Gravitas?

I’m beginning to think that Mitt Romney’s real problem is that he is just plain dumb. Consider, even after three full years of public life Romney cannot get the hang of the GOP’s “moderate racket” the easiest best paying sinecure in modern politics. In return for posing no threat to the internal dominance of the praetorian class in the GOP, a canny republican moderate can grab off committee chairmanships in congress and make excellent money as cable chat show talking head. Sheer dopes like Senator Lincoln Chaffee and utter laggards like Senator Arlen Specter can do the classic “moderate shuffle” in their sleep for ghod’s sake. Romney however, is perfectly hopeless, every time he opens his mouth about some burning social issue he sounds like a poor pathetic passage aggressive nerd.
In the last week alone we have discovered that Governor Romney is against gay marriage and partner benefits except where cirumstances force him to favor civil unions. Thanks to his speech in South Carolina on monday we now know that Mitt becomes a unswerving opponent of abortion whenever he crosses the state line on an outbound flight. In truth the Governor has been both for and against abortion in rapid and bewildering succession depending on whats at stake and where he is located in the continental U.S.A. Lastly his stem cell research policy, is naught but embarassingly incoherent buncombe.
A true blue GOP moderate, would excuse these equivocations and evasions as the natural consequences of charting the middle course and go back to playing the grinning toadying token without a qualm. Yet for all that, Mitt is collecting few kudos for his alleged moderation. Probably because moderation is nothing but a sham and a pose in the GOP and so therefore it harms Romney’s Presidential prospects to have too moderate an image.

On the other hand, if Mitt was a mainstream conservative he’d simpy, denounce all homosexuals, abortions, and cloned embryos and then retire to his office to await the usual plaudits from Scot Lehigh for his devotion to principle. This stance would at least get him some traction in Iowa and New Hampshire, it is a formula for impotence on Beacon Hill, but the long term benefits are easy to see.
Then why all the ifs ands and buts?? Easy, Mitt still has to get re-elected and being an inexperienced amateur politician he making the sort of mistakes that common to a county commissioner in their first term. Alas poor Willard, his compuslive need to sound off on everything gets him not credit either as squish or a neanderthal-something that must bug him assuming he is smart enough to recognize his own damn foolishness.
Frankly, the man is a amateur and it really shows at times like this. All his sinister reptilian aides and sycophants cannot do anything else with him, Romney just lacks the requisite grand political instincts. Mitt’s dad George Romney the former Governor of Michigan was dopey like this too. He ran his mouth off about Viet Nam and was out of the running for President before a single vote was cast in 1968. A more seasoned Governor, a Dukakis or a Sargent, would have stayed out of South Carolina and the seductions of out of state wowsers until they had their own ducks in a row.
Not Mitt, every time he opens his mouth his lack of gravitas becomes more and more apparent.