External v Internal

(Not to imply that everything is all-or-nothing.)

I've decided that I do not think Romney can be president. He's too fake. He's just a big uncomfortable, scared of being exposed faker of fakiness. He has true belief, I believe, but that is not the lens through which he allows himself to speak, publicly. His public persona's expressed paradigm is far more pragmatic. Far more "polished". By that I mean buffed to a sterling Sheen. Shine. 

Mitt Romney suffers from Internal Dissonance Disorder. That is, unlike all of the presidents (and most candidates) he doesn't lay claim to what he actually *is* and express that fully, if thoroughly edited by his team. Romney lays claim to *what you want him to be*. Explicitly. This is a strategy that President Obama used to great success *implicitly*. He advertised Hope, which is something we all want to have. He never has to speak about race, because of the color of his skin. So we project upon him. His intelligence is never questioned. His public persona, while irritatingly frustrated-with-his-sub-par-students professorial in nature, is essentially him. The mistakes that he makes are Obama mistakes. The mistakes G.W. Bush made were Dubya mistakes. Clinton clearly made Clinton mistakes. And so on. What are Romney mistakes? 

Mitt keeps trying to be one of us, deny that he's a cold-blooded money machine, claim that he was never moderate and will not compromise, and give the same damn speech to everyone, whether they like it or not. And the speech stinks. Not his ideas or whatever, it just stinks. It is not fun to listen to, and it does not reach out to anything but my wallet and his ideas on what I should do with it. And other wallets around the country, for corpora-eople everywhere. He believes he knows what will fix our wallets. And it is by fixing education and reducing the government that he proposes to do this. Wait... what? Is that because your plan is to replace public sector teacher jobs with non-unionized private sector teacher jobs? Slowly destroy any and all unions piece by piece? 

I think I went off there again. 

My point is, about about the rest of our lives that aren't our wallets? 

 I don't know what Mitt feels/thinks about the world. I don't know how Mitt wants to shape the world. I don't know which issues get to the core of him. I know that Mitt is about the Money (and this is America-- That's Great.) but why won't he just say "I love making money, and I am an effective dispassionate calculator of expected returns " and get it over with? Then we can move on to other things and stop with the pretending. Would it put him too close to The Donald? 

 I don't want someone playing at being someone they're not as my President. 

For his failings, President Obama is not different in persona despite his power and his up and down experiences. He has not meet all of his promises, and he has failed and succeeded in his first term. He has put some ideals-based legislation forward in what he believes (and is not too far off from what he expressed as a candidate) is best for the country. This is what most first-term presidents are like. Reasonably consistent persona, reasonable anticipated agendas. Nothing totally dissonant. 

Romney is totally dissonant. Publicly dissonant. And frankly, he tends to look uncomfortable with and around his fellow humans. 

What happens when he meets with foreign (and domestic for that matter) leaders and all they feel is "goddamnitall I'm not sure his words would recognize his brain in the parking lot"? 

If he would just be himself and believe that was enough, or if he could just hide his dissonance better (I would argue that this is what made the first President Bush so weird-- is that his intelligence&willpower allowed him to reconcile most internal dissonance before the brain engaged the body, but having your guard up 100% of the time is impossible. And it takes a damn toll.) he'd be fine. But he can't or hasn't learned that he needs to. Or to be very cynical, he feels that the best cold calculation to election is to appear dissonant. Which seems an odd tactic. Anyway. 

 If Al Gore was the amazingly life-like candidate who invented the Internet, Mitt Romney is the Wax Statue candidate who refuses to talk about what's underneath his ice-cream paintjob because he's no meteorologist, but golly, he sure knows that D.C. is hotter-n-heck.