The two-page spread in the July 9
Fortune is the campaign equivalent of a centerfold: Mitt Romney stands on a dock, sun reflecting off the water of Lake Winnipesaukee — tall, confident, faintly smiling, a man on top of the world. One look at that photo and you’re thinking, “Dear God, let me look that good at age 60… and dear God, I wouldn’t mind a summer place on a lake in New Hampshire like his, either.”
Mitt Romney takes a fantastic photograph (even if he insisted on keeping his suit on for the beach-house shot). He’s leading the polls in several early states. He’s done no worse than “pretty good” or better in the debates. Few would deny he’s in the first tier of serious Republican candidates for 2008.
But as his campaign has matured, we’re forced to consider a somewhat uncomfortable question. Is there something a little… (shuffling feet, looking at floor, averting eyes)… strange about the guy?
Perhaps
saying his favorite novel was
Battlefield Earth (by L. Ron Hubbard) was a brilliant strategy to avoid any controversy over Mormonism by replacing it with speculation that the candidate has an interest in Scientology.
Perhaps the
strapping the dog to the roof of the family car is one of those stories that sounds a little — okay, a lot — weird afterwards to outsiders, but if you were there, hooboy, it made perfect, hilarious sense. And Romney insists the dog loved it.
And as for having a “director of operations” who is
under investigation for impersonating a police officer… well, perhaps any candidate could have a staffer who behaves a little strangely.
And the
13-minute web video about the Romney family at Christmas… well, it shows a heartwarming, Norman Rockwellish family scene in a beautiful home… but one wonders who videotapes the family holiday get-together and puts it on a campaign website? (And why did he wash the dishes with his shirt sleeves down?)
The man’s name is “Mitt,” and one of his sons is “Tagg.” That’s the kind of lovable quirk usually found when ESPN does an interview with the first guy to show up to watch spring training.
Any one of these little oddities would be a pretty piddling reason to vote against the man. And yet… bit by bit, these little idiosyncrasies, quirks, and issues tend to add up.
Look, we know how the mainstream media and Democratic attack dogs like to label Republican nominees and their running mates: George W. Bush is dumb, Cheney is old, Bob Dole is old, George H.W. Bush is old, Ronald Reagan is dumb and old. Well, so there are only two lines of attack, come to think of it. Romney ain’t old, so… and he’s not helping matters.
There are 519 blog posts that use the terms “Romney” and “creepy” according to Technorati. According to Google, there are 202,000 web pages that have those two words.
One can only imagine what the attack dogs and hatchet men of the Clinton campaign can and will do with this sort of material. They used an urban legend about the first
President Bush’s “amazement” with a supermarket scanner to paint him as out of touch.
How many little Romney anecdotes like the ones above can they blow into major, reputation-defining, iconic stories?
And this isn’t even getting into the already infamous Mormon factor. Have you noticed the sudden interest in Mormonism in the mainstream media, and the less-than-flattering portrait, emerging just as Romney appears on the national stage? It’s easily forgotten that the protagonists of HBO’s
Big Love are part of a breakaway sect, not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam
did his part to blur the distinction.
PBS’s special on Mormonism made sure to mention “celestial marriage,” and the
AP has already helpfully pointed out that one of Romney’s ancestors was a polygamist, as if we regularly took the character of a candidate’s great-great-grandfathers into account when selecting a president. In August,
September Dawn comes to theaters, telling of the Mountain Meadows massacre, when Mormon militiamen attacked and murdered a wagon train of emigrants of more than 120 men, women and children on (COUGH) September 11, 1857.
After eight months of covering a Romney campaign, the mainstream media will make the Mormon church resemble Wahhabism without the melanin.
It’s a shame that a Republican primary voter has to think defensively, and worry about how the party’s candidate will be portrayed as a far-out religious madman, when everything about Romney’s professional and political career indicates he’s nothing of the sort. But the 2008 campaign cycle has already witnessed a talk-show host speculating that a soon-to-be candidate’s wife “works the pole” because she’s good looking; speculation of McCain having cancer over a bruised forehead; and a major magazine asserting that the GOP frontrunner is, “
quite literally, nuts.”
Any Republican nominee is certain to face a landslide of mud hurled in his direction — and, again, the options in the end are “old” or “weird” — but one wonders if some candidates might need to a better job in handing their critics easy opportunities.
— Jim Geraghty blogs on 2008 at The Campaign Spot.
