July 29th, 2012
I’ve made a habit of arguing that Mitt Romney has plenty of problems as a political commodity, but the notion that he has a “wimp” problem is just ludicrous.
Leave aside the empirical matter of whether or not Romney is a wimp. None of his political liabilities have to do with perceptions of wimpiness. If you wanted to take the worst, darkest view of his record and his persona you might argue that he’s craven, ambitious, mercenary, and grasping. If you took the most sunny view of those same characteristics you could just as easily argue that he’s intelligent, measured, flexible, and focused.
But there is no conceivable reading of Romney where his problem is that he’s a “wimp.”
The only explanation I can think of for this story is that Tina Brown has been stewing over Time’s breastfeeding milf cover for months and was determined to one-up them on the traffic-bait scale.
More on Romney and the Wimp — Jonathan Last Online July 30, 2012 at 2:05 pm
[…] always, it’s hard to defend Romney. Here’s his response to the stupid Newsweek cover: “They tried that in George Herbert […]