Mitt Romney and Roderick Spode

As you all know, one may be a designer of ladies’ underwear or a great dictator. But not both. Similarly, one may have passed a healthcare reform that’s a mini-version of Obamacare or one may become the Republican party’s next presidential nominee. But not both. 

That, at least, is held to be Mitt Romney’s awful predicment and it’s making him do some very strange things to compensate for this dreadful weakness. Politics can be cruel: Mitt’s greatest strength was once his technocratic, problem-solving approach. His Massachusetts healthcare reforms were a Good Thing, not a betrayal of conservative first principles. Changed days.

Matt Yglesias makes the good point that Scott Brown’s support for Romneycare didn’t prevent him becoming a conservative “icon” (a word that should be banned, incidentally) and that’s true. But there’s every difference in the world between a Massachusetts Senate Race and the national stage. Similarly, Rush Limbaugh’s endorsement of Romney in 2008 belongs to a different time entirely. That was before Obamacare’s arrival, after which Romney’s strategic position looked much more vulnerable than it had when he was being endorsed by conservatives who couldn’t stand or couldn’t trust John McCain.

Romney’s problem, I think, is that he lacks both empathy and imagination. These are under-appreciated, but vital, qualities. A politician need not possess both (Thatcher, for instance, lacked imagination but possessed empathy – at least for the people she thought she was talking to or cared about) but successful politicians have some measure of both. Deficient in these qualities, Romney comes across as stiff and awkward and somewhat robotic. His politicial intelligence seems artificial; he has a grasp of the grammar but lacks true fluency in the idiom of day-to-day  retail politics and the Vision Thing. Consequently it sometimes seems as though he is trying too hard and, in the process, he risks making himself appear ridiculous. 

To get back to Roderick Spode, Romney’s habitual reinventions as a Man of the People or Red in Tooth and Claw Conservative remind me of Bertie Wooster’s withering appraisal of Spode:

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”

Now Spode really believed he should be dictator; Romney’s sins are such that intelligent people can’t believe that an intelligent man such as Romney can really believe what he’s saying or doing. No wonder he looks like a “frightful ass”. He’s no good at faking it and the effort involved in faking it simply makes him appear a “perfect perisher”. Still, that’s an “elite” opinion. Romney’s trouble is that he could end up squandering his elite support without actually making much progress with the “base” whose support he also needs. But that’s the gamble.

Despite that – and despite or because of John Podhoretz’s well-founded grumbling about the quality of the field – Romney remains the obvious front-runner and not just because he’s the horse with most form over course and distance. Who else is there? Romney’s difficulties are plain but he seems more likely to pass the “He’ll Do” test than Tim Pawlenty. Or, that is, Pawlenty needs Romney to be disqualified for some reason before he has a real chance to be the candidate unhappy GOP voters will “settle for”. As Ross Douthat says “Just because the Republicans seem to need a better candidate than Mitt Romney doesn’t mean they’ll get one.”

There’s one other way for Romney to help himself with the base – particularly the evangelical base – and that’s to announce his preferred Vice-President before the primaries even begin. Readers will recall that Roderick Spode was madly in love with Madeline Bassett and here the blighter offers a way forward for Romney since, happily for him, there is a Bassett available for courting: Mike Huckabee. There’s an engagement to boggle the mind but one that, actually, just might work.

Elsewhere in OmniRomney today Steve Kornacki makes a good case for Romney’s favouritism, Brendan Nyhan thinks he is being treated unfairly by the media and Jonathan Bernstein questions whether Romneycare will really poison his chances.