Not in his father's footsteps
Mitt romney, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race last week, will go down as the most robotic big-ticket presidential candidate in history -- "the Platonic ideal of inauthenticity," as Harold Meyerson put it in a Washington Post column. I chalk it up to psychobiography. Growing up, he learned that authenticity kills.
It's perfectly normal for young boys to view their fathers as terrestrial gods. The young Romney's experience was unique in that the rest of the country thought his dad a terrestrial god too.
It all started with the Rambler. Already by the late 1950s, Detroit was breaking out in cold sweats at mounting competition from more fuel-efficient imports. The auto industry was only getting what it deserved, George Romney, then chairman of American Motors Corp., would thunder "wherever he could find a soapbox," as Time magazine put it in a 1959 cover profile. He would pull a toy dinosaur from his briefcase: "This fellow here is triceratops. He had the biggest radiator ornament in prehistoric history. It kept getting bigger and bigger until finally he could no longer hold up his head. He had a wheelbase of nearly 30 feet."
Dramatic pause.
"Who wants to have a gas-guzzling dinosaur in his garage?"
His Rambler was small, but that didn't keep Romney from sleeping in it some nights during the 70,000 miles he traveled in 1958 to preach its wonders. It was a hit and a pop-culture sensation, the subject of a million-selling ditty about the "Little Nash Rambler" that bagged a Cadillac on the road without shifting out of second gear.
Pundits swooned; "George Wilcken Romney, at 51, is a broad-shoulder, Bible-quoting brother of a man who burns brightly with the fire of missionary zeal," Time's profile began.
A political career soon followed. But an unconventional one. Michigan was holding a new convention to replace its inadequate Constitution and needed a reconciling figure to manage the task. Romney was chosen -- and before the convention had hardly begun, he was being talked up as a presidential contender. He was Michigan's James Madison.
By the time the new Constitution passed in 1963, he was the state's governor -- a Republican in a Democratic state where the United Auto Workers was almighty. That holy grail of the pundit class, bipartisanship, runneth over. "Romney Prestige Lifts on Narrow Vote Victory," said the New York Times headline. His prestige could hardly lift more. As talk turned in the White House to the 1964 election, John F. Kennedy uttered, "The one fellow I don't want to run against is Romney." The first full-dress biography of him had been already published three years earlier.
