A Running Series: the Media Hates Mitt Romney

Now we have the first authoritative, self-conscious entry in the genre. Fittingly, it’s from the art form’s Mozart, Dana Milbank:

Following Mitt Romney on the campaign trail is a painful yet familiar experience.

Painful, because of the wince-inducing moments when you realize that, for all of Romney’s success in imitating human attributes, there remain glitches in the matrix that reveal him to be different from the rest of us…

Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an “authentic inauthenticity problem.”

And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political reincarnation of Al Gore, whose campaign I covered with an equal amount of cringing a dozen years ago.

It’s a requirement that bloggers — be they focused on sports, politics, music, or cats — pat themselves on the back in those rare moments when their musings on the subject they purport to be experts on are proven correct. So, yeah, I totally called this. (Not that it was hard to see coming…)

What’s especially amusing about the Milbank column, though, is the way that he immediately introduces the self-exculpatory narrative that the media used to excuse their petty behavior vis-a-vis Gore back in 2000, and will no doubt implement once again in 2012 while covering Romney. It’s a variation on the hated passive voice trope but with a good dose of blame-the-victimizing mixed in:

The media tend to assign each candidate a character flaw as a form of shorthand (John McCain was volatile, George W. Bush was dopey, Obama is all talk). Ominously, Romney’s descriptions are the same applied to Gore 12 years ago: assuming “personas,” going through “makeovers,” attempting “regular-guy” traits, exhibiting “robotic” behavior and issuing new versions, such as “Romney 3.0.”

For Romney, the problem now becomes that reporters, and opponents, are perpetually on the lookout for new examples to add to his dossier of awkwardness. “It’s a self-perpetuating cycle,” explained Chris Lehane, who sought, with limited success, to help Gore defy his “wooden” image. “You’re trying so hard to think through what you’re going to say that you get mental handcuffs every time you speak. You’re so nervous about the archetype that you fall into the archetype.”

In Romney’s case, there is already abundant support for the archetype: his belief that “corporations are people,” his talk about hunting “small varmints,” the story about driving with the family dog in a kennel strapped atop the Romneys’ car, his attempted $10,000 bet with Rick Perry, his singing “Who let the dogs out?,” his pretending to be pinched on the behind by a waitress, his bizarre jokes about Hooters and hollandaise sauce, and his tendency to ask debate moderators for protection from his opponents.

None of those is, by itself, disqualifying — and, as in Gore’s case, not all the examples are fair. But, combined with Romney’s frequent fluctuations on the issues, his awkwardness has left an impression that he is a phony and not to be trusted. Romney isn’t necessarily doomed — Gore, after all, received more votes than the other guy — but this much seems clear: Over the next 10 months, Romney will be getting the Gore treatment.

Disingenuous BS no matter the source — but extraordinarily so when coming from Dana Milbank, perhaps the ultimate embodiment of superficial Village cattiness. Why, it’s as if Jack Abramoff started making the rounds from talk show to talk show to wax sanctimonious about political corruption and the venality of the Washington, DC politico-lobbyist complex!

Tagged as: Al Gore, Dana Milbank, Jack Abramoff, Jonah Goldberg