The editorial “Mitt’s Snake-Bit Season” is a summary of all that has gone amiss with the Romney campaign recently. It can be found here:NY Times . New York Times reporter Gail Collins tallied and recorded Mitt Romney’s gaffes and his campaign trail annoyances as of September 19. Unfortunately, although Collins correctly gathered all of the info, she did not pause to analyze it.

The editorial begins during a “Live with Kelly and Michael” interview with Mitt Romney discussing his pajama situation.  He sleeps in “as little as possible.” After mocking this answer for a time, Gail Collins  moves into the campaign’s “attempts to change the conversation.” This means more specifics about Mitt Romney’s plans because “the campaign announced that it had just realized the nation wants Romney to say what he’d actually do as president”. Along those lines, the Christian Broadcasting Network asked Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan if he would refuse to say exactly which tax loopholes Romney would close. The answer was yes, and then Ryan “veered into a disquisition about something that once happened to Tip O’Neill.” From Ryan to Romney and his 47% gaffe. Collins includes excerpts from Romney’s remarks, as well as the reactions from Ann Romney, Obama, and Ryan.  She dismisses criticism of Marc Leder: “If presidential candidates had to avoid all multimillionaires who held parties with naked guests and Russians on platforms, there would be no money for misleading TV commercials”. Romney’s attempts to explain his speech are given a paragraph, and then Collins takes us back to that first interview. Romney has moved on to discussing his favorite reality shows. Collins surmises that Romney’s love for Snooki explains much about the candidate.

In that editorial, Collins accurately fulfills her job description; she wrote an opinion piece on recent news, but it was a bit easy. Collins tackled the surface and gathered together a collection of items which when pieced together made Romney look ridiculous. This week, Romney did not need Collins to look ridiculous. He did that himself. What Romney did need was someone to analyze his missteps. She mocks him. She does not talk about why this highly intelligent man would seriously discuss Snooki, or why he would dismiss 47% of the country he professes to love. Reading her editorial is a bit frustrating, because she has all the information, but apparently she did not read the entire column at once. Because if she had, Collins would have seen that a pattern for Romney’s gaffes develops. He is catering to his audience. The 47% percent talk was given to a bunch of rich people who consider a government superfluous. They will never need Social Security; why should they want to pay more to support people who “mooch” off of their money? “Live with Kelly and Michael” is a harmless morning talk show which usually discusses television and entertainment, not politics. Romney knew he would lose his audience with anything too in-depth. So he chatted about sleepwear and his favorite shows; he held the audience’s attention. Romney also painted himself as a normal American who enjoys trashy television and makes nudity jokes. He played to the complaints of cardboard stiffness. Collins dismisses all this with her response to the nudity, “Euww.” She sounds just as childish and ridiculous as Romney.

That same scene reveals another problem that Collins does not mention. America claims to want to get to know Romney, but perhaps we already do. Perhaps Romney was born to be a venture capitalist, cool calm and usually collected. Despite the cries that Romney is out-of-touch, he is clearly trying to listen to the public. He hears the whining and adjusts accordingly. Then we complain about the adjustments we earlier whined for. For some reason, we refuse to allow the Romney we see to be the real Romney, constantly demanding warmth. He tries, and we call Romney awkward and robotic. If pundits and the public did not push for something Romney is not, he would not be awkward. Clearly, Mitt Romney’s persona worked for him at Bain (whether it worked for the employees of the dissolved companies is another matter). That same personality might work very well as president if we allow it. And if we stopped demanding warmth, Romney might stop spouting political faux pas.

Source: “Mitt’s Snake-Bit Season” by Gail Collins for The New York Times on September 19, 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/opinion/collins-mitts-snake-bite-season.html?_r=0