For Lack of a Better Romney

Ezra Klein quotes a friend of his, who put the election in these "depressingly clear" words:

This election is a choice between a Democratic president who voters don’t think is able to solve our economic problems and a Republican candidate who voters think is committed to the same doctrines and institutions that helped produce them.

What would the better Mitt Romney look like? Klein says that he would tell a more honest story about the human cost of doing business:

Rather than denying that Bain’s activities sometimes hurt workers, he would admit it. Rather than offering paeans to free enterprise and risk taking, he would acknowledge that the modern economy isn’t fair and is sometimes downright cruel. Workers lose their jobs, their health insurance and their self respect because management is insufficiently farsighted, or because advances in shipping technology make it cheaper to move a factory to China. But the solution, he would say, isn’t to make our companies less competitive. Rather, the answer is to make our government more compassionate and more effective in helping those left behind.

I think the quality in Romney people find most offensive is the creeping insincerity and disingenuousness that underlines his every vapid utterance, and that's a fairly accurate assessment without going into the vacuity and dullness of his tired refrains about belief in America or some other platitude. Romney's words make Obama's "Yes We Can" phrase look promisingly articulate and revealing. Unlike Obama, whose character seems to suit perfectly that all-too-twentieth-century word 'genuine', in most people's eyes Romney is a distant Wall Street master of the universe who doesn't really understand how the country works. The propensity to laugh awkwardly in uncomfortable moments and at inappropriate times is only the tip of the iceberg.

But not even Romney's status as a like-ability challenged candidate counts among his top issues as a candidate. Undoubtedly his greatest hurdle will be to give his base something in him to throw their energy behind. At the moment, I think it would be fair to say they have nothing.

Conor Friedersdorf had an interesting take on Romney's likability issues, saying that it's probably better that nobody really likes him, and cites the arguably disastrous presidency of George Bush as an example. In general, conservatives tend to be better presidents if their supporters aren't too keen on them:

The maddening things about hagiography, whether of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Mayor Rudolf Giuliani or Barack Obama, is its impracticality. There is, or so I understand, some psychological utility for boosters of national leaders. But praise, whether deserved or not, doesn't make a leader more effective; and excessive praise, which is always paired with an aversion to criticizing, always makes leaders less accountable and responsive to their constituents.