A frank appraisal

"Sarcastic rant driven chatter" aside, Humble Elias has been a interested observer in "Brand Romney" since his unsuccessful run for the US Senate in 1994. And I freely admit to using him harshly, but what can I say?
Only that I have Menckenish tendencies.
But it is starting to look like he might be the GOP nominee for President in 2012, although this is "Brand Romney" we are talking about, they are "One and Two" so far.
If he is nominated Romney is gonna run as "Reagan 2.0", a budget balancer, a private sector job creator with the usual conservative insurgent rhetorical rubbish. If he discusses social issues at all, it will be in sotto voce which is pretty much out of the Bush Family playbook.
Romney is a good debater, but not a great debater, he rarely does well against other republicans since he can't really take a hard right shot. More often than not, he gets wilded by the opposition and rarely keeps his composure. But in a general election, these are not gonna be a tactical factors in any notional debates between President Obama and the Former Viceroy.
Moreover he is a bit of an android, he makes Al Gore look like Robin Williams, scripted and overscripted is Romney at the core.
However, Romney makes smarm, phoniness and insincerity work for him. If the debate is somehow over who is a better nicer more upstanding person, no matter how patently unctuous and insincere the delivery, it is advantage Romney phoniness and all. That is more or less how he beat Shannon O'Brien, the whole thing came around to abortion and tattoos giving Mitt a chance to badly impersonate Ward Cleaver, which given the preference for the bromides he was espousing, gave Romney the election.
If you are looking for his weaknesses, other than his rhetorical shortcomings and his Bushian reliance on political thuggees, it lies in the fact that at the end of the day, Mitt Romney is a banker, and bankers are god damned unpopular right now.
Do you think he has ever given anyone who desperately needed it, credit?
Not hardly.
Do you suppose he was an easy touch for a cash strapped business that couldn't meet its debt obligations over the short term.
I doubt it.
Frankly I strongly doubt Mitt Romney has ever done anything for anyone who makes less that $500,000 a year.
So when he starts gassing on about job creation and smarming it up about his simple old fashioned social views, the response is threefold , Mitt is a BANKER BANKER BANKER!
If he talks about values, the response is, Mitt and his Banker Values right down to the foreclosure crisis the banks handed off to the Feds.
If he talks about jobs then the response is, the only jobs Mitt ever created were for other rich white men.
As for his simple old fashioned values, well, bankers love money, not people.
Simple...