Middle America’s Man
Mitt Romney is a stolid counterpoise to Obama’s exuberance.
Mitt Romney is a stolid counterpoise to Obama’s exuberance. Will his ‘ ordinariness’ win the day?
If Willard Mitt Romney, 65, defeats Barack Obama, 51, in nine weeks time, he would join an exquisitely small, intensely elite club of four men who count as the richest presidents in American history. That is exceptionalism of the sort most Americans cheer loudest. Are they cheering? Perhaps, but so faintly that a new poll, conducted just days after his Republican Party’s national convention, finds Romney tied with Obama at 45 per cent voter approval.
It is an improvement on what ABC News and The Washington Post described last week as the lowest ratings for any major party nominee ever, but if that’s enthusiasm, it’s still pretty limp. Ipsos pollster Julia Clark, who conducted the September 2 survey of 1,441 registered voters for Reuters, says the modest uptick in perception is the result of the traditional ‘ convention bounce’. “The fact that Obama and Romney are still tied signals to me that we’re not going to see any sort of sustained bump for Romney,” she points out.
It is consistent with Romney’s record. Though he has amassed twice the net worth of the last eight US presidents combined, he also famously won an award for those “whose contributions to school life are often not fully recognised through already existing channels”. This was from Cranbrook, the private boys’ prep school he attended in affluent Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he grew up the privileged youngest child of a Mormon car company CEO who went on to become governor of the state. Even the faithful struggle to work up a properly emphatic enthusiasm. “I think it might be too strong to say I fell in love with him but I did get to know him better and I find he’s a remarkable man,” says John Macy, who was one of Wisconsin’s 42 delegates at the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida.
“Mitt Romney shares many similarities with George W. Bush and that includes a business background, having been governor of a state and standing up for India,” adds Sampat Shivangi, who travelled to Tampa from Jackson, Mississippi, to serve as a delegate at his third Republican national convention. But even Shivangi, who is on the IndianAmerican Coalition for Romney and raised $ 1.7 million ( Rs 9.35 crore) for the presidential campaign in Jackson three weeks ago, talks less about Romney, the man, and more about Romney, the generic Republican. “He believes in the party’s core principles, that handouts are socialist and there should be small government. The state of the economy under Obama will draw voters to Romney,” he says. “Romney’s a great CEO and though the Republican Party could have had a stronger candidate, he is at least a sharp businessman,” agrees Sanjay Singhal, who runs a satellite communications company in New York and describes 2011 as “the worst in 16 years of my business with a 33 per cent drop in revenue”.
The two- cheers- for- Romney mood squares with Harvard historian and writer Niall Ferguson’s unenthusiastic description of him as “not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine but clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination”. Ferguson, who regularly fulminates against the slide of Obama’s America into “some version” of low- growth, highdebt Europe, should know. He advised John McCain, the Republican nominee who lost to Obama in 2008.
But the even- toned praise for Romney chimes with his own even- keel estimate of himself. “I was born in the