Romney's Too Slick For His Own Good
DES MOINES, Iowa, Aug. 11, 2007 (The Nation) This column was written by Marc Cooper.
I drove 227 miles on Thursday to get from Council Bluffs to the hamlet of Hampton in order to catch an "Ask Mitt Anything" meet and greet with Mitt Romney. In a flyspeck of a northern Iowa town where the only two eateries were a Hardee's and a Subway, Romney drew a bank basement crowd of about 50 — all-white and decidedly elderly, i.e. a very representative cross-cut of the Iowa GOP electorate.
Anyway, please remind me not to do that again!
I'm not really complaining. I readily confess that being able to cover any portion of a presidential campaign is a privilege and a treat. But, damn, it's hard to take some of this very seriously.
The BS factor is heavy in almost every event of any candidate. But Mitt Romney is in some special category of his own. I had trouble believing that anybody in that room could believe anything he said. Tanned, wonderfully dressed, tall, and enviably fit for a 60 year old, Mitt comes off as too slick by one-half. Someone once said he ought to learn to stammer a bit more, in the posed manner of, say, a Bill Clinton.
Not Mitt. He doesn't botch a word as he delivers one rehearsed graph after another. I'll save you the rhetoric and cut to his main point: "STRENGTH." A Strong Military. A Strong Economy. Strong Families. A Strong America. Strong. Strong. Strong.
Got the point?
But the shamelessness factor was sort of out of control. He's the man to bring "change" to Washington, but his stump speech omits any single policy matter on which he differs from Bush. He asks us to thank Bush for keeping us safe for the last six years and goes out of his way to praise the rough treatment of detainees at Gitmo. No cheers for those ideas, not even from the loyal Republicans in the room.
(Continued here.)
I drove 227 miles on Thursday to get from Council Bluffs to the hamlet of Hampton in order to catch an "Ask Mitt Anything" meet and greet with Mitt Romney. In a flyspeck of a northern Iowa town where the only two eateries were a Hardee's and a Subway, Romney drew a bank basement crowd of about 50 — all-white and decidedly elderly, i.e. a very representative cross-cut of the Iowa GOP electorate.
Anyway, please remind me not to do that again!
I'm not really complaining. I readily confess that being able to cover any portion of a presidential campaign is a privilege and a treat. But, damn, it's hard to take some of this very seriously.
The BS factor is heavy in almost every event of any candidate. But Mitt Romney is in some special category of his own. I had trouble believing that anybody in that room could believe anything he said. Tanned, wonderfully dressed, tall, and enviably fit for a 60 year old, Mitt comes off as too slick by one-half. Someone once said he ought to learn to stammer a bit more, in the posed manner of, say, a Bill Clinton.
Not Mitt. He doesn't botch a word as he delivers one rehearsed graph after another. I'll save you the rhetoric and cut to his main point: "STRENGTH." A Strong Military. A Strong Economy. Strong Families. A Strong America. Strong. Strong. Strong.
Got the point?
But the shamelessness factor was sort of out of control. He's the man to bring "change" to Washington, but his stump speech omits any single policy matter on which he differs from Bush. He asks us to thank Bush for keeping us safe for the last six years and goes out of his way to praise the rough treatment of detainees at Gitmo. No cheers for those ideas, not even from the loyal Republicans in the room.
(Continued here.)
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