April 24, 2012 |
The following is an excerpt from Alex Pareene’s new e-book for Salon, “The Rude Guide to Mitt.” It can be purchased atAmazon, Barnes & Noble and the Sony Reader Store.
Mitt Romney is weird. When the Obama reelection campaign early in the
cycle made the mistake of indicating that its strategy would be to
imply that Mitt Romney is weird by repeatedly
telling Politico that
it planned on calling Mitt Romney weird, Romney’s camp countered by
causing a brief and not particularly sincere media brouhaha over whether
“weird” is code for “Mormon.” Plenty of Americans think Mormons are
weird, yes, but in this case, the simple fact is Mitt Romney is weird,
entirely apart from his religion.
He seems incapable of natural conversation and frequently
uncomfortable in his own skin. He’s simultaneously dorkily earnest and
ingratiatingly insincere. He suggests a brilliantly designed politician
android with an operating system still clearly in beta. He once tied a
dog to the roof of his car and drove for hundreds of miles without
stopping and some years later thought that was an endearing story. All
video of him attempting to interact with normal humans is
cringe-inducing, as a cursory YouTube search quickly demonstrates.
(Martin Luther King Day, Jacksonville, Fla., 2008:
Mitt poses for a picture with
some cheerful young parade attendees. As he squeezes in to the
otherwise all-black group, he says, apropros of nothing, “Who let the
dogs out? Woof, woof!”) He seems to have been told that “small talk” is
mostly made up of cheerfully delivered non sequiturs.
Every good Romney profile has a “Romney says something bizarre” moment. In Sridhar Pappu’s
2005 profile for the Atlantic,
Romney produced a commemorative plate featuring the likenesses of
Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, and announced: “Not only was Eisenhower one
of my favorite presidents; when we became grandparents, you get to
choose what the kids will call you. Some call you Papa. I chose Ike. I’m
Ike, and Ann is Mamie.”
Leaving aside that Eisenhower worship is not particularly widespread
in the modern GOP (he failed to kill the New Deal programs and didn’t
particularly love Israel), it is not “a thing” that you can make your
grandchildren call you by the name of a random dead president. There are
a wide variety of names for grandparents based on family traditions and
cultures and adorable toddler malapropisms, but I have never heard of a
grandparent asking to be called some other non-related person’s name.
(“Make the children call me ‘Horatio’ because I so admire ‘CSI: Miami’s’
David Caruso.”)
Even
Romney’s family seems to have found this weird: Of his eight
grandchildren, only the oldest ever called him “Ike,” according to Tagg,
and she stopped when everyone else evinced a preference for “Papa.”
This odd Eisenhower admiration seems like some sort of carefully
calculated (but poorly thought out) way to highlight “moderateness”
while also appealing to pious sentiment. Romney explains that he admires
Ike as much for his personal morals as for his actual acts, and says he
feels disappointed in Jefferson, for his affair with Sally Hemings.
“What for me makes people like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt
and John Adams and George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald
Reagan such extraordinary leaders is that they had integrity through and
through,” he says. (I guess it’s OK to have an affair, like FDR, and
own slaves, like Washington, but Romney draws the line at combining the
two.)
He has an odd habit of bragging, or sort of bragging, when dealing with regular folk on the campaign trail.
The New York Times (in
a feature, by Ashley Parker and Michael Barbaro, entirely about how
weird Mitt Romney is) has him telling a woman at a diner that he “stayed
at a Courtyard hotel last night,” adding, “it’s LEED-certified.”
In his
2007 New Yorker profile, Ryan Lizza refers to it as “one-upmanship.”
After
a voter at the New Hampshire diner told Romney, “My daughter goes to
Michigan State,” he replied, “Oh, does she, really? My brother’s on the
board of Michigan State.” When another patron said that she was from
Illinois, Romney told her, “I won the straw poll at the Illinois
Republican convention!”
His off-kilter interpretation of casual conversation also involves
guessing at the ethnic background of strangers, poorly (“are you
French-Canadian?”), and awkward joking (pretending a waitress pinched
his ass). And he enjoys congratulating people, seemingly for the feat of
existing and being in the vicinity of Mitt Romney.
If Nixon was epically, operatically weird — the sort of president the
nation that produced Charles Manson should expect, let’s say — Romney
is uninterestingly weird. First reel of “Blue Velvet” weird, without a
hint of that subterranean layer of rot and perversion underlying the
whole thing. Upon returning to his childhood home in Michigan for a 2012
campaign event, Romney noted that the trees were “the right height.”
Another fun — and weird — Romney fact: He models his hair not on that
of his father, or that of Leland Palmer, but on his father’s top
religious aide in Romney’s boyhood. From
the Globe:
Mitt
had grown up hearing people comment on his father’s sweep of
slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early
teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin
Jones, who served as his father’s top aide in running the Detroit
operations of the Mormon Church.
“He
sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records,” Mitt would
recall years later. “I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was
quite shiny, and that you could see it in from front to back. Have you
looked at my hair? Yep, it’s just like his was some 40 years ago.”
“Have you looked at my hair?” There is perhaps some psychological
insight there: Romney is worshipful of his father, and has apparently
modeled himself on a man his father trusted.
Romney’s commitment to clean living is less an individual quirk than
one prescribed by his religion, but it is always amusing when a grown
adult acts like a character in an Archie comic. A 2003 Boston Magazine
piece has the new governor pouring Diet Vanilla Coke and regular Vanilla
Coke for a family taste test. (I can only assume the sodas are
caffeine-free, though there is some debate in LDS circles about the
letter versus the spirit of the prohibition against “hot beverages,”
which does not explicitly mention caffeine.) It also notes Romney’s
regular breakfast: “cereal, egg whites, and toast without butter.” At
Bain Capital, he refused to put his own money in a company that produced
R-rated movies. (He did consent to allow Bain to invest.)
Even the stories of Romney’s supposed temper are ridiculous. He was
arrested, in June of 1981, for disorderly conduct while attempting to
launch his family boat in Cochituate State Park. He got in a heated
argument with a cop who noted that the boat was not displaying its
registration. Romney was hauled in in his swim trunks. Charges were
dropped when he threatened to sue for false arrest. At the 2002 Salt
Lake Winter Olympics Romney got in a public confrontation with a
volunteer police officer directing traffic outside an Olympic venue.
Police allege Romney said “fuck” multiple times while berating the cop.
Romney declined to apologize to the cop, Shaun Knopp, and while the
public berating did happen — he mentions it in his book — Romney made a
big point of specifically denying that he used a bad word. (In fact,
Romney insisted at the time that he specifically said “H-E double hockey
sticks.” Like a child. A remarkably well-behaved child speaking in
earshot of his second grade teacher.) He told the Boston Globe that he
had two witnesses to corroborate his denial. “I have not used that word
since college — all right? — or since high school,” he said.
His mother got a bit TMI when Romney was running against Ted Kennedy in 1994. From the
Times:
“Where Senator Kennedy, who remarried two years ago, is still known for
his hard-drinking, hard-living bachelor days after his 1981 divorce,
Mr. Romney’s mother, Lenore Romney, who is 85, volunteered in an
interview last week that her son and Ann waited until they were married
to have sex.”
Romney recently told
People magazine,
“I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and
never did it again.” I’m not sure we should believe him. There’s no way
in hell I can imagine Mitt Romney loosening up enough to have a beer.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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