[Vision2020] Three for the Gipper

Thu Aug 30 03:53:08 PDT 2012

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=3f0d0918/c874980e&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787508c_nyt5&ad=Sessions_120x60_Aug20_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fthesessions>

------------------------------
August 29, 2012
Renovating Mitt Romney By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

TAMPA, Fla.

So, about Mitt Romney.

The Republicans have been holding a convention to nominate him for
president! I am telling you this on the off chance that you haven’t been
paying attention. Perhaps you feel as if you’ve already met Mitt Romney and
don’t require another introduction. Perhaps you feel as if you’ve met him *a
lot*. But this is entirely different because the party’s mission this week
is to construct an entirely new, improved, warmer, more lovable version.

They built this Romney!

“We built it” is one of the themes here, at the government-underwritten
convention in a government-subsidized convention center in a city that rose
on the sturdy foundation of government-subsidized flood insurance. But no
taxpayer dollars were expended in the attempt to put together a New Mitt.

None. Really, it was just private corporations and rich people.

Even before the speeches began, before Tim Pawlenty compared the president
to a tattoo or the governor of Ohio, John Kasich, accused Joe Biden of
being a bad golfer, the magnitude of the Romney renovation challenge was
clear. This wasn’t going to be one of those quickie home makeovers you see
on TV, where a couple goes away for the weekend and comes back to discover
that they have a large, new picture window and a totally open kitchen floor
plan.

The folks who spoke during the first two days of the three-day convention
were supposed to do foundation work, preparing the public to regard the
presidential candidate who emerged on Thursday night as a kindly dad or a
favored sibling who’s always such great company when you’re feeling down.

They failed completely. It was as if, instead of fixing up the targeted
house, the renovators decided to do some engine work on a recreational
vehicle parked three blocks down the road.

Some of the speakers tried to divert the crowd with fancy rhetoric. Who
will ever forget the way Paul Ryan said America was getting the runaround
and needs a turnaround?

Some tried being counterintuitive. Mike Huckabee, in an interview before
his speech, compared Mitt to a nasty doctor. “If you’ve just been diagnosed
with a brain tumor, you honestly don’t care if your neurosurgeon is a
jerk,” he told Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast.

The challenge of giving their presidential candidate a heartwarming back
story was apparently too much for many of the speakers, who decided to
describe their own humble roots instead. Gov. Chris Christie talked about
his mother. Ryan brought up his father, mother and grandmother. Rick
Santorum told the story about his coal miner grandfather’s hands again.
Huckabee dropped the names of his grandchildren.

We may never figure out the inner life of the Republican presidential
candidate. But we are going into the fall campaign knowing a whole lot more
about the relatives of major Republican office holders.

Ann Romney, poor woman, was left stuck with the entire burden of the
convention’s yearning for a candidate remake. It turns out that her
grandfather was a coal miner, too! It is possible that the only person in
the entire city of Tampa this week who does not have a coal miner in the
family tree is Mitt.

“Tonight I want to talk to you about love,” she said. The critical point
was that Ann loves Mitt and Mitt loves America. What could be better than
that? Then, half an hour later, Governor Christie decreed that respect
trumps love. If these people can’t even decide where love ranks on their
to-do list, you can appreciate why they found it impossible to get together
to build a new presidential candidate.

Although she was assigned to paint a picture of the Mitt Romney we have
never seen and suspect does not exist, his wife’s remarks were remarkably
short on specifics. She did have a story about their humble early married
life, which involved a brief period in college when they were forced to
consume “a lot of pasta and tuna fish.”

Ann assured the crowd that her husband had spent “countless hours helping
others,” and although that was pretty vague, we do have other accounts of
his good deeds, mainly for fellow parishioners at church. She also seemed
intent on telling us that he’s a fun guy, full of Mittwit, but she failed
to provide any examples of fun that were actually funny. The take-away
image of Mitt Romney, Neighbor, was less George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful
Life” than Ned Flanders in “The Simpsons.”

The best humanizing story about a robotic presidential candidate I can
remember was the one John Kerry’s daughters told about how Kerry had saved
their hamster Licorice from a “watery doom” by diving off a dock,
retrieving the animal and administering CPR. And, actually, that didn’t
work out so well.

They’ll make do with what they’ve got. One thing’s for sure: nobody in
Tampa is all that interested in talking about Mitt Romney interacting with
pets.
  ______________________________________________________________________

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
August 29, 2012
Will They Decipher the Cipher? By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>

TAMPA, Fla.

Mitt Romney doesn’t elicit passion, as Ronald Reagan did in Detroit. Or
respect, as Poppy Bush did in New Orleans. Or excitement, as W. did in
Philadelphia. Or admiration, as John McCain did in St. Paul.

 The emotion he evokes is pity. Romney slogged and spent his way to the
G.O.P. convention his dad craved for himself only to find that his role is
not so much leading man as forgotten man.

Following an adulatory promotional video about himself, Chris Christie
splashed in the Narcissus pool, giving a preening keynote speech that
gassed on for 1,800 words and 16 minutes before he even deigned to mention
“our actual nominee,” as Sarah Palin sardonically put it on Fox News.

Christie, who has already said he may run in 2016 if Romney loses, urged
“sacrifice” and “tough choices” even though the blurry Romney beckons with
an all-you-can-eat buffet of defense spending and tax cuts.

When TV cut away to Mitt in the hall to capture what should have been a
thrilling moment, he looked as though his jelled skull might burst into
flames.

He must have been fuming over why his high-priced mercenaries, who vetted
Christie’s speech two weeks ago, failed to ask the New Jersey governor to
cool it on the solipsism. In a conflict of consultants, the Romney adviser
who’s helping run the convention, Russ Schriefer, is a once (and future?)
Christie strategist.

Do Romney’s consultants, like some other conservatives here, have a thinly
veiled disdain for an animatronic aristocrat who insists on being in a
business he has no business in?

This synthetic convention aches with the enormity of the effort involved in
trying, and failing, to make Mitt alluring and compelling, the fruitless,
endless hunt for the enigma code that will decipher the cipher.

It’s absurd that Romney is still working tirelessly to show who he is given
that he has spent the past six years running for president. Ann Romney was
straining so hard to come up with heartwarming, personal anecdotes about
Mitt and her family, she actually hit on one with CBS News about her son
mourning her miscarriage that a startled Mitt said he had never heard.

Even when conservatives try to defend Romney, they manage to insult him.

“If you’ve just been diagnosed with a brain tumor,” Mike Huckabee told
Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast, “you honestly don’t care if your
neurosurgeon is a jerk.”

David Brooks of The Times mocked press critiques of
Romney<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/opinion/brooks-the-real-romney.html>,
but the satire slashed the candidate, too: “Romney owns many homes without
garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.”

If conservatives think Reagan is a candidate for Mount Rushmore, Romney
brings to mind a Sisyphean rock.

As Bill Kristol put it on Fox News, hailing Paul Ryan as Romney’s savior:
“It feels less like a couple of hundred people in Boston working very hard
to kind of push the boulder up the hill and more like a genuine exciting
cause.” (Mitt’s dad urged him to “be bold,” not boulder.)

Charles Krauthammer dryly suggested on Fox News that to be more likable,
Romney should go out on stage with the dog that he had on the roof of the
car and have the dog endorse him right there ... Seamus and Mitt.” (Except
Seamus is dead, and Mitt is struggling to prove he’s alive.)

Romney is seen more as maître d’ than nominee, ushering the party to a
better table in the future. In Politico, conservatives referred to the
placeholder Mitt as a transitional figure and “an ideal segue.”

When Mitt awkwardly came out on stage at the end of Ann’s speech in what
was supposed to be a crescendo, the room went flat. The few ripples of
excitement in the Ward Cleaver-Betty Crocker convention with the generic
music and anesthetized delegates have centered on younger 2016 prospects.

On the convention floor Tuesday night, Rick Perry told Chuck Todd of NBC
News that he would “absolutely” consider running in 2016.

On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart hailed Marco Rubio as “Charisma Boy,”
saying it was good that Marco had dodged the problem of being Mitt’s
running mate because, if he wins, “it would have been uncomfortable for you
to run against him in 2016.”

After Condi Rice, glamorous in a salmon suit, impressed the crowd Wednesday
night, Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic and GQ tweeted: “OK, HRC v. Condi in
2016 is on.”

And, of course, there was the evening’s main course and future, Ryan, who
brought the zombie convention alive with a zowie speech — building up
Romney and tweaking him about what’s on his iPod, “which I’ve heard on the
campaign bus and on many hotel elevators.”

Ryan’s deft speech conjured the president’s nightmare — that disillusioned
voters might decide it’s time to try something new.
  __________________________________________________________

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
August 29, 2012
Will They Decipher the Cipher? By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>