Barrel Strength

This is my reaction to the Romney versus Gingrich fight for the Republican nomination. Old friend Glendronach has this much more incisive analysis:

“The primary race leaves me despairing. While Romney has the proven record to be an effective administrator, a quality lacking utterly in the White House now, his campaign has been inept and tone-deaf. I had hoped he would refine his economic message after New Hampshire by taking up Santorum’s down-to-earth pitch to Reagan Democrats but he has come across as only more vague.

“I have followed Newt Gingrich since I was in university. He has an impressive intellect and is a lethal opponent in any debate. He is also a wilfully destructive narcissist, as demonstrated over several decades of professional and personal misadventure. The capacity of politicos and primary voters to ignore that is disturbing. As I mused to a friend, do we really want to replace Obama with a latter-day Ludwig II?

“Gingrich is punching the right red-meat voter buttons: indignation at an ineffective Obama and a callous media elite, contempt for Washington, and praise for self-reliance and common sense. Indeed, any decent GOP candidate should be embracing these. Sadly, it is being done by a preening ego with a volume of baggage befitting a traveling Saudi prince.

“I suspect that Romney is going to lose Florida and then we head into the territory of a brokered convention. Let’s just pray for a result such that we can say of the White House, like Tangina the psychic from “Poltergeist”, “This house is clean.”"

For myself, I look forward to the possibility that Romney will find some passion, but I doubt it. I have met several old-stock Mormons, and to the extent one can generalize about the personality type summoned forth by a religion, Romney’s WASPy blandness seems altogether typical. Good citizens, but bland by choice.