JONATHAN CHAIT AUGUST 29, 2011
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
Maggie Haberman reports on the personal animosity between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry:
Perry thinks "Romney stands for nothing,” said a Perry confidante. “He’s got no spine, no backbone.” ...
Perry, people familiar with his views said, sees Romney as expedient, overly ambitious and unpalatable to the conservative base. Likewise, people close to Romney said he has unflattering opinions about Perry.
“I think he had a few exasperating experiences with Perry, and he’s not alone in that,” said one source close to Romney. “I think Mitt thinks Perry is not that bright.”
Stop it, you two! You're both right!
It seems that pretty much all the leading Republicans hate Romney. I wrote a column a few years ago explaining why I personally like Romney -- he's smart, competent, secretly despises the Republican electorate, and is the social outsider among his peers:
And yet, somehow, it has been decided that Romney is the flip-flopper of the race. Once the label has been attached, it can never be removed, and almost anything can be shown to affirm it. (Recall the ridicule Romney suffered after he mentioned that he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King but later had to admit he was not actually present at the march with his dad.) In classic junior-high fashion, the other flip-floppers have smarmily joined in the ridicule. "You are the candidate of change," sneered McCain, who required a whole six years to go from declaring on his campaign bus that "The Christian Right is neither" to publicly embracing Jerry Falwell.
Romney has acquired the aura of an overbearing, upper-class phony. But I see him as more of an earnest dweeb, desperately, and unsuccessfully, trying to fit in with his new crowd. I can almost picture him coming home from the Republican debates, crying his eyes out that he wants to move back to Massachusetts because all the other candidates keep laughing at him.
Haberman passes on an anecdote from "Game Change," which came out a year later, and that turns out to perfectly vindicate my image of the social dynamic at play:
“There was a lot of social action between the candidates themselves, not just the staff, again, except for Gov. Romney’s campaign,” he said. “They were always the one at the end of the hall that had the door locked. I would say that in the scheme of the debates, they were playing the role of the Cool Kids.”
The anti-Romney sentiment was captured in a scene from the the 2008 retrospective “Game Change,” when Romney happened to walk into a men’s room during a debate break just as Huckabee, McCain and Giuliani were all trashing him to each other. A source with direct knowledge of the incident told POLITICO that McCain, during one of the bathroom breaks, slammed Romney and said he preferred longshot former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo to him “because at least he believes the things he says.”
Note that both elements of the dynamic as I imagined it turned out to exist here. You had the perception of Romney as the overdog, juxtaposed against the reality of him as the detested outsider. The only thing I didn't imagine was that the other candidates would literally be gathering in the bathroom to make fun of him.
11 comments
"The only thing I didn't imagine was that the other candidates would literally be gathering in the bathroom to make fun of him" That's where all the pricks hang out.
- stanmvp48
August 29, 2011 at 12:07pm
Meh. I think your liking of Romney is misplaced. Your big point in his favor is that he's only *pretending* to be evil and stupid. Great. So, as I said before, this makes him a sociopath.
- miceelf
August 29, 2011 at 12:38pm
But a psychiatrist recently said that mentally ill people often make the best leaders. As long as they are the right "type" of mentally ill. Perhaps TNR can do a slide show or symposium comparing the mental illnesses of the various Republican candidates. For example, Bachman just suggested that Hurricane Irene is a sign of God's wrath, but then she she started to back away. Well, TNR, get right to it; I am not going to do all your work for you.
- skahn
August 29, 2011 at 12:48pm
skahn. While they're at it, how about including BHO. dweeb Mittens and wuss Barack. What a possible gag-me choice in 2012. In some sense, I would prefer Perry-- In Texas we know he's really a Conservative Dem in favor of big-Bidness cronyism. And if elected, would be much more likely than BHO to get a significant stimulus bill passed through a Repub House and Senate, loaded with Boss-Tweed goodies for his buddies. BHO reminds me more of Hoover-- squeaky clean, humanitarian, and ideologically unfit for his times. The times may be better served by a 21st Century reincarnation of Boss Tweed than Hoover.
- drofnats1
August 29, 2011 at 1:04pm
There's also the possibility that Chait likes Mittens (and BHO) because they ARE dweebs and wusses, and that Chait thinks those are required chatracteristics for Dems. It's pretty obvious Repubs have a different set of standards. As a liberal Progressive, I appreciate Ambrose Bierce's definitions in the Devil's Dictionary: Conservative (n): One who is enamored of existing evils as opposed to liberals who wish to replace them with others.
- drofnats1
August 29, 2011 at 1:20pm
drofnats
It would be easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle.- Nusholtz
August 29, 2011 at 1:45pm
Nuts. Not if your a Repub. You're smokin' what you shouldn't if you think the Repubs won't rediscover Keynes insofar as spending and deficits are concerned two days afer a Repub Prez is inaugurated.
- drofnats1
August 29, 2011 at 4:30pm
Interesting story - that's quite a leak.
- Usrname
August 29, 2011 at 4:41pm
dro, I don't think it would be so much a matter of re-discovering Keynes as it would be of repaying all their big bidness friends' generous contributions. Nothing says crony capitalism like lucrative no-bid contracts to business partners.
- GSpinks
August 29, 2011 at 5:05pm
Drofnats1, you've gone from being slightly painful to being a full on bore ... no, NONE of the republican candidates for president would be better than Obama. Romney would hew to the right in his first term to make sure he didn't get a primary challenge, Perry would be an unmitigated disaster. Have you forgotten the days when many government agencies were headed by Bush appointees who had no agenda other than to weaken the department they were overseeing, or didn't know the first thing about governance? Perry will be that on steroids. Obama may have disappointed you, he sure has me in some ways, but seriously, wake up. Having an incompetent (to use Roi's word) democrat is better than having a republican president in the current republican climate.
- NR409654
August 29, 2011 at 5:31pm
"Nuts. Not if your a Repub. You're smokin' what you shouldn't if you think the Repubs won't rediscover Keynes insofar as spending and deficits are concerned two days afer a Repub Prez is inaugurated." Not to mention the need for monetary stimulus. There will be lynching of the Fed chief unless he doesn't loosen. "
- stanmvp48
August 29, 2011 at 5:38pm