The episode highlights what’s really wrong with Romney. He’s kind of lame, and he’s really ... annoying. He keeps saying these ... things, these incredibly off-key things. Then he apologizes immediately—with all the sincerity of a hostage. Or maybe he doesn’t: sometimes he whines about the subsequent attacks on him. But the one thing he never does? Man up, double down, take his lumps.
In 1987, this magazine created a famous hubbub by labeling George H.W. Bush a “wimp” on its cover. “The Wimp Factor.” Huge stir. And not entirely fair—the guy had been an aviator in the war, the big war, the good war, and he was even shot down out over the Pacific, cockpit drenched in smoke and fumes, at an age (20) when in most states he couldn’t even legally drink a beer. In hindsight, Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned ... French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?
Another point of comparison with Bush Sr. is instructive. Newsweek identified Bush’s wimp problem as being laced into his adherence to an old, upper-class, WASP civic code: the idea that one does not put oneself inordinately forward. At his boarding school, students literally received grades in a category titled “Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention.” Somehow, in 1987, this magazine decided that high marks in that realm constituted a demerit. But a quarter century, one global financial meltdown, several concentrations of wealth, and many magnitudes of culture-coarsening later, that sounds like a real plus. He was magnanimous, and his magnanimity was grounded in a code of honor.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/29/michael-tomasky-a-candidate-with-a-serious-wimp-problem.html
It is a VICIOUS article--vicious. And the right won't read it.
But they won't be able to miss that cover in the supermart!
= new reply since forum marked as read
