Mitt Romney - Acting Out The Trauma

Interesting psycho-historical angle:

I say there is almost nothing as traumatic for a politician than losing an election. Here's what might be even worse: You are an aspiring office-holder, a young and handsome and ambitious man on the rise, and your father loses an election. Dad is your hero, and then the world's goat; you start rethinking your vision of how the world works.

...I'm here to write about another loser and son: George and Mitt Romney – both almost-certain Republican presidential nominees. Pollster Lou Harris said late in 1966 that George Romney, then governor of Michigan, "stands a better chance of winning the White House than any Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower." Then, just over a year later, he was humiliated with a suddenness and intensity unprecedented in modern American political history.... His son was 19 years old. What makes Mitt – né Willard – Romney, run? Much, I think, can be understood via that specific trauma.

[George Romney's] calling card was his shocking authenticity; his courage in sticking to his positions without fear or favor was extraordinary.

...Then, most famously, there was the Vietnam War. He supported it after returning from a trip there in 1965. Then, courageously, after a second trip in 1967, he began to criticize it. On September 4, 1967, a TV interviewer asked, "Isn't your position a bit inconsistent with what it was, and what do you propose we do now?"

The line everyone remembers from his response: "When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam." But he continued with a devastating, prophetic, and one-thousand-percent-correct assessment: that staying in Vietnam would be a disaster. The public, and certainly the pundits, weren't ready to hear it. All they heard was the word "brainwashing" – not in the colloquial sense in which Romney obviously intended it, but as something literal.

...His opponent, meanwhile, running what you might call a robotic campaign, just bullshitted about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote. When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills.