Y'know, I took no pleasure in watching Willard Mitt Romney's electoral meltdown and subsequent defeat Tuesday night.
He has campaigned nigh incessantly for an unprecedented six years straight for the US Presidency and has just exactly nothing to show for it.
A wearisome exercise that helped morph a twitchy ass-kissing amateur into an uninteresting hack when the big hammer finally fell at 11:18PM EST, 11-6-2012.
In the end, Willard stopped simply being entertaining, his gaffes dried up at long last and he managed on nothing more than smarm, mendacity and sheer lust for power to make this a competitive race in the final weeks.
For a while there this summer, Mitt had all the makings of another Sarah Palin he literally said nothing sensible for four months straight, but late in the game he found his opportunity and ran with it right off a cliff.
I suppose there is something admirable in Romney's desire to go down with all flags flying or at least he wanted to make it look like all that money he collected from the overclass was going into a real fight to the finish.
In truth, this whole election heralds the Twilight of the MBAs.
Ah yes that strange business school mentality that asserts that the skills necessary to run a tuna cannery, high tech company or a great republic into the ground, are entirely transferable based on one's MBA from an A-List school.
This notion has been the absolute downfall of the US Private Sector during this current recession and it got a rude awakening on Tuesday.
You just can't treat the US Presidency as a natural corporate promotion...Romney tried it free and clear in a National Election and it did not work.
And when you partner all this up with Romney's almighty intellectual disconnect from the great issues of the day and his rhetorical limitations you get a recipe for disaster.
You could tell even as the race tightened that Mitt knew something was wrong, why else did he suddenly defect to the classic Massachusetts GOP Gubernatorial playbook in the final weeks?
Run to the center, play to the independents, deflect the oppositions ground game via commercials and try to rise above it all.
Put it another way Romney tried to address accusations that he changed his mind a lot by...changing his mind.
In the end none of it was enough, the coalition he sought to create was too narrow, too backwards, too bent on punishing others with a tendency to...vote, and for a man who trumpeted his independence, Romney was pretty clearly the complete captive of the GOP's tea partei base even if there might have been mutual contempt going back and forth on both sides.
But its over now, Romney's twelve years at the top of US Politics has come to a tedious and slightly tawdry close.
This blog started with him as Governor in 2003 at the start of his desperate run for ever high office, Humble Elias has been at a remove from Romney nigh these twenty two years but always an interested observer of his many many political personas.
He had none of Nixon's dark charm or Reagan's loopiness or the Bush Family's crime family patina...Nope in the end Romney was just a hapless too ambitious MBA who wanted to outdo his Dad in the worst possible way, and so he did.
