under the radar and quietly let his biographer create that version of him—and he gets the praise for his leadership that he craves.
Ugh.
Chris
As far as him vs Trump go;
Like Trump, Romney is a guy whose single biggest achievement was being born.
Like Trump, Romney’s first contribution to American civics was using his privilege to dodge the draft so some kid from Harlem or Southie could go die in his place.
Like Trump, Romney, instead of picking a career that at least gave back to the country that allowed him such privilege in some way shape or form, built an entire career out of coming into a new business, completely wrecking it, going through its pockets for loose change, and then moving on to the next victim. The difference is that Trump only did this because he was lazy and incompetent. At Bain Capital, it was an actual business strategy.
And like Trump, Romney decided that this entire career as a blood-sucking parasite entitled him to be President of the United States.
Romney has far more in common with Trump than not. Like Dubya, he was a sign of things to come, a milestone on the road to where we are now rather than an off-ramp.
Geoduck
Over on Fark.com, one contributor wrote a fake letter from Romney, ending it with “Human Emotions, Mitt Romney”. Always thought that summed it up pretty well.
BellyCat
Should we request a wellness check?!?! ;-)
Geminid
@tokyokie: I would agree with you generally on your judgement of Republican Senators except for Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. She endorsed (and I believe campaign with) Democrat Mary Peltola in Alaska’s runoffs last year, and I can’t think of another Republican politician who would have done that.
But Alaska is a singular state and Murkowski is a singular politician. She won election as a write-in candidate in 2010, after losing the Republican primary to a right-wing challenger. Reports were that support from labor unions and Alaska’s Native Corporations made that possible.
JustRuss
Let’s not forget that Romney 2012 employed a lot of lying, although he’s not in Trump’s league so it’s easy to forget how bad he was.
As far as Pierce’s critique about running away from his “achievement in government”, the only achievement Republican voters support is punishing sluts and the poors, of course he ran away from it.
RaflW
Romney sitting in that restaurant back in 2016, looking like a sheepish, whupped man as he interviewed for a Trump cabinet position is still seared in my mind’s eye. He may have held a fantasy notion that if he got in the admin, he’d hold some line, but it was telling that he’d even consider such a thing.
LiminalOwl
@Scout211: Great points, thank you. I had left California before the time of Prop 8, so I was less aware.
And I hadn’t meant for my comment to be primarily about the LDS, but got cut off in editing. My main point was that when people talk about Romney as “decent,” I remember his eagerness to cut people with mental health issues off from medication as well as his gleeful account of torturing his dog Seamus. The mask of decncy slipping to reveal the fundamental sadism.
Chris
@LiminalOwl:
For me it’s the Benghazi smirk I think back to, though having a career FSO father certainly helps me there.
There’s something deeply ugly, like “kid frying ants with a magnifying glass” ugly, buried under that guy’s Mormon Nice Guy facade and all the Very Moderate Statesman media fluff. But then I suppose that’s true of all of them. Nobody makes it that high in Republican politics without it.