Sen. Mitt Romney is making a big push, once again, to become the bland, seemingly benign face of the Republican party. He wants everyone to forget the fact that not unlike Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio (and don’t ever forget former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan), Romney swallowed what little he had that passed as integrity in order to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. Our country’s most vulgar symbol of moral and systemic failure obliterated the faux-”moderate” Romney, and then proceeded to get Romney to bend the knee. But like a rodent who has hid underground long enough to watch the house cat’s home burn to the ground, Romney has recently emerged—hoping to present the same old Republican Party in a better tailored suit.
On Sunday, The Atlantic published a profile on Romney titled “The Liberation of Mitt Romney.” In it Romney pretends he has always had a spine and moral values. He projects his own desires onto others in his party, saying it is they who are willing to sublimate their personal integrity for power. Writer McKay Coppins is so bowled over by Romney’s milquetoast criticisms of Trump over the past couple of weeks he writes this amazing paragraph:
In the nine years I’ve been covering Romney, I’ve never seen him quite so liberated. Unconstrained by consultants, unconcerned about reelection, he is thinking about things such as legacy, and inheritance, and the grand sweep of history. Here, in the twilight of his career, he seems to sense—in a way that eludes many of his colleagues—that he’ll be remembered for what he does in this combustible moment. “I do think people will view this as an inflection point in American history,” Romney tells me.
Romney explains that he’s not an egomaniac (he doesn’t think of himself as a “historical figure”), even though his career is the career of an egomaniac. Anywhos, Romney takes great pains to prove to Coppins that his political career is a secondary consideration to his personal life. He’s just a nice, easygoing guy. “You know, I had my career in business, I’ve got my family, my faith—that’s kind of my life, and this is something I do to make a difference. So I don’t attach the kind of—I don’t know—psychic currency to it that people who made politics their entire life.”
Not everyone he’s met in the Senate shares this outlook, he said. “People are really friendly, they’re really nice—except Bernie,” he said, laughing. “He’s a curmudgeon. It’s not that he’s mean or whatever; he just kind of scowls, you know”—Romney hunched his back and summoned a Scrooge-like grunt. “For Bernie, it seems like this is kind of who he is. It’s defining. It’s his entire person. For me, it’s part of who I am, but it’s not the whole person.”
Let’s be very clear of the implication here. That Sen. Bernie Sanders—regardless of your personal feelings about his politics—is “Scrooge-like,” and takes his politics too serious, unlike Mitt Romney, who is willing to have an expensive dinner with the devil in order to remain on friendly terms with the political party that has betrayed democracy for power. You may be a Biden fan, a Warren fan, a Clinton fan. You may cynically believe that Bernie Sanders’ ego was what led him to continue further into the 2016 primary than many in the Democratic Party wanted him to. But if your criticism of Sen. Sanders is that he believes in the policies that he presents too much, while you yourself can sort of take them or leave them in exchange for a half-second smile over scallops at a posh D.C. restaurant, you’re a dirtbag.
Sen. Mitt Romney is a dirtbag. He may be super nice. He may be very easy to talk to. He probably would be a better president than Donald Trump—but my wireless keyboard would be a better world leader than Donald Trump and it has about the same internal moral compass.