The narcissistic fantasy of Mitt Romney 2016

The prospect of a third Mitt Romney run for the White House is really getting me down. I don’t just mean that I think it’s ridiculous. Jonathan Chait has written that (very funny) column already. I mean that the thought of Romney throwing his hat into the ring yet again is actually making me sullen.

For the better part of a year, I’ve been telling friends and family members that there’s no way Romney would run again. (Here I am saying as much last summer.) And now it looks like I might have been wrong. But the issue isn’t that I may have made a bum call as a columnist. I now realize it’s not so much that I didn’t think he would run as that I didn’t and still don’t want him to run — and not because I’m a Democrat and think he’d be such a formidable opponent.

Quite the opposite.

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The reason I don’t want Romney to run is that I think he’s a decent and in some ways admirable man — and if he runs he’s likely to make an utter fool of himself. It will be a transparent display of world-historical neediness — a campaign based on nothing but his own supposed wonderfulness. Yes, running for president is always a megalomaniac’s game. But even by that standard, a third Romney bid would be noteworthy for its narcissism.

How do I know this? Because I’ve been observing Romney for a long time.

I was teaching political science at Brigham Young University and living in Salt Lake City back in the late 1990s when Romney swooped into town to galvanize the foundering organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Like many of my Mormon students at BYU, he was a little too earnest for my taste, but like the best of those students, he was impressive — exuding ambition, confidence, and competence. That impression persisted in my mind after I moved away from Utah in 2000. The Salt Lake Olympics went off without a hitch, and Romney went on to become governor of Massachusetts. A Republican elected in Kennedyland? I knew there was something formidable about him.

Then came the first campaign for president.

There were three elements to Romney’s 2008 run for the White House. First, champion the religious right. Second, out-hawk everyone (including George W. Bush) on the War on Terror. Third, demonstrate domestic-policy accomplishment by touting how he’d engineered and instituted a sweeping health care reform plan in Massachusetts that had made coverage nearly universal in the state. The first two campaign planks didn’t appeal to me at all — indeed, I’d taken an early swipe at Romney on the religion question in a January 2007 cover story for The New Republic — but the last one sounded impressively pragmatic and reformist to me.

That Romney didn’t get very far.

The mood in the country, and in the GOP, was profoundly different four years later when Romney tried again. This time there was no talk of religion, and much less about foreign policy. You see, Romney now had a big problem. The signature achievement of his single term as governor of Massachusetts had been a model for the signature achievement of Barack Obama’s first term as president: the Affordable Care Act, which was universally detested among Republicans.

Romney responded to this predicament by making the most tortured appeal to federalism I’ve every heard. Health care reform in Massachusetts was nothing to be ashamed of, you see, because it was done at the state level. But imposed on the country as a whole as Obama and the Democratic Congress had done in 2010 — well, that’s nothing less than the End of Freedom in America. And then change the subject.

It is a testament to Romney’s not-inconsiderable gifts as a politician that he was able to pull off this two-step in debate after debate during the interminable GOP primary season of 2011 and 2012, and on into the general election campaign, without once breaking out in laughter or breaking down in tears.

Aside from its absurdity, the strategy left Romney with very little to talk about besides how much he loved America, and how his experience as a venture capitalist taught him how to create jobs. Had Romney not emphasized his business background at the expense of concrete policy proposals, the worst stumbles of the general election campaign — above all, the egregious flattery of entrepreneurs and the denigration of 47 percent of the country as moochers — might not have proven quite so damaging to the campaign. What voters were left with was a unified portrait of a man seemingly fixated on wealth and his own personal, nearly miraculous powers of job-creation.

That simply wasn’t enough to win.

And yet he apparently wants to try again in 2016 — when he’ll invariably have even less to offer.

Let me explain.

Romney 2008 is dead and buried. His successor came up short — and the economy has since rebounded more quickly and more strongly than even he himself had predicted for his own presidency. That means Romney 2012 is dead and buried, too.

And that means that any Romney 2016 campaign will need yet another Mitt. A Third Romney. This Romney won’t be able to run as the man who accomplished health care reform in Massachusetts. And he won’t be able to run as a job-creating superhero.

What’s left?

The answer is nothing. Nothing besides the contentless ambition, confidence, and competence I first detected in him back in 1999. Romney 2016 will be Proficiency Personified — the ultimate Manager-in-Chief — a consultant for hire, ready, willing, and eager to take charge of the country and do… I actually have no idea what he would do. And neither do you.

And neither does he.

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat touched on this core truth in a humorous tweet written a few days before writing a more polished (but less incisive) column on the once-and-future Romney. Envisioning a seemingly endless series of Romney presidential runs, Douthat tweeted: “Romney 2016: Reform conservative. Romney 2020: Buchananite. Romney 2024: Rothbardian. Romney 2028: Neo-reactionary.”

One needn’t assume that Romney will drift ever-further rightward to recognize the reality captured here — namely, that the substance of the man is protean, fluid, in flux. Which is just another way of saying that by this point in his public life there is no real substance at all. Just plastic, ready to be molded into just about anything.

The contrast with another Republican who ran three times for president — Ronald Reagan — could not be starker. Whether or not you agreed with his agenda, Reagan obviously wanted to be president because he had something specific to accomplish.

All Romney wants to accomplish is becoming president.

Which isn’t to say he wants it for purely selfish reasons. On the contrary, as far as his wife Ann is concerned, there’s something touchingly selfless (but still breathtakingly self-regarding) about Mitt’s single-minded fixation on winning the White House. As The New York Times recently noted, relying on unnamed “advisers,” Ann “believes deeply that her husband owes it to the country to take a serious look at running a third time.”

No, actually Ann, he doesn’t owe us anything at all. We’ll get along just fine without your Indispensable Man. Let him off the hook. Tell him to get a hobby and enjoy his quarter-billion-dollar fortune for a change. That’s assuming, of course, that he can be satisfied with serving as something less than the single-handed Savior of the United States of America.

The alternative is to let him enact his narcissistic fantasy on the national stage yet again. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that — for his sake no less than ours.