His greatest passion is something he’s determined to keep secret.
By Frank Rich
Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.”
Here we are in 2012, and nothing has changed. What Romney’s former colleague observed of the young Mitt at close range decades ago could stand as the judgment of most Americans watching him at a cable-news remove now. That’s why his campaign has so often been on the ropes. That’s why, in a highly polarized nation, the belief that Romney is a phony may be among the very last convictions still bringing left, right, and center together. As a focus-group participant evocatively told pollster Peter Hart in November, Romney reminded him of the “dad who’s never home.” Nonetheless, this phantom has spent most of the campaign as the “presumed” front-runner for his party’s nomination. Amazingly, this conventional wisdom held up throughout 2011, even though 75 percent of Romney’s own party was searching so frantically for an alternative that Donald Trump enjoyed a nanosecond bump in the polls.
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Who is Mitt Romney?
ReplyDeleteGood question, but who the heck are the rest of them?
This whole GOP primary process is depressing for conservatives.
Some days I think the country is so far gone financially, culturally, and morally that it almost does not matter who gets elected president.
My mind tells me that this is not the case, but often times the heart thinks it is.
This GOP primary reminds me of a psychological experiment where the experimenters frustrate and confuse the lab rats to see at what point they break down and just become passive. Is that what's afoot?
Or is it a play directed by the ruling liberal elite to divide and conquer the traditionalists?
More and more Ephesians 6:12 comes to mind: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."