A few months ago I was launching
potatoes from atop my roof with a homemade plastic cannon, frustrated with the
state of things. A fashion show downtown
was tying up traffic for miles, so I decided to make the most of it by filling old
PVC pipes with hairspray and igniting the fuel with a twist-flint, sending one
spud after another hurling over suburbia in the general direction of the gala. I was perched in a folding chair on the ridge
of my roof, with a basket of potatoes to my right and a cooler of exotic beer
to my left, and after about an hour the hot summer evening finally seemed to be
going my way, save for one immutable nuisance.
Between salvos my portable radio
would interrupt its broadcast of fifties-era mambo with Romney campaign ads, a trite
jab in the ear that repeated itself once every fifteen minutes. After each sound bite the congas would
resume, followed by an explosion, smoke, and a muffled thud in the distance revealing
just how close I’d gotten to the most glamorous outdoor catwalk of the season. By the time I could finish off the ale at
hand, fling the empty bottle into the recycling bin below with a great crash,
open another, and reload the cannon, Mitt Romney’s feigned zeal would puncture
the mambo again, starting the cycle anew.
It was all very rhythmic.
But by midnight I had run out of potatoes and ale, and that
hackneyed radio spot had sunk in—something about business and jobs and
greatness and why I should be bummed out about the state of things but inspired
by him, all delivered in a half-throated voice resembling a first-time Little
League coach trying to pump up a team that didn’t care. It had the stink of a fool with too much
money, as if all it took to convince Mitt to run the ad was the business card
and firm handshake of a square-jawed con-artist who snuck into his country club
at just the right moment.
“I like your attitude,” Mr. Romney undoubtedly said after
hearing The Pitch on his way to the locker room, still clad in a track suit. “Welcome
aboard.”
Within 24 hours a jumble of speech excerpts pirated off the
internet would be cobbled together into a polished 30-second nugget just in
time to interrupt the World Weekend Mambo Program and a check would be sent to
a PO box two counties south of the Canadian border in northeastern Montana, the
producer never to be heard from again.
Or at least that was the most likely origin of the litany
of plastic slogans still rattling around my head the next day. Money and street smarts don’t always go
together, and the same can be said for charm—at least the kind that resonates
beyond the boardroom Power Point crowd. At
breakfast I saw a notice for an upcoming Romney-Ryan campaign event, next to a
headline in the local section reading “JESSICA SIMPSON CANCELS CLOTHING LINE,
CURSES STATE FOLLOWING RUINED FASHION SHOW.”
Meeting Mitt Romney in the flesh would be a good chance to scan the guy
for soul with my own two eyes, although I was doubtful there’d be much to
uncover. Devoting one’s life to chasing
cash or status as an end in itself is a damning symptom of a man without
insight. A brain hard-wired to Win at
the expense of self-reflection is easy to detect in person.
As it turned out, I was right, but in a wrong kind of way. Office sociopaths do have a signature disposition, but Mitt Romney didn’t quite fit
the mold. The supporter who introduced
him, snake-man Florida Governor Rick Scott, dripped of it, but after listening
to Romney’s pitifully flat speech I waded through the crowd and found Mitt,
oddly, displaying a bit of human emotion.
It was hot and sunny and uncomfortable and when I shook the poor lug’s
hand I could see in his eyes that he was worried, like a fretful child longing
to retreat home where bad things don’t happen.
When wiping the sweat off his face he’d grimace dejectedly, as if to
plead with the world to have pity. And I
did.
“Hi,” he asked. “How
are you doing?”
“Hot,” I said, trying to comfort him.
Without responding he moved on to the next person, forced a
smile, and said “Hi. How are you doing?” Then he turned to the next person and said
“Hi. How are you doing?” and again, and again, until most of the crowd had waddled
off and he could finally escape to his air-conditioned campaign bus.
Phony though he was, this was not quite the wind-up doll I
had expected. A good, vicious liar is
too single-minded to show weakness in public.
Later I learned he had cancelled the rest of the day’s events due to
“fatigue,” so his look of despair had only been an honest expression—a dangerous
habit in the most high-stakes popularity contest in world history.
No, it didn’t seem like he had it in him. George W. Bush had been given everything his
whole life but he learned to scowl, rather than pout, when dissatisfied. Which is probably the main difference between
the two. Every spoiled brat has an inner
demon on hair-trigger alert in case the hired help brings porridge that’s too
cold, but Mitt grew up actually trying to impress his somewhat reasonable
father, whereas little George simply never cared about properly coloring within
the lines. When called upon by Dad and
his oil buddies to get onstage Georgie did as he was told, but coped by flaunting
his contempt for the world at every possible opportunity.
Mitt, however, just seemed confused. When caught off-guard he would sputter like a
short-circuiting robot and cycle through a repertoire of clumsy phrases that he
didn’t write himself. The man kind of
looked like a President, and had enough money to hire all the planners and
experts he needed, but probably never had the dimmest spark of an idea what purpose
he’d be serving at the most powerful job in the land, beyond bragging rights, of
course.
In reality, Mitt has no real political convictions, not
even bad ones. He is a naïve son of
privilege who’s actually dumb enough to believe that he deserves to win just
because he thinks of himself as a winner.
The blind spots that develop over time with this kind of psychology are
easy to exploit by a determined opponent, which is why his first race for
office ended in ruin. Even with truckloads
of bullion and a favorable political climate, in 1994 the can-do entrepreneur was
savagely ground into pink sludge by Ted Kennedy in a humiliating 17-point loss. And soon he recongealed, neither humbled nor
wiser, and went straight back to grinning like a schmuck in pursuit of power
for which he had no use. Like Bush,
Romney is scum. Unlike Bush, he doesn’t
know it.
The ominous signs of an unbalanced twerp began to manifest
at least as early as his prep school days in Michigan. For kicks young Mitt would dress up like a
state trooper and pull over drivers cruising the Interstate. This was good, I thought, because police
impersonation is a crime and perhaps now he could be flushed. I immediately drew up plans to have him
arrested, maybe in a pre-dawn raid on his hotel room in a swing state, but then
discovered that the statute of limitations had long since expired.
My tolerance for the youthful indiscretions of public
figures is in fact very high. If the
general population were to more broadly share in this attitude then more people
could participate in politics than just the handful of operators powerful enough
to burn the body and cover their tracks.
But this odd little sado-role-playing act of Mitt’s pertains to the ugly
present all too well, in that it highlights his strange disconnect between his
actions and the people they affect, an unsettling quirk that stayed lodged in
his psyche as he metastasized into adulthood.
In college he kept playing dress-up and falsely arresting his
peers. Once he joined a protest—against the peace movement, but never found
the time to join the military himself. At
the height of the Vietnam War he spent a couple of years as a missionary living
in a mansion in Paris, and when he learned that his father had begun to
criticize the war, he changed his position too, because winners are smart like
that.
By the 1970s he was married with children, and whatever
rascality with which he was born had begun to stiffen. He went to Harvard while living off stock he had
received from his father, and after graduation followed in the old man’s
footsteps and entered the private sector. This soon led him to Bain & Company, where
he toiled away as a strategic adviser to Monsanto, at the time facing lawsuits from
poisoned veterans for its role in the production of Agent Orange. His hard work helped the company grow and
even thrive as it continued to claim that its other toxic chemical products,
then devastating the Lake Michigan of Mitt’s childhood, weren’t really toxic at
all.
His career went on like this for some time, and by all accounts
he had hit his stride, roaming the world like a vampire hunting for lonely orphans. Workers fired en masse with their jobs
shipped to China. Dirty money from
foreign criminals. An unnecessary
bailout. More pollution. Aborted fetus disposal business, cigarettes peddled
to children, and even a bit of porn. The
occasional enterprise that didn’t
appear as a front for Satan or the work of some shameless pimp was also welcome,
as even today more people have heard of Staples than Stericycle.
After his embarrassing loss to Kennedy in 1994, Mitt limped
back to business and resumed stockpiling banknotes. But the allure of political prestige again overwhelmed
his more basic instinct for self-enrichment, and he soon landed a gig as
President and CEO of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Corruption had been
rampant, as is always the case when cities plead with the International
Committee to pick their location over others, and with Mitt as the new face of the
Games it was a simple matter of finding some scapegoats and then paying their
legal expenses when they proved a willingness to keep quiet. He doled out contracts to firms willing to
donate to the festivities, including Marriott International, on whose board of
directors he was then serving.
But written conflict-of-interest agreements are only
followed by chumps and those who can’t get away with it. Mitt could and did, and topped off his stint
by awarding a nice, plump contract to the same gentleman who admitted to
bribing Olympics officials in the first place.
Heading the Olympics was enough of a résumé booster to help
him win
the Massachusetts Governor’s office shortly thereafter, in a race largely
bankrolled by himself. He called his
views “progressive” and slimed his opponent, the State Treasurer, for being too
cozy with big business. Within two years
he decided it was time to move on to the presidency, and made no attempt at
reelection when his term ended with a 39% approval rating.
I never had much doubt that Mitt Romney would lose to Barack Obama
if he ever made it past the Republican primaries. But politics is essentially a death sport,
with millions of lives hanging in the balance, and it would be the height of
irresponsibility to let this tone-deaf jerk wander into the White House on
account of my own overconfidence.
As fate would have it, the Republican National Convention was
going to be held in Tampa, not that far from my potato-launching operations
center. It would be out of range even
with a rifled cannon or finned potatoes, but close enough to casually visit in
person. When the time came I headed out and
began prowling around downtown. Michelle
Bachmann was hosting a public screening of some documentary about the Occupy
protests and their connection to the Great Invisible Anarcho-Muslim-Communist
Threat or something, but the security guard wouldn’t let me in. I thought it would be cute if Bachmann would sign
my pocket copy of the Constitution but the security detail simply wouldn’t hear
of it, and probably neither would the nearby cluster of ridiculous police
informants posing as grungy radicals.
Some Tea Party leader from Idaho came out of the cordoned-off screening
area muttering about not liking someone’s accent, so I followed him for a while
to see where he’d go. We passed endless
squads of riot cops on bicycles wearing adorable short-shorts and a crazed mob of
religious zombies screaming “HOMO-SEX IS SIN” into a bullhorn. After the Tea Party guy disappeared into a
hotel, I wandered into a group of Ron Paul delegates on a street corner
grumbling about their treatment at the convention. Their Maine delegation had been stripped of
credentials based on some trumped up technicality, so they were planning to
storm the convention center at 5pm in protest.
It is an odd feeling to cheer on a group of people striving
to nuke every social program under the sun, but the truth is they had indeed been
cheated, and unlike the other delegates they were motivated by something bigger
than the typical poll-tested hodge-podge of vague slogans. To the Paulites, hating the gubmint meant
militarism as well as clean air regulations, domestic surveillance as well as
food stamps. Their quest to capture the
Republican Party and turn it into some kind of neo-Jeffersonian force for peace
in the world was perhaps naïve but far more noble than the mutant blather
spouted by the pro-Romney hacks at the podium inside the center.
The official convention script seemed to boil down to transferring
tax revenue from the sick and old to weapons contractors and the already
wealthy, but it was cynically packaged in the quaint imagery of red barns and
small towns. I wished the Paulfolk well,
but knew they were condemned to an eternity of continued humiliation within the
GOP, or even worse, as doomed electoral suicide bombers in one third party or
another, constantly losing elections, shedding devotees, and being blamed for
“spoiling” the election for everyone else.
I moved on to a restaurant and guzzled an ale.
Small business had been hit pretty hard by the
convention. Many restaurants and snack
shacks had ordered more perishable inventory than they could sell now that
traffic was disrupted by check points and barricades. Lettuce
and cold cuts were going bad and delegates were spending their money in more
upscale establishments, so I tried my hardest to make up the difference by
piously ordering IPAs and double-whiskeys.
From there I went straight to a nomination-viewing party to
watch Romney’s big moment. It was a few
blocks away from the local marina where Mitt’s biggest donors had famously gathered
on a yacht to suckle champagne and hump their duly-elected public servants. The viewing party was in a dimly-lit hall equipped
with a projector screen and a buffet. I
immediately began gathering free food, but after a few minutes, began to notice
that everyone else was wearing a suit.
And almost everyone else was a foreigner, except for the event hosts,
who soon introduced themselves as representatives of the State Department.
I was in the middle of a nest of Foreign Service operatives
cultivating contacts from abroad, led by an emcee who wouldn’t shut up for the
convention speeches! No drinks either…a
shameful “party” for our visitors whose first taste of American culture was bad
hors d’oeuvres and self-important bureaucrats.
I stormed out in disgust and fetched some ale from next door, downed
what I could, and returned just in time for Mitt to recite his lines.
A British journalist interviewed me after the speech and I denounced
poor Mittens as a clueless oligarch who should be frozen in carbonite for
display in the lobby of AFL-CIO headquarters.
The bloke seemed surprised that a Yank would view Mitt as scornfully as the
majority of the rest of the world, and chuckled to himself as we concluded. An Al Jazeera reporter got wind of this and wired
me up to debate an angry-looking Romney supporter from the University of
Florida, but the satellite uplink wouldn’t connect so I left my scowling
opponent to his own devices. On my way
out of the hall a Japanese news program grabbed me for one last interview, which
I guess means there’ll be a video of me floating around the internet until the
end of time, railing against our free republic’s conversion into a militarized police
state, my Irish skin pinkened by the hot Tampa sun, several ales strong, complete
with Japanese subtitles.
But I knew this wasn’t enough to keep Mitt out of the White
House. The guy was a damn bot, and it
would take more than a few shots in the international media to fry his
programming. In the end I found myself embracing
the more traditional method of knocking on doors and making calls to other swing
states. It did the trick and Mitt lost
Florida by a hair and the national popular vote by 2.8 points. I celebrated on election night by drinking a
great deal of rum and launching potatoes towards Romney’s regional campaign
office after the polls closed in the Pacific Time Zone, and kept firing until a
total of three car alarms went off and my last potato landed in glory with a heavy
clang. There wasn’t any mambo on the
radio that night, it being a Tuesday, but the samba was nice and there were no campaign
commercials to interrupt my private party.
My target was located in a strip mall next to a tanning
salon, which doesn’t make much sense in Florida, but then again neither does
Romney. A creature born with everything who
always wanted more and probably still doesn’t know why he chased after the
presidency is indeed a curious beast. If
he could do it all over again and win as a Democrat he probably would, which is
why he didn’t deserve to be president, and ultimately why he lost the election. With no serious inner convictions the guy is
purely the product of the deals he’s made and the high-priced advisers who tell
him what to say and even what to believe.
That’s a dangerously compromised personality to have at the top of the
pyramid, and we are better off without him.
Farewell Mitt! It’s
nothing personal. But this time you
lost, and I much prefer Winning.
