Jamelle Bouie / The American Prospect
Over the weekend, The Washington Post profiled a post-election Mitt Romney. The picture, according to friends and associates, is of a man who-for the first time in his life-is aimless:
Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There's no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. […]
Four weeks after losing a presidential election he was convinced he would win, Romney's rapid retreat into seclusion has been marked by repressed emotions, second-guessing and, perhaps for the first time in the overachiever's adult life, sustained boredom, according to interviews with more than a dozen of Romney's closest friends and advisers.
One is inclined to feel sorry for the guy, until you remember that he ran a campaign that combined a narrow economic message-America should be grateful to the job creators-with tangible disdain for large swaths of people, from undocumented immigrants and single women, to African Americans, gays, and lesbians.
If Romney had run a more inclusive campaign-one that didn't dismiss half the country as "takers"-then maybe he'd be measuring the drapes in the Oval Office and not figuring out what to do with his downtime in La Jolla.
