GREAT piece in Rolling Stone: What Mitt Romeny Learned From His Dad
(Chris Hayes mentioned this was the best thing he'd read all week. It is really interesting.)
Here is a truism about the psychology of politicians: there is almost nothing so soul-definingly traumatic for them as losing an election. You believe yourself a great man, a figure of destiny. You love your job, or covet an even more important one—and then suddenly one day it's gone, all because the public decides it doesn’t love you any more. The trauma shapes future ideology: if you’re a conservative, say, you might become more conservative. That was the case for two pioneers of the Democratic Party's long march to the right: Joseph Lieberman, who lost a bid for the U.S. House of Representatives, and Bill Clinton, who lost his reelection as Arkansas governor, both in 1980, a year of profound reckoning for Democrats who got blindsided by Ronald Reagan and his coattails.
I say there is almost nothing as traumatic for a politician than losing an election. Here's what might be even worse: You are an aspiring office-holder, a young and handsome and ambitious man on the rise, and your father loses an election. Dad is your hero, and then the world's goat; you start rethinking your vision of how the world works. Consider a third pioneering Democratic corporate sellout, Evan Bayh, who managed the 1980 Senate reelection campaign in which his fighting liberal father Birch Bayh lost to baby Reaganite Dan Quayle. Thereafter, as governor and senator from Indiana between 1989 and 1997, the son hardly met a right-wing idea he couldn't embrace.
In my first weekly online column for Rolling Stone, I'm here to write about another loser and son: George and Mitt Romney – both almost-certain Republican presidential nominees. Pollster Lou Harris said late in 1966 that George Romney, then governor of Michigan, "stands a better chance of winning the White House than any Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower." Then, just over a year later, he was humiliated with a suddenness and intensity unprecedented in modern American political history (of which more below). His son was 19 years old. What makes Mitt – né Willard – Romney, run? Much, I think, can be understood via that specific trauma.
I wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed four years ago, just before Romney dropped out of the 2008 race, arguing that he would "go down as the most robotic big-ticket presidential candidate in history." I chalked it up to psychobiography: Even more than most kids, Mitt couldn’t help but view his dad as a messiah – because much of America did, too. George Romney's first appearance on the cover of Time, in 1959, came just before Mitt's twelfth birthday. As CEO of the Americans Motors Corporation, he had single-handedly set Detroit on its ear by calling its products "gas-guzzling dinosaurs." The first full biography of him came out in 1960. Soon after, he became Michigan's James Madison, heroically leading a bipartisan effort to redraft the state's messed-up constitution. By 1963, he was governor, a Republican in a Democratic state, a politician so beloved that John F. Kennedy was terrified at the thought of running against him in 1964. After his reelection in 1966, he ran 54-46 in a hypothetical 1968 match-up with Lyndon Johnson. /snip
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/what-mitt-romney-learned-from-his-dad-20120117#ixzz1kJBv3r96
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