Romney’s secret Twitter account is woeful

A close reading of Mitt Romney’s secret Twitter account initially doesn’t reveal that much. Under the nom de plume Pierre Delecto - a name choice for which we have set aside some time to discuss separately - the Utah senator tweeted only 10 times.

“Pierre” said nothing salacious. He composed no thoughtful threads. He instead occupied himself with the nitpicky minutiae one might expect from a retiree wielding his first social media account. “Why isn’t your NH poll up on your web site?” he asked Fox News in December of 2015. “Jennifer, you need to take a breath,” he instructed Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin just a few months ago. “Maybe you can then acknowledge the people who agree with you in large measure even if not in every measure.”

The oddest aspect of Mitt Romney’s secret Twitter account was the fact that it existed at all - that a genuinely powerful man with the time-honored platform of a U.S. Senate seat and a well-established brand as the 2012 GOP presidential nominee had chosen to become a lurker in order to communicate his positions. Such communication included seeking out Erick Erickson, a conservative blogger with a substantial but not gargantuan following, to tweet at him, “Wrong.”

The account, which its owner made private after its discovery by Slate reporter Ashley Feinberg, felt unseemly somehow. It was like watching the CEO of a major corporation insist on joining the side-dish committee of the company picnic in order to lobby for his favorite small potatoes.

When Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis tweeted out a short list of senators who had offered support to Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr, Pierre Delecto replied, “Romney, too.” When Soledad O’Brien archly commented on Romney’s tepid condemnation of President Donald Trump, Pierre Delecto made a point of vouching for the senator’s toughon-Trump bona fides. “Only one to hit Trump on character time and again,” Pierre wrote.

And, as if to illustrate this, Romneyas-Pierre went on a mild campaign of “liking” various tweets critical of Trump.

Romney is not the first powerful man in recent memory to hide behind a false identity. Each time, the chosen name seemed to reveal something poignant about its adopter.

Former congressman Anthony Weiner, sending out the world’s most depressing sexts, constructed the softcore porn-ish alter ego of Carlos Danger - the name of the kind of man whose naughty pictures might actually be appreciated. Former FBI director James Comey, who sees himself as deeply moral and principled, dubbed himself Reinhold Niehbuhr for his own secret Twitter account, in honor of the revered theologian.

And what of Pierre Delecto?

It’s a preposterous name. It’s a little bit “delectable” and a little bit “delicate;” it’s the kind of name conjured up by two women in a vintage General Foods International Coffee commercial as they reminisce about a debonair stranger in Paris.