The "Best" They've Got: Mitt Romney and the End of a Fictional Era

Mitt Romney's retiring and we need to nip this mythology-making in the bud

Accompanying Senator Mitt Romney’s decision to retire was an excerpt from McKay Coppin’s biography Romney: A Reckoning in The Atlantic. Having gone a few rounds with the book publishing business, I kind of roll my eyes when it comes to this “synergy.” Like everything else now, the retirement of a senator, a former standard-bearer for the Republican Party, and supposedly the remaining conscience of the GOP, was just kind of melted down and reconfigured in the interest of selling a product.

Anyway. The article is interesting in that Romney allowed Coppin access to him in a way that’s reminiscent to the pretty interesting Netflix documentary Mitt (2014) that went behind-the-scenes of his 2012 presidential campaign. But what has got the most traction is the reveal of a text message Romney sent to Mitch McConnell prior to January 6th.

This revelation is meant to show us that Romney tried to do something while the rest of the GOP sat and waited for the fruits of their labor to spoil and lead to destruction. But what exactly did Romney do?

Fire off a bizarrely formal text to his 78 year old colleague and hope he does something?

I mean, the scene he described in the text was positively apocalyptic. And instead of, I don’t know, walking down the hall and holding a meeting, he texted it?

And I think, quite frankly, this is Mitt Romney in a nutshell. Like all the articles lauding him for voting to impeach Trump when he should’ve been impeached, it praises him for simply doing as little as humanly possible while everyone around him, everyone he caucused with, planned with, worked with, did their all to make things worse. He did the absolute bare minimum and he did it in a way that he could later show to someone writing a book that paints him in a good light as a “sensible Republican.”

But that’s not a thing. It simply isn’t anymore. It’s a mythology that might make people feel better about the state of things, that might help them believe that Donald Trump is the only problem needing solved and then, after that, everything might return to “normal.”

As Romney retires it’s important to remember that, more than anyone, he has benefited from the moderate and liberal need to believe this fairytale. And while all the media eulogies attempt to paint him in sepia tone nostalgia, it’s simply obscuring a larger and more necessary truth we need to remember.

And Romney’s true legacy is that he was part of the GOP’s old guard in that he was most concerned with lowering taxes for the wealthy, enabling corporations, destroying governmental impediments on personal profits, shredding the social safety net, but was also willing, in a tradition that is honestly dying, to do it all with a smile and dress it up in faux-compassionate language. He welcomed the authoritarianism of Trump and others if it was dressed in a disguise.

Why?

Because he was in aggressive self-denial about his own motivations and hopelessly, tirelessly concerned about how he was perceived by the media and the nation at large.