Yawn. Willard Mitt Romney.
At a time defined by political gridlock, there’s one thing on which it seems most Democrats and Republicans can agree: it’s easier to get excited about a pile of rocks than it is Mitt Romney’s run for president. Sure, there have been a few moments that managed to transfer some Americans’ attention from their sinking net worth and mounting debts to the Republican race for the American presidency (re: Newt Gingrich’s Dickens-esque advocation of handing poor children mops to teach them the values of hard work; the advent of the Santorum sweater vest; Rick Perry’s inability to count to three, et al.), but very few—if any—of them had anything to do with Mitt Romney.
Despite blazing the majority of his primary campaign trail as a frontrunner (a status which, given his bottom-of-the-barrel competition and staggering amounts of spending should have been a lot easier than it actually was), Mitt Romney still failed to resonate with a formidable chunk of his party’s voting base. Said failure could be the inevitable result of Americans being more concerned with potential home foreclosures than the empty ho-hums of an overly-polished and out-of-touch multimillionaire. It could also be a sign of a population disenchanted with the constipated state of the GOP and American politics in general. Or maybe it’s just some sad combination of both. But either way you slice it, it probably doesn’t help that no one can get a good gauge on who Mitt Romney actually is. Not that anyone wants to. Plainly speaking, it’s not only that people find Mitt Romney incredibly boring—the man’s just not very likable.
On the left, Romney’s emergence to the presidential scene represented not only a consequence of free-market capitalism and a political party in decline but also a reminder that—despite how many grimaces and groans his ‘humorous’ attempts at relating to middle America elicited—the results of this election may very well determine the fate of the middle class for the foreseeable future. The liberal focus, then, wasn’t so much on Mitt Romney the fleshy snore as it was the easily manipulated (and broken) system that bore him such exorbitant amounts of wealth and political power in the first place.
Meanwhile, conservatives wearily accepted Romney’s presumed nomination as a fait accompli. Simply put, they had no one else. All they had was the guy who, despite his big business credentials and Koch stamp of approval, more or less gave Obama his big “socialist” idea for his own version of affordable healthcare. The guy who refused to endorse the Bush tax cuts in 2003. The guy who, when asked his thoughts on US immigration policy in 2006, said that “the 11 million or so that are here [illegally] are not going to be rounded up and box-carted out.” The guy whose political record as a Republican drew a stark contrast to today’s strand of über-conservatism. As Newt Gingrich branded into everyone’s minds so early on in the primary season, Mitt Romney just wasn’t one of them. In fact, he was nothing more than a Massachusetts moderate—and not even an interesting one at that.
Nevertheless, both parties have pressed on shaking their heads at the same man neither of them can seem to trust. The shared leeriness is pretty warranted, though. There are the tales of Romney’s ostensibly homophobic bullying in high school. The surfeit of creepiness covering the gaping hole where his charisma should be (behold Romney’s rendition of ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ featured above, a cover so awkward even Michael Cera would blush). Then there’s the whole dressing-as-a-cop-to-prank-your-friends’-dates thing and the pro-war draft dodging. And now there’s chatter about Romney’s latest political problem: retroactive retirement.
If some of the stories above pan out to be true after their complexities are hammered out, their legal implications could sprinkle Romney’s life story with some unwanted public trust issues. After all, if convicted of impersonating a cop in California and Michigan (the states in which it’s alleged he did just that) more than once in each respective state, that’s considered a felony. And perjuring oneself—what some believe Romney did via his under oath statements regarding his cloudy ties to Bain Capital after he left in 1999 to run that year’s Winter Olympics—is punishable with up to five years in prison if convicted.
Yet in spite of all the intrigue that typically accompanies an attractive politician’s alleged lying under oath, Romney still has a hard time garnering an iota of interest from people beyond the DC bubble. And even there the enthusiasm is tepid. Said conservative stalwart and House Speaker John Boehner recently, “the American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney…95 percent of the people that show up to vote in November…are going to vote for or against Barack Obama.”
The sad thing is that Boehner’s right. You can’t ‘fall in love’ with a political candidate you simply cannot know, or for that matter a candidate you do not wish to know. Conversely, it’s difficult to strongly dislike him. But worst of all, it’s just really hard to care. For conservatives and liberals alike this is dangerous territory. The former because it makes for a more difficult time galvanizing their much-needed grassroots base come this fall; the latter because their own watch dogs don’t have enough of a distinctive political form to monitor very effectively. And if voters within a two-party system can only be bothered to vote for or against a man from a single political party just because they know who he is—well, that’s bad news for all of us.