Republicans fear repeating gaffes of the past

Like the former president Richard Nixon, Mitt Romney puts his foot in it more often than not. But don’t write him off, says Jack Shafer

BE CAREFUL about writing Mitt Romney’s political obituary before they fill him with formaldehyde and pour him into his mahogany condo.

Like that other frequent Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, Romney has a remarkable talent for stepping into it, sinking, and soiling himself rotten as he extricates himself.

Romney’s latest stumble — complaining to rich donors about the “47%”, which was webcast by Mother Jones — would bury a less tenacious candidate. But Romney’s talent for powering past his embarrassments ranks up there with that of Nixon, a champion of compartmentalisation who believed that as long as he had a pulse he had a chance of winning the White House.

Like Nixon, Romney is not only at war with the Democrats but also with the base of his own party, which has never been convinced he’s a true conservative. Both Nixon and Romney have dressed their pragmatist campaigns in conservative clothing, but with the exception of their cultural biases against sex, drugs, and pornography — and their instinctual disrespect for disrespecters of authority — none of it has ever rung true.

The stink of inauthenticity wafts so heavily from both that their early biographers have incorporated it into the titles of their books, as historian David Greenberg pointed out to me in an interview. The Real Romney, published this year, and 1960’s The Real Nixon, both posit that what you see is not what you get with these two men.

“Romney is the most patently phoney presidential candidate since Nixon,” says Greenberg, author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image. “The most talented politicians express a natural ease, by backslapping or chit-chatting with people. Nixon and Romney don’t have that skill, but they try anyway.”

The failures of Nixon and Romney to connect, to seem “real”, or to appear likeable have resulted in both doubling their efforts to be personable and human, making even the sympathetic cringe.

The camera hated Nixon, and it showed. In 1968, Roger Ailes, now head of Fox News, worked on the Nixon campaign as a consultant and improved the candidate’s stagecraft. Yet the camera still magnified Nixon’s internal discontent.

Romney doesn’t sweat or glower when facing the lens, but press encounters tend to give him the jitters, jamming his efforts to pave a communications groove with voters. Like Nixon, Romney reflexively despises the press, which he blamed for the disaster that was his July foreign policy trip.

Pragmatists like Nixon and Romney, who have few core beliefs beyond the personal, require staff pollsters and strategists to tell them where they should be on issues.

Liberal writers such as Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait would have you believe the Mother Jones video reveals the true, inner Romney, somebody who regards the poor, the sick, and the retired as grifters. If only that were true. He doesn’t even have that conviction.

As a pragmatist speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, Romney is content to say what they want to hear: That the 47% are parasites and the donors are exalted beings.

Romney owes much of his early campaign reputation as an unprincipled waffling weasel to his major accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts, Romneycare. Romney distanced himself from the measure during the primaries, but once he secured the nomination, his campaign cited the legislation as a political plus, evidence that he had the skills to “reform” the healthcare industry.

This sort of calculated duplicity brings us back to Nixon, who campaigned as a conservative but who once in the White House supported the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, wage and price controls, Amtrak, affirmative action and other codicils to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Obviously, every politician over-flatters supporters, makes voodoo dolls out of reporters, and reverses himself. Nixon had a pretty good excuse for his flip-floppery: He cared primarily about foreign policy and would do almost anything to avoid domestic policy battles.

But what does Romney really care about? He’s been running for president non-stop, since 2007, and I still haven’t a clue.