Romney: A Reckoning

“‘A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,’ he said the first time he showed me the map. ‘It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.’ America’s experiment in self-rule ‘is fighting against human nature.’ ‘This is a very fragile thing,’ he told me. ‘Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.’”

The histomap of the rise and fall of civilizations is a source of fascination and concern for Romney. As he considers the origins of tyranny, he recognizes in contemporary America the same disregard for human life that has led to the downfall of so many other once-great civilizations. He views the acceptance of such tyranny as the gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, a menacing reminder that all institutions will fall.

“Only after studying him closely do the signs of age start to show. He shuffles a little when he walks now, hunches a little when he sits. At various points in recent years, he’s gotten so thin that his staff has worried about him. Mostly, he looks tired.”

Throughout the text, Coppins examines the role of surfaces and appearances in maintaining the illusion of power. By offering an introductory image of Romney that describes him looking old and vulnerable, Coppins establishes that this text will prize veracity over vanity; he is not here to glamorize Romney, but to critique him.

“‘When a Romney drowns,’ a Mormon leader once observed of George’s ancestors, ‘you look for the body upstream.’”

The Romney family is proud of the mythology of stubborn men. George Romney in particular lauded the ancestors whose stubborn actions showed that they went against the grain to fight for their ideals and achieve what they believed to be right.

“He met with Black Panthers and new-left radicals; he posed for photos with Saul Alinsky and gave speeches pleading with white America to wake up to the injustices in their country. ‘We must rouse ourselves from our comfort, pleasure, and preoccupations,’ he said, ‘and listen to the voices from the ghetto.’”

George Romney gained a reputation as a civil rights activist whose rhetoric was rooted in genuine conviction. While other Republicans in the 1960s feared that supporting civil rights would prevent their reelection, Romney was proud to advocate for social equality. This was one reason for the failure of his presidential campaign; Nixon pandered to white southerners and painted the Black Panthers as villains.

“Now presented with a chance to explain himself, George responded to the interviewer’s question with characteristic bluntness. ‘When I came back from Vietnam,’ he said, ‘I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.’”

When he first visited Vietnam, George Romney was met with a display of patriotism that convinced him America belonged there. Upon further reflection, he realized that he did not believe the opinions he had initially eagerly championed. When he tried to take accountability for this change of heart and demonstrate that he was wrong, the public was too preoccupied with the word “brainwashing” to bother with understanding the actual sentiment of his words.

“What he did know, and what would stick with him for the rest of his life, was that a single poorly chosen word in a local TV interview had abruptly cut short his dad’s march to the White House.”

While Mitt Romney was serving his mission in France in the 1960s, he had little communication with his parents and American media. The bit of news that did reach him in France was the tip of the iceberg: his dad’s campaign was doomed by the use of the word “brainwashing” to describe his initial support for Vietnam.

“And yet, some part of him—the part that saw his dad’s story as not just a heroic parable but a cautionary tale—also knew that it didn’t matter. George Romney’s presidential campaign—noble, idealistic, maybe a little naive—was felled by his most admirable and self-destructive quality: a stubborn insistence on telling the truth.”

Mitt Romney held his father in high esteem, and he was proud of his dad for advocating for his beliefs. Mitt hoped to achieve the same ‘righteous crusade’ that his dad would have championed, but planned to do so through data-driven, analytical campaigns that would not be sidelined by outbreaks of impassioned speech.

“But it struck him with the force of something divine. Our sacrifices were accepted. This was the point of his mission, he now realized—doing the hard thing, making the sacrifice. Maybe it would yield fruit, maybe it wouldn’t. But the difficulty and deprivation would have their own sanctifying effect, and that was reason enough to keep trying.”

“But it struck him with the force of something divine. Our sacrifices were accepted. This was the point of his mission, he now realized—doing the hard thing, making the sacrifice. Maybe it would yield fruit, maybe it wouldn’t. But the difficulty and deprivation would have their own sanctifying effect, and that was reason enough to keep trying.”

“These were unusual demands for a rising corporate star, but Romney knew he would never live up to his ideals as a husband and father unless he drew bright, uncrossable lines for himself. Decades later, he would look back on his life and conclude with satisfaction that he’d succeeded in honoring those lines when it came to his family.”

As he climbed the corporate ladder, Romney struggled to balance the demands of family, faith, and work. While most of the colleagues with whom he was competing pushed themselves to spend as many hours at work as possible, Romney made it clear to his bosses that he would not compromise the time he needed to spend with his family and church.

“In his hurry, he cut corners. Of course he did. No one makes it as a titan of industry by walking the straight and narrow all the time. Some of Romney’s ethical lapses would feel, later on, like gray areas.”

Romney struggles to reconcile the choices that were not always ethical but seemed necessary to succeed in corporate America. As he tries to justify charging retroactive fees and laying off workers in response to unionizing, he begins making excuses that will harm him when his political career brings these to light.

“He also seized on the Church’s twelfth Article of Faith, which declares a belief in ‘obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.’ […] Abortion, he reasoned, had been legalized through Roe v. Wade—perhaps he had a similar responsibility to honor that?”

Romney flip-flopped on his abortion stance several times. While the Mormon Church does not support abortion, he recognized that he would have to be pro-choice to win votes in Massachusetts. He returned to scripture and used the belief in obeying the law to justify his new pro-choice stance.

“There was an irony, of course, to Romney’s distaste for Kennedy’s dynastic advantage. His own political credibility came largely from his father.”

As Romney prepares to debate Ted Kennedy, he considers the role of nepotism. He cannot help but acknowledge that critiquing Kennedy’s legitimacy also forces him to critique his own legitimacy. This self-awareness encourages him to separate himself from his father’s work.

“George Romney died eight months after the election, the victim of a heart failure suffered while he was on his treadmill. Lenore discovered his body. She said later that she knew immediately he was gone when she woke up to find no rose on her nightstand.”

The relationship between George and Lenore Romney is lauded as a loving ideal. Mitt celebrates his parents’ marriage. George convinced Lenore to marry him instead of pursuing her career, and the text reflects an undercurrent of appreciation for the sacrifices of wives.

“Before long, he was using his home state as a punch line in speeches. ‘Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention,’ he told crowds from South Carolina to Missouri.”

Romney’s moderate stances gave way to what was viewed as characteristic flip-flopping. While he could perform as both liberal and conservative, the deliberate flux between these identities sometimes read as off-putting.

“Romney had pictured a campaign for the presidency as a lofty, noble thing—a venue to debate the most pressing issues at the highest level. Instead, he was scarfing down deep-fried Twinkies for the cameras and memorizing trivia about corn-based fuel production and promising state senators that he fully supported federal subsidies for ethanol.”

As Romney participates in the circus of the Ames Straw Poll, he realizes that his expectations are far from reality. He is rather out of his element but determined to present himself as an everyman.

“There is an old campaign adage: When you’re explaining, you’re losing. Romney’s problem was that he loved almost nothing more than explaining things. He believed it was one of his great strengths—his ‘superpower,’ as he put it himself—and he held a naive conviction in the idea that logic would prevail if it was stated plainly enough.”

Romney’s campaign continues to be hamstrung by his old-fashioned style of debating and inability to prevent himself from making gaffes that circulate widely on social media. Presenting technical information that requires explanation does not win elections; catchy, rhetorically attractive slogans do.

“Conservative evangelicals might not like the idea of a Mormon president, but surely, Romney thought, they were more uncomfortable with a serial philanderer in the Oval Office.”

At several points throughout the text, Coppins offers wry observations that foreshadow Trump’s influence. Romney initially believes that evangelicals will hold marriage in high esteem; he quickly realizes that the evangelicals he encounters do not practice what they preach and bend the rules to accommodate Trump’s infidelities.

“He had no idea how much worse it could get.”

At several points throughout the text, Coppins shares pithy observations that underscore the imminent changes to the political climate. In hindsight, Romney’s concerns about things like “Obama seems a little arrogant” feel laughable. Coppins employs this sense of irony to evoke humorous dread in the reader. 

“At the top of his list—neither a pro nor a con, or possibly both—Romney had typed out a line from Yeats that he couldn’t get out of his mind: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ It captured so much of this political moment, but especially what he saw as ‘the new GOP.’”

William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” describes the end of the world. Published in 1920, the poem was believed to refer to the landscape of postwar Europe, where divisiveness reigned and the Irish Yeats still felt the aftershocks of the Easter Rising. The poem was also inspired by the 1919 influenza pandemic, which nearly killed Yeats’s wife.

“Mattis, a retired four-star general, had been the quintessential adult in the room—a widely respected figure on whom official Washington had pinned its hopes for staving off an international crisis. Now he was ejecting from the figurative cockpit—and Trump was fully at the controls.”

Romney and Coppins repeat the phrase “the adult in the room” to metaphorize the descent of Trump’s presidency. Romney maintained that the 2012 election represented a competition between two different brands of rationality; the 2016 election and its aftermath enabled a kind of chaos that relegated rationality. The bar continued to lower.

“Do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our Republic, the strength of our democracy, and the cause of freedom? What is the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience?”

This quote appears in the epigraph, which makes it more meaningful when it appears at this point in the text. Offering the same quote twice serves the rhetorical purpose of underscoring its meaning and emphasizes that Romney has had to ask himself this at several points in his political career.

“Sometimes, to amuse themselves, he and Manchin would debate which of them had to contend with the worst gadflies and extremists in their respective parties. ‘We’ll say, ‘Who has the craziest side? I’ll trade you one of my crazies for two of your crazies!’ Manchin told me. The West Virginian called this parlor game ‘playing cards with crazies’—and Romney always left the conversation depressingly convinced that he’d won. One Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a Matt Gaetz and a Marjorie Taylor Greene? Romney would take that deal every time.”

The final chapter reveals several instances of bipartisan candor that would have seemed unimaginable to the Romney of the first chapter. By this point in the text, Coppins has firmly established that previously impermeable boundaries have fallen; the division of parties has given way to the division of sense and nonsense.

“They could vote to signal solidarity with anti-vax voters while knowing there was no actual risk of overturning the vaccine mandate. What’s the harm in humoring them?”

Coppins rhetorically (and ironically) asks “what’s the harm in humoring them” (or variations of this question) several times throughout the text. This repetition emphasizes the slow burn of Trump’s ascent to power and the slow violence of extremism.