Editor’s Note: In this month’s letter, written before the presidential debates, I marveled at what an historically ineffectual candidate Mitt Romney turned out to be, while noting that I might have to eat my words if he surprised us all and put in a strong debate performance. Well, Mitt kicked Obama’s tired little ass on that first debate, so in honor of him, and because I mean what I say, I sat at my desk last week and ate a lunch of several carefully chosen words, all of which tasted foul, like a stump speech of actual stumps.
I don’t know what amazes and confounds me more: Mitt’s sudden come-on-strong tenacity (Mitt, why were you hiding that? And what else do you have hidden in that soul? Besides all those binders full of women) or the whole sad parade of "undecided" voters, for whom we all wait. These are the people who arrive idling at the drive-through and still don’t know what they want. You had all this time to get your order straight—people, it’s either HAMBURGER OR CHICKEN!—there is a nation waiting behind you, and you STILL aren’t quite sure what you want. Come on, admit it, you’re not just undecided. You’re anti-decided. And you’re impossibly swingy. I mean, Mitt Romney spends 18 months playing to the right wing of the political stage and then—showtime!—comes out with a one-night-only Masterpiece Theater production of Mitt Romney: The Man Who Cares Too Much, and suddenly the polls tighten like an instantaneous national cramp.
Now, having watched the second debate, the one where Obama woke up from nap-nap time, and having seen Mitt’s badgering, prickly side slip back out—a friend said he looked like he was on bath salts—I sense another slight swing back. It’s enough to make a man sea-sick. Is there a word for political nausea? I’d use it, but I might have to eat it some day.
Speaking on behalf of the media elite, I would like to apologize to the voters of this great country for our pretending, at any moment, that this election has been "neck and neck." This election has been frequently agonizing, often mind-numbing, but it has never been neck and neck, in part because Mitt Romney does not possess a neck. It’s more like a head pedestal.
Remember all that talk of a "statistical dead heat"? I never believed any of it. Truth is, this election has never been close, because it’s never been a real race. For a race, you need ignition, and this is what Mitt Romney has failed to give us, along with human feeling, economic solutions, or a logical explanation for why he’s "kind of a Snooki fan."
(Sorry, Mitt: "Look how tiny she’s gotten!" does not count.)
I have numbers and elaborate polling data that prove my point, but I am not going to foist them upon you, because I am not that kind of media elite. I am the kind that watches television and forms lasting impressions from whatever video clips they show, then alters them slightly after Candy Crowley weighs in. But this year I don’t want Candy! I don’t need Wolf Blitzer’s panel of eighteen undecided voters chewing on their own empty eleventh-hour ambivalence. If you have not formed an opinion by the time Wolf Blitzer is forced to empanel you, you do not deserve airtime. You deserve to live in Canada where they don’t have presidents and people can’t decide if they’re French.
What we all needed desperately this election was an honest reckoning, something deeper and gutsier than polls, for someone hirsute and important-looking like Wolf to scream the simple truth: Mitt Romney is not a candidate! Sure, he’s the candidate, but he’s not a candidate. It wasn’t until the final stages of what we here at GQ like to call Death Race 2012 that commentators started talking serious smack about Romney’s chances, and even then it was usually to blame the campaign—Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan had the best phrase: a "rolling calamity"—rather than to find fault with this Empty Vessel of a man. By then, it was too late and the bad-mouthing missed the point: You cannot right a rolling calamity.
Sarah Palin, the original Calamity Jane, harped that Romney just needed to "go rogue," but you know you’re in dark territory when Sarah Palin’s giving you campaign advice. (Sadly, the thought of Mitt Romney going rogue suggests pajama bottoms and mugs of cocoa.)
But the problem was always more basic and un-rogue-able than that. Throughout the history of the republic, to be one of the two people judged to be fit for the highest office, you generally had to know your way around an answer. In fact, your ability to answer questions, to have a communicative personality, was deemed among the most important qualities.
And here’s where we get into trouble. Mitt Romney is a fundamentally incommunicative soul—not shy; effusive, in fact; but given to believe in private-chamber wheeling and dealing, whereas public communication should be transactional, a means to an end. This does not help to make you a popular person. Worst of all, he does not know how to answer questions—and by that I mean to answer them in a way that leaves you satisfied the guy answered the damnQ .He’sthefirstpost-media-training candidate, the one after whom politicians will say: Enough is enough; it’s possible to be too trained. The answering thing is a skill set no one can ever teach him, too, no matter how much cramming or "elegant phrasing" he attempts, because, in his heart, he does not believe in its value. The only people he feels he owes candid answers to are donors, which is the real reason that secret 47 percent video harpooned him—not so much because he was dissing half the country, but because the video showed him in his natural habitat, speaking to the animals in his kingdom about us, and we could see with our own eyes that he regarded himself as a wholly different species.
Or think about it this way: Can you imagine, post-election, any news outlet—Fox News? CNN?—hiring him to be a political analyst, the way they hired Palin and Newt (talk about media elites!) and countless other loudmouths with hard-bitten opinions? No, and maybe that says something good about Romney, but it also speaks legions: We still don’t trust his opinions, can’t identify his worldview, and won’t pay to hear either.
I’m writing this forty-two days before the election, so maybe I will eat my words. Maybe he’ll turn everything around during the debates. But when I think of Mitt’s communication skills, I think of a moment at the end of September, when he was roundly being trashed for not getting out and campaigning enough ("It’s hard!" moaned Ann Romney) and for spending too much time raising piles of money. (For what?! For a rainy day? The election is now!) A reporter caught him ducking into a fund-raiser in West Palm Beach and asked him if he’d be hitting the trail harder. This was a golden opportunity to communicate.
"Ha ha. We’re in the stretch, aren’t we?" said Mitt, awkwardly stating even the obvious. He could feel the heat of history upon him. The world was waiting for an answer, for leadership. Instead, he choked and pointed to the heavens. "Look at those clouds," he said. "It’s beautiful. Look at those things."
Yes, Mitt, we can see everything so clearly now.