Who Is the New Mitt Romney?

It’s the pre-start of the pre-Presidential election of 2016. We begin our quadrennial speculation of what new Mitt Romney incarnation will appear in our living rooms during this cycle.

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The foundation of each Romney campaign has been his resume. Successful in business, created a varying astronomical number of jobs, extreme wealth, and so on.

There are disadvantages to this approach. The resume has a flip side. The free market has a base philosophy. Individuals acting selfishly will, as a byproduct, benefit society as a whole. Jobs will be created, products will be produced, competition will help consumers. But the base motivation is … well … base. The benefits to others are incidental. The key impulse is the quest for profit.

When profit is the bottom line, the accidental effect will not always be positive. Layoffs, the raiding of pensions, the torpedoing of competitors, the closing of plants, contractual disputes, will often become part of the ongoing process. The faith and hope of Adam Smith was that, when all the human pluses and costs are totaled, the aggregate would be positive.

So the Romney record was, as it had to be, littered with the professional bodies of ordinary people. Opposition ads almost wrote themselves.

They told us that it wasn’t personal. It was business.

– Mary Jo who lost her job at Sensata Inc, October 16, 2012

A resume based campaign often campaigns against itself, as great wealth itself brings a more personal disadvantage. Every Romney campaign brought new disconnects.

I’ll tell you what. 10,000 bucks? Ten-thousand-dollar bet?

– Mitt Romney, to Rick Perry on Healthcare, December 10, 2011

I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re gonna get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.

– Mitt Romney, January 8, 2012

…they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved heh heh production to Wisconsin.

– Mitt Romney, March 28, 2012

But the deepest problem was the apparent lack of core values in the campaign, or in Mr. Romney himself. Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom was asked whether political positions advocated by Mitt Romney during the primaries might be rejected in the general election against President Obama. Mr. Fehrnstrom blurted out the standard that proved to be the campaign’s guiding star.

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

– Eric Fehrnstrom, appearing on CNN on behalf of the Romney campaign, March 21, 2012

The vacuousness of the Romney positioning seemed to come together in one campaign stump speech, reported by conservative Mark Steyn in the National Review.

I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.

– Mitt Romney, quoted January 22, 2012

The absence of core political beliefs, the etch-a-sketch philosophy, the stump speech that was a satire of itself, seemed to me to come together in one brief explanation. Mitt Romney had been recorded explaining the difficulty in getting 47% of America to accept responsibility for their own lives. In November of last year, Mitt looked back on the lessons of that remark.

My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man. If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.

Mitt Romney, to the New York Times, September, 2014

It is the television Madman philosophy, openly expressed. It is Mitt Romney apologizing for failing to recognize his real audience. If he had, he says, he would have expressed an entirely different core belief.

A new core belief will be prepared for 2016. Instead of deriding those struggling to escape poverty, he will base his new campaign on eradicating poverty. That’s the ticket.

Peggy Noonan, seldom the wellspring of wisdom she imagines as herself, does hit the problem of Romneyism on the head.

There is no such thing as Romneyism and there never will be. Mr. Romney has never encompassed a philosophical world. He has never become the symbol of an attitude toward government, or an approach to freedom or fairness. “Romneyism” is just “Mitt should be president.” That is not enough.

– Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2014

Authenticity is an elusive quality in politics. To one with a reputation as an habitual shapeshifter, authenticity remains a very high bar. But Mitt Romney has talent and resources. He has access to the most advanced techniques and the best brains in image construction.

He and his panel of experts are constructing a new campaign incarnation, complete with a new message, different from anything he’s ever tried before. Mitt Romney needs one final element to become President Romney.

He needs to put his people to work manufacturing authenticity.

This article is a collaboration between MadMikesAmerica and FairandUnbalanced.com.

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