Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Ten days from now, some of the world’s best-paid magicians of image and narrative will unveil a reboot of a most unfathomable man, Willard Mitt Romney, a 2012 model with a shelf life of barely two months.
The Republican National Convention will mark the fourth time in 18 years, dating to a losing Senate race in 1994, that a Team Romney has tried to construct a Brand Romney. This problem of who he is, Romney acknowledged last year, has plagued him ever since he became a public figure.
In focus groups, he’s described as a tin man, a shell, an empty suit, vacuous, a multimillionaire in mom jeans. And that’s from supporters.
At the convention, you can expect to hear high praise for a virtuous, disciplined, loyal person of family and faith. You will surely hear the words “turnaround” and “no apology” — both titles of platitudinous and unread books by Romney — in defense of his business acumen and unshakable view of American exceptionalism.
But I doubt you will hear anything of the real Romney because he is afraid of his own past. His life — even with prep school privilege in Bloomfield Hills, the draft-avoiding refuges of mission work in Paris and business school at Harvard, a founding role at Bain Capital from a mentor who guaranteed he would never fail financially or professionally — is not without drama.
Yet that Romney story is laden with land mines of his making. Or rather, that of his party, which has turned so quickly against common-sense solutions to the nation’s problems that Romney’s real achievements, and prior principles, are now toxic to most Republicans.
Start with his family. His great-grandfather was a fugitive, tracked by federal marshals as he tried to plant polygamy throughout the Southwest for a radical new American faith. It’s a hell of a tale, Butch Cassidy with five wives. But Romney never mentions this arc for fear his Mormon religion will offend evangelical Christians who dominate the Republican Party.
He could talk about his father, or maybe not. George Romney, born in Mexico, was a principled politician who didn’t support Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. He was nearly ousted from Richard Nixon’s cabinet for aggressive pursuit of racial integration in the suburbs. He opposed the Vietnam War. He not only paid a much higher rate of income tax than did his son, but he made public those taxes — 12 years of returns.
George Romney would be booed at this year’s convention.
What about Mitt the businessman? His years at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm, were supposed to be his chief selling point. The boys of Bain had numerous venture capital triumphs. But they also busted up a lot of lives with leveraged buyouts that inflicted heavy casualties.
Well before Democrats set out to make Bain a four-letter verb, Republicans during the primary recast Romney’s 15 active years in high finance as a plunder spree. “A bunch of rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company,” said Newt Gingrich. “Vulture capitalist,” cried Gov. Rick Perry.
More significant than Bain’s brand of “creative destruction” was how Romney himself got very rich. The bulk of his wealth came from capital gains, not salary or actual income. Those gains are taxed far less than many working people’s wages, and, with offshore accounts, the rates can go even lower. The story of American inequality is in the additional tax returns that Romney has vowed never to release.
With Bain and his colorful Mormon past off the table, that leaves Romney’s one-term as Massachusetts governor to highlight. He ruled as a moderate — oops, bad word. His greatest achievement, of course, was universal health care that became the template for Obamacare. He once called it, “the ultimate conservative idea.”
As he shed the ideas he embraced in the Bay State and tried to become “severely conservative,” Romney the unknowable became Romney the unlikable. His flip-flops were Olympic in caliber: on gun control, abortion, climate change, taxes, gays.
“Some are actually having children born to them,” he said of gay couples, in disgust, while groveling in the South, as reported in “The Real Romney,” the fair-minded biography by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman.
With Paul Ryan on the ticket, Romney becomes ever more hollow in comparison to the younger man of a cold-hearted-but-consistent philosophy.
A few weeks ago, Brian Williams of NBC News asked Romney if he was “unknowable to us.” Great question. Romney chuckled, that nervous stage laugh, and said voters will likely wait until the debates to discern his character. Fat chance. Better to chase fireflies with a thimble, for the true Romney is a phantom — lost long ago to reinventions and calculations.