Despite his millions, the picture-perfect family and an overpowering campaign organization, Romney becomes his own worst nightmare every time he dishes half-truths and exaggerations and dissembles about his religious and political views, pointlessly trying to persuade the so-called Christian Right that he is one of them.
If it continues, he may not win his party's nomination. The irony, which his halting marches through Iowa and New Hampshire underscored is this: No Republican candidate is better qualified, organized or energized to take on the Democrats.
Substantive general election debates between Romney and either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are exactly what the American electorate wants and needs. It could happen if Romney would stop with the intellectual pandering that only suggests he may have lost track of the consistent personal convictions he once had, ones necessary to be the world's reliable "go to" guy.
Unlike his inspirational father, whose candidacy imploded over a single, truthfully fervent, if ill-considered broadside ("When I came back from Vietnam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get."), Mitt's protracted scuttling of his own campaign is excruciating and bone-headed.
Romney mangled his father's stellar civil rights legacy by exaggerating George's relationship with Martin Luther King. Instead of apologizing, he set his flacks to parsing and spinning.
Romney's inability to empathize with common folk is longstanding. As an LDS stake president, he was kind, though often impatient and patronizing, with members who didn't measure up. Once, he joked that a church-sponsored social group for older single adults he championed was a club for "quitters and losers."
Instead of the noblesse oblige expected of one so well-born, recall his bumbling as he praised a New Hampshire baker by evoking memories of a similar bakery "near my father's summer home." Or, the unintentional one-upping he gave the proud father of a daughter at Michigan State: "My brother's on the board of trustees."
When Mitt finally threw his hat in the political ring nearly 15 years ago, friends assumed the acorn had fallen near the stalwart oak. The son would be smart, kind and perhaps slightly cagier than the old man. The son would talk proudly about his principled dad who recognized that Martin Luther King stood for the right. He would rhapsodize about the '64 GOP convention in San Francisco when his proud father rose indignantly and stalked out, a visually arresting slap at the heavy-handed soldiers of the radical right.
One would expect that no son-of-George would ever allow one of the more guileless members of his campaign team to take the fall for its misbegotten attempt to involve LDS Church leaders in its efforts to secure support from BYU-affiliated business school groups. But Mitt did.
One would think no heir-to-George would pin blame on his eldest son for the illegal immigrants working in the family garden. But Mitt did. No loyal husband would gracelessly roll his own wife under the bus ("Her contributions are for her and not for me. Her positions are not terrible [sic] relevant to my campaign.") to dodge accountability for his own previous support for Planned Parenthood.
Would anyone think less of Romney if, instead, he had responded with indignation? He might have said, but didn't: "No member of my team should discuss fundraising schemes with an apostle of my church." Or, "I should have canned that lawn service myself long ago." Or, "Planned Parenthood funds many programs worth supporting that have nothing to do with abortion."
The question of the moment is this: Have his recent limited successes in Iowa and New Hampshire given the tin man new heart and fresh courage? At long last, will the moderate independent thinker who was an early supporter of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition that promoted fiscally sound and socially responsible public policies, the real Mitt Romney, finally stand-up?
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* RB SCOTT is a founding editor of People magazine and writer for Life magazines. He has followed Mitt Romney's political career since 1993.
