What is Mitt Romney’s Problem?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Jon Cohn sends us to Joe Klein’s latest head scratching over Mitt Romney:

Romney remains a mystery to me: He’s smart, he was a good governor, he’s essentially a responsible moderate-conservative…but he has made an utter fool of himself flip-flopping and fudging–and taking wildly stupid positions (against the START treaty, for example) on issues about which he knows little or nothing. It almost seems a personality disorder. In this case, his efforts to distance himself from his own, essentially successful program, are particularly pathetic. If the man had the tiniest smidgeon of courage, he would make a conservative argument in favor of universal health care–it liberates a great deal of potential economic energy (all those would-be entrepreneurs now stuck in stultifying corporate jobs because they don’t want to leave their health plans). Or he would simply plead humanity: it’s inhumane for an industrial giant not provide health care for all its citizens.

But no. Instead we get the embarrassing spectacle of an intelligent man acting like a semi-coherent jerk.

This isn’t really a mystery, is it? Romney’s a moderate conservative who figured out sometime between 2006 and 2008 that it was no longer possible for a moderate conservative to win the Republican nomination for president. The events of the past two years have made this even clearer than before, but Romney really, really wants to be president. His only option, then, is to pretend to be a tea party conservative, but both his past record and his weak acting skills make this really hard to pull off. So he ends up sounding like a semi-coherent jerk.

This is common knowledge, isn’t it?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate