Then, hey, what’s not to like?
The difficulty of dealing with a candidate like Mitt Romney, who reminds me less of his laudable father, the late Michigan governor George Romney and more of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, is that he can baldly misrepresent the facts about himself and others, something he’s done repeatedly in this election cycle, and affect wounded rectitude when he gets called to the carpet for it.
I don’t support any of the candidates now running for president in either party. And I don’t oppose Romney. Which Romney, after all, does one support or oppose? He has had more incarnations than Frank Caliendo. His shifts on major public issues have been too convenient to know what he really believes beyond, to quote Robert “Bob” White, the one-time mayor of Bluffington in the old Doug cartoon show, “Vote for me. Vote for me. Vote for me.”
Not all of our most effective presidents have been terribly likable at a personal level. FDR charmed, for example. People adored him. But he so effectively ensconced himself behind a wall of subterfuge that few people got to know him. Dwight Eisenhower, who spent a lot of time with FDR once told Arthur Larsen that Roosevelt was “a cruel man.”
But the reasons that his rivals dislike Romney so, apart from jealousy over the use of his personal wealth to give his campaign credibility, which is his right, may tell us something about Mr. Romney’s character. And character in the presidency does matter.
Everybody has a right to change their mind. The person who hasn’t done so in the course of a lifetime is probably not a sentient human being. But what does Romney believe on a plethora of issues on which he seems to have had any number of Damascus Road experiences. Real?