The son of revered former Gov. George Romney, who served three terms in the 1960s, received a hero’s welcome at the docks as he arrived on tiny Mackinac Island Saturday for a conference that will include dueling speeches with his archrival, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Romney, a champion flip-flopper, has painted Perry as a floppier flipper. In the high school version of the 2008 Republican primary contest, Romney was regarded by John McCain and other contenders as the loathed hall monitor, prissy and hypocritical. It’s not that he has gotten so much more popular or less plastic, though he has improved his performance. It’s just that his rivals keep getting more implausible.
The only reason Perry got in the race in the first place was that Republicans yearned for an alternative to Romney. (This weekend, they were drunk-texting Chris Christie.) But for now, Perry is proving to be Romney’s best asset.
Asked the 3am question by a moderator, Bret Baier of Fox News, what would a president Perry do if he got a call saying Pakistan had lost control of its nuclear weapons to the Taliban, the Texas governor offered a Palinesque meditation on “the Pakistani country”.
“Well, obviously, before you ever get to that point, you have to build a relationship in that region,” he said. “And that’s one of the things that this administration has not done. Just yesterday we found out through Admiral Mullen that Haqqani has been involved with – and that’s the terrorist group directly associated with the Pakistani country – so to have a relationship with India, to make sure that India knows that they are an ally of the United States.” But can he see the Taj Mahal from his house?
Romney used his new sarcasm on President Barack Obama, too, claiming the Democrat takes his inspiration from the “socialist democrats” in Europe.
“Guess what?” Romney said. “Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.”
He also poked the president on jobs: “I happen to believe that to create jobs it helps to have had a job, and I have.”
Those are strong words from a candidate whose liability is that he made a living eliminating jobs. In any other economy, working at Bain would be a bane to Romney’s presidential craving because it’s hard to trust a flip-flopper who’s a company flipper.
Romney himself has used the phrase “creative destruction” to describe what his former private equity firm, Bain Capital, excelled at: buying firms, restructuring and downsizing, and selling them for a profit. As Howard Anderson of MIT told the Washington Post ’s Karen Tumulty: “Private equity is a little like sex. When it’s good, it’s very, very good. When it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”
But in this economy, a predatory business plan from a man worth $200 million may not sound so bad. Especially now that the former community organiser is being limned as a president who was too naive and hesitant in handling the cascading crises of his first two years.
In Pretty Woman , Richard Gere played a financial shark who downsized companies; he wore expensive suits, went to polo matches and drove a sports car. (No dog or hooker tied to the roof.) Romney, by contrast, is trying to downplay his downsizing fortune and his upgrading of his snazzy La Jolla beach house.
He makes sure everyone knows about his Carl’s Jr jalapeno chicken sandwiches and his Jet Blue middle seats. And he pushes the regular-guy image in tweets: “Great deep-dish at @ginoseast”; “Just got a Trim at Tommy’s in Atlanta”; “Thanks @subway freshbuzz for breakfast. Better than the usual campaign diet of morning donuts”; “Thanks to the great @SouthwestAir crew for an easy flight.” On Friday, his adviser Ron Kaufman tweeted a picture of the candidate in an airport terminal with his laptop on his lap, presumably tweeting more encomia to fast-food emporia.
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