Mitt Romney is just so cute. So desperate to please, so willing to say anything anyone wants him to. I like to think of him as a non-murderous version of the T-1000 from Terminator 2 -- all he has to do is get close enough to touch you, and he immediately adopts your outward appearance down to the smallest detail. "Is this good enough?" he always seems to be saying. "Is this what you want? Just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it!" Dave Weigel tells us of one little piece of Romney's efforts to get everyone on the right to like him:
The day after the midterms, a postage stamp-sized ad popped up on Facebook. It featured the headshots of Mitt Romney and Jim DeMint, and it congratulated DeMint for... well, for everything he did. No grousing about lost opportunities in Senate races from Mitt Romney. He was firmly on the side of the Tea Party's, and the media's, favorite radical.
Yesterday, as DeMint campaigned for a successful earmark moratorium vote in the GOP's Senate conference, Romney's Free and Strong America PAC promoted a petition of support for DeMint.
There are lots of reasons Tea Partiers will be suspicious of Romney, including the fact that back when he was a pro-choice moderate he actually served as a governor, and by all accounts made an attempt to govern effectively, as opposed to waging the kind of ideological warfare that characterizes the efforts of people like DeMint, and makes Tea Party hearts go all aflutter. But he'll do anything to win them over.
There's actually the opportunity for some rather amusing mischief here. Some crazy kids with a video camera could follow Mitt around, and get people to approach him with the most outlandish statements they could come up with, to see what he does. "Governor, what I want to know is, what are you going to do about the threat from Klendathu?" To which Mitt will look deeply into the voter's eyes and respond earnestly, "This is something I've been concerned about for a long time."
-- Paul Waldman
