I knew there was something wrong with Mitt Romney, really wrong, when my mom – a daughter of Pennsylvania’s steel mill country, but a dedicated Republican, told me back in 2012, “I just don’t like him.” Of course, those steel mills are all gone now, moved to China by guys who either were, or looked exactly like, Mitt Romney. Now he’s finally calling it quits as a senator, apparently by popular demand. His departure is cause for celebration. Mitt Romney is a bad person who pretends to be a good person. He is the blow-dried embodiment of everything awful about the Republican Party that used to be. The only good thing about him is the riddance.
Mitt Romney is an empty $5,000 suit, a human Mad-Lib who tries to fill in the blanks with whatever his audience wants to hear. He is Eddie Haskell with incredible hair, who believes in nothing except the desperate imperative of his own success. That success, of course, has been limited – Mitt will be remembered for his failures. Love Trump or hate him, you have to respect the way The Bad Orange Man serially humiliated Mitt by encouraging his ambitions right up to the point where Trump publicly snatched back whatever job he was dangling in front of Romney’s nose. Brutal, and totally deserved.
Mitt believes he deserves the awe of the peasants; why is not so clear. Mitt got quite a head start in life because his dad was a rich guy deep inside Republican politics, and this grates on him. Mitt pulled himself up by his Gucci straps, unlike his nemesis JD Vance, who pulled himself up by his combat boot straps. JD, who was born into desperate poverty and actually worked his way up, was a United States Marine. Mitt couldn’t be troubled to serve in anything but his own cause. His only interaction with Vietnam was to ship American jobs there. The hard, dirty work of actually serving the country – instead of posing for pics with Old Glory fluttering in the background – is the job of the JD Vances of our country, and one of the few American jobs Mitt did not seek to outsource. Mitt couldn’t be bothered to put on a uniform, nor could any of his 72 rich children – Tugg, Bugg. Mugg, Skipper, Dipper, Nipper, Chip, Clip, Whip, and Chester, to name a few. Some of the news reports of Mitt Romney’s retirement from self-service mention that none of his sons are Republicans. That figures.
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Think of Mitt as Judge Smails from “Caddyshack,” only less amusing and with more estrogen. He represents the worst of the rich guy Republicans, who look down on normal Americans and are absolutely livid when the proles get uppity and pick a guy like Donald Trump over them. They are not always as utterly unctuous as Mitt – we once had guys like George H.W. Bush, who would never be confused with being a man of the people and who was famously baffled by a grocery store checkout counter. This is the guy who announced, “Message: I care,” and you could just see him looking at how Ronald Reagan could connect with the riff-raff and how he absolutely could not, and wanting to scream, “What the hell do you little people want from me?”
But at least he balanced out his condescension with noblesse oblige – Bush the Elder literally got shot down in World War II right off an island full of Japanese cannibals. The greatest danger Mitt Romney ever faced was getting a lumber strain from cinching those mom jeans too tightly about his sternum, or scratching his paws while awkwardly shaking the rough hands of the farmers at the Iowa State Fair before running to his limo and getting the hell away from those people.
You hear from a few folks that Mitt Romney is a genuinely good man, but I haven’t seen it. All I’ve seen is pure ambition. He worked for Bain Capital gutting our country and ruining Americans’ lives. He was a complete empty vessel, and he tried to fill himself with whatever he thought was going to get him ahead. This was the guy who created the predicate to Obamacare – and only the Republicans could be a party stupid enough to nominate the guy who did that in a national election race where the marquee issue was opposition to Obamacare. When he was governor of Massachusetts, before Massachusetts stopped being useful and Utah started, he was all in on the soft lib GOP vibe. But running in 2012 he became “severely conservative” because he thought that was what the voters wanted to hear. If this guy had gotten elected, we would’ve still had the corrective of Trump, just later. Mitt was another eager caretaker of the failed establishment. He just wanted to manage the decline more efficiently.
But you could always see the bitterness and weakness in his character. It was on full display when last cycle he shivved fellow senator Mike Lee in the back for the crime of being more popular and effective, but it manifested much earlier. He hired Ric Grenell to be his campaign’s foreign policy advisor, and when some people complained that Ric was gay, a real man would’ve told those critics not to let the door hit them on the butt as they left. But principle is not Mitt’s jam. He rolled over and fired the loyal Grenell. Maybe Ric has forgiven him – that’s between them – but I don’t, because I see no admission of wrongdoing or contrition. Mitt doesn’t do either of those things.
Instead, Mitt turns on his loyal supporters just like another rich kid turned pol, George W. Bush did. Mitt doesn’t think he lost in 2012 because his establishment friends, including the regime media, nuked him. He certainly can’t blame himself, though he was the one who rolled onto his back and showed his belly to Candy Crowley, among other wretched acts of submission. He blames those of us who turned out and voted for him. Turning on the Great Unwashed helps him avoid uncomfortable conversations at the country club. Now he’s the guy the regime media can go to who will reliably trash those actual Republicans actually fighting for what Mitt Romney once pretended to actually believe.
Today, he’s all in on the fads, from Donald Trump being a threat to Our Democracy to climate change. Remember when he decided to go walk with the BLM scumbags? They were puzzled to see him there, but it was no surprise to those of us who had once backed him and been discarded. You might not have noticed, but Mitt Romney is white – so white that he thinks Canadians count as “diversity.” This was just more of his trademark posing, made even more laughable by its transparent insincerity. You could remake “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?” with one of the Romney boys bringing home his fiancé who is a brunette. Like many of his clique, he wants to be down with the struggle, but from a safe distance. Albert Einstein once calculated the maximum possible speed as either 1) the speed of light or 2) the speed of someone calling the Five-O if a black guy is seen walking in Mitt’s neighborhood. Romney is the kind of guy who would hang a sign reading, “In This House Black Lives Matter,” off his lawn jockey.
Now this human dollop of Miracle Whip is going away, finally, and trying to keep his dignity in the face of his latest humiliation. Even the people of Utah, who have nearly infinite patience with establishment squishes, have had enough of this buffoon. He represents the worst of the Republican Party establishment that used to be: condescending without any achievements to justify the attitude, confident in his own competence when he never managed to show any, and fussily certain of his own moral superiority for no apparent reason.
Good riddance, Mittens (HT @LarryOConnor).
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, as well as Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce. Novel number eight, Overlord, drops this fall!
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