Consistency, they say, is the hobgoblin of small minds; it was also the hobgoblin of Mitt Romney's aborted presidential bid. Mitt tried to be all Mitts to all people - a genial moderate when running for statewide office in liberal Massachusetts, and a hair of the dog conservative when seeking the G.O.P. presidential nomination. Some bona fide conservatives with genuine conservative bona fides did sign up for Romney's campaign, but the evidence suggests that this was a marriage of convenience, designed to thwart the insufficiently doctrinaire McCain and Huckabee candidacies. No one, you see loved Mitt for Mitt, and a vote for him was almost always a vote against someone (or something) else.In a smaller field, Romney's strategy of shoehorning himself into the pro-business, socially conservative gap might have propelled him to victory. On the back end of this construction, however, Huckabee proved to be his superior, a genuine bible-thumping clergyman who could talk the talk with the conservative Christians, who, after being lionized in the wake of President Bush's 2004 re-election, have thusfar been an afterthought in 2008. Furthermore, the entire field of Republican candidates, especially McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, seemed to take particular delight in singling Romney out for abuse whenever possible. The Massachusetts governor's "flip-flopping" and win-at-all costs mentality (his campaign was the most aggressively negative) seemed to especially irk his fellow Republicans, and undoubtedly their constant withering fire stripped a lot of the luster off his candidacy, if not his comically immaculate coif.
Underreported, of course, is the extent to which Mitt's religious background derailed his presidential bid. The media is free all day to speculate on whether Obama's blackness or Hillary's gender helps or hurts, both because identity politics play a huge role in Democratic politics, and having an African-American or female president would be a seismic break with tradition. Crossing religious boundaries, or at least, since JFK, coming from a non-mainline Christian denomination, doesn't have a whole lot of national juice (though it's worth noting that Utah went for Romney by an absurd 90%-10% margin). Yet, in large part it was Mitt's religious preference that doomed him; in many swaths of the Evangelical community, Mormons are considered heretics - it's not far-fetched to consider that such bias, or at least discomfort, cost him vital support, especially in Iowa. I, for one, would be fascinated to know how many Republican primary voters were ultimately turned off to Mitt not by his transparent fakeness, but his church.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not sorry for Mitt Romney. His laughably eager-to-please, cynically manipulative style doomed him from the start. Had he managed to attain the presidency - and I think either Obama or Hillary would have eaten him for lunch in the general election - what would he have done? How would he have governed? Given that self-contradiction seemed to be his only constant, we honestly have no way of even speculating what a Romney administration would have looked like. The only thing surprising about Mitt's announcement that he was dropping his bid is that he didn't return to the podium fifteen minutes later and deny ever saying anything of the sort.
This announcement, delivered to a fawning crowd of imbeciles at the Conservative Political Action Conference who actually shouted, "No!" when Mitt declared he was dropping out, was the final nail in the coffin for any shred of political dignity Romney hadn't already shed during the campaign. During his speech, Romney warned "that unless America changes course, we could become the France of the 21st century" (changes course from what? the Bush administration?), made a cheap crack about Harvard professors being liberal (as an alumnus of that effete, elitist institution, he would presumably be in a position to know), and said, alluding to the fact that if he remained in the running, it might improve Obama and Hillary's odds of winning, "I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror." It was a condensed lesson in why he is exceedingly unfit to be President of the United States. I, for one, am extremely pleased that his life-long dream died a slow, painful death; I only wish he could have burned through another $35 million before it was over.
