UNMITTIGATED GALL

2/6/08

Thank God that Mitt Romney will not get near the Oval Office.

Mr. Romney is fond of telling people that he would be a good president because he has had a job in the “real economy.” Normally, being in favor of the Founding Father’s conception (admittedly often honored in the breach in their cases) of public service as being something one does as a brief, required, and largely selfless respite from whatever one does for a living, I would find such an argument persuasive. However, in Mr. Romney’s case, the electorate thus far has resoundingly and repeatedly told him that what he considers “the real economy,” private equity and management consulting, is not what they consider the “real economy.” And, given the role private equity and management consulting will prove to have had in the decimation our economy is currently experiencing, the voters don’t trust a man with his credentials to fix our economic problems. That Mr. Romney ever was in this race is further evidence of how completely out of touch, and beholden to the moneyed interests, the Republican Party is.

Admittedly, one has to have an outsized ego in order to run for President, and one might even argue that one has to have an outsized ego in order to be a good President, though the humility of Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the most underrated president in American history, offers a counter-argument. However, a grotesquely outsized ego, and that is what we are experiencing in the continued persistence of Mitt Romney in his self-financed, delusional quixotic quest for a job that he feels is his entitlement, is truly frightening.

Even the television addled American electorate has the gumption to reject candidates who assume that they have all the answers and could solve all our problems if only the benighted masses would see fit to accept the gift of their presence they are generously offering us. Or at least Americans have the sense to vote for Democrats if that is what they are seeking in their elected officials.

Normally, one would think that the GOP’s rejection of Mitt Romney would be a good sign both for the GOP and for the good sense of the American people. However, rejecting him for the odious John McCain dashes any brief glimmer of optimism that can be derived from Romney’s well deserved demise.