"You would no more cast Romney as Reagan than you would Pee-wee Herman as James Bond"
"Republicans and conservatives seem to know all this: many of them wanted New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to jump in. Now, there’s a Republican man! Bellicose, sharp-tongued, a gleeful crusher of liberal pieties. Even his girth seems somehow manly. (Maybe it’s the way he throws it around.) He’s a smart choice to keynote the party’s convention—he’ll supply the tough-guy shtick the nominee can’t."
"Still, there’s a campaign to get through first. At some point, an unexpected event more serious than the Olympics—a scandal, a smear—will put Romney under the interrogation lamp, and he’ll need to rise to the occasion. We’ll see then if he has it in him. So far, he wants to sneak into the White House through a side door, without having to do any of the difficult and controversial things candidates have to do. Voters want candidates who are harshly tested and emerge from those tests stronger. Romney is desperate above all else to dodge them—and when they have come, he’s failed."
Newsweek Magazine
Cover Story
Mitt Romney's Wimp Factor
Jul 29, 2012
Mitt Romney's Wimp Factor
Some excerpts :
What kind of teenager beats up on the misfit, sissy kid, pinning him down and violently cutting his hair with a pair of school scissors—the incident from Romney’s youth that The Washington Post famously reported (and Romney famously didn’t really deny) back in May?
The behavior extends, through more sedate means, into adulthood. The Salt Lake Olympics remains his greatest triumph, for which he wins deserved praise. But to many of those in the know, Romney placed a heavy asterisk next to his name by attacking the men he replaced on the Olympic Committee, smearing them in his book, even after a court threw out all the corruption charges against them.
And what kind of presidential candidate whines about a few attacks and demands an apology when the going starts to get rough? And tries to sound tough by accusing the president who killed the world’s most-wanted villain of appeasement? That’s what they call overcompensation, and it’s a dead giveaway; it’s the “tell.” This guy is nervous—terrified—about looking weak. And ironically, being terrified of looking weak makes him look weaker still.
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In 2006 an interviewer asked Mansfield his definition of manliness, and he said: “confidence in a situation of risk.”
By this definition, the conservative definition, Romney is a total bust. He’s the most risk-averse major politician to come along in ages. He accepted the job at Bain Capital only after wringing out of Bill Bain a promise that, if the venture failed, Mitt would be welcomed back to Bain & Co.—at his old levels of compensation and seniority—and that the press and public would be fed some happy talk about how it had all gone as intended. And why didn’t he leave Bain in 1999 to go run the Olympics, as he always said he had, but instead take his now-famous “leave of absence”? To have the option of coming back; to minimize the risk. Even his flip-flopping, his taking of positions all over the map, is a form of risk aversion, being all things to all people, able to placate any audience, never stuck out on a limb unable to satisfy.
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Which ties directly to his biggest wimp problem. He still, after five years and two presidential campaigns, has yet to take one real stand on any issue; has yet to adopt one position that troubles his party’s hard right.
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The catalog of Romney flip-flops is lengthy and by now famous: abortion rights; support for Planned Parenthood, to which he and his wife once wrote checks, now in his gun sights; Grover Norquist’s “no tax increases” pledge, which he admirably refused to sign as a gubernatorial candidate but since 2007 has taken up with gusto; on immigration, where he once supported a path to citizenship; on guns (he supported the Brady Bill in the 1990s); on “don’t ask, don’t tell”; and, most famously of all, on health care.
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Compounding matters, when pressed to the slightest degree about his inconsistencies, he can get nasty and whiny. No one talks anymore about his encounter with Bret Baier of Fox News last December, but it was a Moment. When Baier had the nerve to challenge him on his health-care and immigration views, Romney complained—told Baier his questions were “uncalled for!” Of course it was Fox, which is supposed to be his on-air public-relations firm, so Romney was shocked. But even so, you don’t say it. A politician complaining about a journalist just doing his job is ... weenie-ish.
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