Romney bitterness

Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right.

The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler.

We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point:

That critique of the right claiming that the left drives them right has a lot of truth to it, but I think there is some extra dimension to folks on the right feeling raw about Romney in particular.

To many folks on the broad right who may not even be MAGAs, supporting Romney’s presidential bid reflected something paralleling what Clintonian triangulation represents to the broad left. “He is obviously sharp. He is fundamentally competent. He doesn’t say inflammatory stuff that freaks out the other side which some other potential candidates from our side might. We are tacking toward the center rather than toward what we want most, to be less vulnerable to criticism.” There was even the inversion of Dems’ grumble, “How can the Republicans object to the Affordable Care Act when it is essentially the same plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts?” He was not a candidate who excited them, he was a candidate they hoped would repel their opponents less, win over a few votes, and enable reaching across the aisle in Congress.

I’m not saying Romney was that person; he was more a creature of longstanding Republican movement conservatism than they remember. But a lot of Republicans sincerely understood him that way. Folks on the broad left should be familiar with how it feels to see that fail.

There’s also a thing that fascinates me about Mitt Romney’s screen presence. He looks like the actor one might cast in a movie which has just one scene in the Oval Office, and thus needs a guy who is obviously meant to be the president without anyone having to be told. It’s a characteristic which feels very comforting to Republicans in a way they would assume extends to Dems. They don’t understand that it opens the question of why they don’t feel the same comfort with Obama in the Oval, with its obvious ugly answer.

Dems of course did not attack Romney as Practically Hitler. But we did sharply criticize him (for very good reasons), which felt so unfair because they were Trying To Be So Nice in picking him.

Fine, then. They’ll pick a candidate who does excite them. Not because Trump is a fascist — obviously that is a “leftist” fantasy! But they get to enjoy the schadenfreude from the left frantic over that “fantasy”. Why not? Being nice by picking Romney got them nowhere.