Mitt Romney is:

A phony
An Eagle Scout
The Dad who’s never home
The man you want to marry
but not the kind of man who sends a thrill up your leg
Mr Collins (a marriage of convenience)
A house, with a solid basement, but not a dream kitchen

A white shadow
A windsock
A shell, a wall, a mask
A well-oiled weathervane
The Tin Man with a Tin Ear
The stainless steel candidate
The pretzel candidate
Zeppo

A cold-hearted businessman
An empty suit
A tall and square-jawed man with impressive hair
The ordinary American, who flies and eats cheap just like us
A fat cat
A robot, the Romney-bot
The 2010 Seattle Seahawks
A hollow man
A phantom
A man with no core
A lazy media construct
A hoax
Weird

So many things, and yet, nothing at all—

Given that Mitt Romney announced his presidential run seven months ago, and that this is not the first time the former Massachusetts governor ran for president, there have been an unusual number of stories recently suggesting that we have no idea who this man—subject of dozens of magazine profiles, scores of daily stories, and all the descriptions above since June—actually is.

Just last week, for example, New York magazine asked, alongside a faceless headshot of the frontrunner, “Who in God’s Name is Mitt Romney?” Asserting that “the ‘Mitt Romney’ we’ve been sold since 2008 is a lazy media construct, a fictional creation, or maybe even a hoax,” New York columnist Frank Rich provided 4,000+ words to try to answer that question, and to explain why we don’t yet know the answer to it.

Michael Tomasky, writing in the January 26 issue of The New York Review of Books made a similar effort to explain Romney, saying, “There still seems something missing in the man.”

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, in what serves as a companion piece to Rich’s, took on the subject in the February 4 Sunday Review, “Mitt’s Muffled Soul”; The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis weighed in February 6 with his own theory, while NBC’s First Read e-mail that morning kicked off, “Who is Mitt Romney?”

Why are we still asking this question? And if the press hasn’t gotten to the bottom of Romney yet, How now?


W hen the press comes up against the blank wall that Romney projects, some of its members tend to come up with psychological theories about why he is so opaque.

And indeed, Rich, Tomasky, Bruni, and MacGillis give it their best shot by turning their X-ray goggles on Romney’s soul. Rich and Bruni blame Romney’s unknowable-ness on Mormonism. MacGillis’ theory is Vietnam and Tomasky points to Romney’s “father’s unfulfilled destiny.” But interesting as these pieces of armchair psychoanalysis are, they are flawed.

Rich says that “faith is key to the Romney mystery” and Romney should open up—and the media should ask more—about his faith (Bruni echoes these sentiments):

… In Romneyland, Mormonism is the religion that dare not speak its name. Which leaves him unable to talk about the very subject he seems to care about most, a lifelong source of spiritual, familial, and intellectual sustenance. We’re used to politicians who camouflage their real views about issues, or who practice fraud in their backroom financial and political deal-making, but this is something else. Romney’s very public persona feels like a hoax because it has been so elaborately contrived to keep his core identity under wraps.

(I would argue this is too harsh: if there is one consistent detail of Romney’s public biography, it’s that he’s a Mormon. He has been private about his faith, but not dishonest. And he has a right to that privacy about his spiritual life, as do President Obama, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. As for Rick Santorum, less might be more.)

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