Does Romney Know Best?

Jennifer Rubin, the Head Romneybot at the Washington Post, has an awfully convincing argument for Romney to get the nomination. Just listen:

.... He will never be emotionally bonded to voters in the way presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were. He’s smart. He’s polite. But small talk with average voters isn’t his strong suit. If he were your neighbor you might have trouble keeping up a conversation about trivial matters, but he’d be there if your power went out. And he’d have a neatly typed (maybe laminated) list of the best plumber, electrician, etc., in the area. That said, he is also the guy who gives money out of his pocket to a stranger in need.

But so what if he is sort of stiff and very 1950s in vocabulary and manner? These are not the greatest personal shortcomings in modern society.

 

So much for convincing. And by the way, we already have one candidate who can't relate to average Americans -- and it's Obama! 

If the best thing Romney's most stalwart supporter can say is that "being a stiff and polite 1950s TV dad might help..." then we're in much deeper trouble than I thought (no offence to Robert Young).

 

Watching the Huckabee forum last night, I remembered why I do like Perry the somewhat haphazard cowboy and the Avuncular Newt - and even Sanctimonius Santorum when he's not shoving his "values" down my throat.

Romney just comes off as such a dud; I can't believe that's the best we can do. Ugh.

 

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AfterWords

I was looking for something else when I happened to come upon this Dean Acheson quote, repeated by Joe Liberman in another, different, context. It strikes me as conceivably relevant to Romney's candidacy.

"No people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." 

 

Isn't the declaration that Romney is most "electable" just another way of saying that he's our most inoffensive candidate?

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Our language always gives us away. Two phrases in Rubin's piece -- about "small talk with average voters" and "conversation about trivial matters" -- convey more than a whiff of the snide, the snobbish, and the supercilious. Why the suggestion that average voters spend so much time on the "trivial"? Why this implied disdain for ordinary voters -- and, if that's what we're getting from one of Romney's noisiest cheerleaders, how do we know that his own stiffness and awkwardness among the hoi polloi isn't also a sign of a certain disdain -- or at least distaste -- for humble Americans? This has nothing to do with the fact that Romney was born rich. Lots of American politicians were born rich -- George W. Bush being the most recent noteworthy example -- yet seemed perfectly comfortable among their less-than-wealthy countrymen. Romney's social klutziness doesn't disqualify him for the presidency -- but it does make one wonder: Why is he so maladroit in the kind of settings that even politicos like Nelson Rockefeller seemed to relish?