Politics, in essence

As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 1994, Mitt Romney told gays that he would be a valuable ally for them—more, even, than his opponent, Ted Kennedy.

Now, as a candidate for president, Romney opposes any advancement of gay rights.

As a candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney looked in the eye of his Democratic opponent during a debate and pronounced that he absolutely favored protecting a woman’s right to choose. He said he resented insinuations otherwise.

Then, as a candidate for president in 2008, he vowed in a debate with his Republican primary foes that he absolutely opposed abortion rights. He said he was weary of implications otherwise.

As governor of Massachusetts in 2006, he celebrated as a great personal accomplishment his state’s enactment of health reform by which citizens were mandated to get insurance, some using government subsidies.

Now, as a candidate for president, he says he will try to repeal a replica of the program he so extolled in Massachusetts.

In the Republican presidential primary this year, Romney told CNN’s John King in a debate that FEMA should be abolished. He said that rebuilding after a natural disaster should be the responsibility of state governments or, better yet, the private sector.

Your best hope if Romney becomes president and your house gets leveled by a tornado is that, of course, he never really means what he says.

The curiosity is what all that says about him as a human being and a presidential prospect.

Is he simply a cynical and unprincipled opportunist, a characterdevoid hollow man?

Perhaps more to the point: Does any of that affect his ability to perform competently the job of president as we currently need it performed, which is with effective focus on the economy?

If he could fix the economy the way he made deals at Bain Capital or salvaged the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, would it really matter that he had no abiding political principle?

It may be that nonideological swing voters don’t care about ideological consistency or integrity.

The other evening I was intrigued by the Frontline joint biographical documentary on the two candidates for president.

A theory, at least, was revealed to me about the soul of Mitt.

It is that he defines virtue as an intense and effective focus to achieve a goal. It is that this value system reflects three influences—his training by a highly accomplished father, the confidence born of his elite upbringing and the regimentation of his religion.

He refined that essence as vaunted dealmaker for Bain Capital. Each acquisition—each investment deal— was considered in a vacuum, by its circumstance and situation.

There was no demand for consistency of personal principle. Instead, there was a demand for adapted tactics from one acquisition to the next.

I suspect Romney applies that model to politics. Each campaign is in its own vacuum and is its own unique transaction.

FEMA needed to be abolished in a Republican primary negotiation. Now it doesn’t, I’d wager. Romney saw Kennedy as vulnerable because of famous misbehavior.

Romney thought he would be a good U.S. senator. He thought the way to beat Kennedy in Massachusetts was to present a better-behaving and incremental version of Ted.

Getting elected governor required that he be pro-choice. Showing success as governor required that he work with Democrats to enact health-care reform.

Now he negotiates a new deal in a new vacuum.

If he wins, the margin will be provided, I figure, by people who don’t so much respect him as they choose him for his ability to focus on a goal and achieve the success that he regards as essential virtue.

Barack Obama’s essence, from the Frontline documentary, seems to be self-reliance. It grows from being raised without a father and by an odd, but loving, mother who would take him as a young boy to a strange new culture in Indonesia.

He sees himself as virtuous because he cares about poor people and seeks fairness in public policy.

He is not highly partisan by nature. He is ideological personally, but not by association.

That’s because he is conditioned by his upbringing—never quite fitting anywhere—to believe in himself more than he believes in any group.

As editor of the Harvard Law Review, he gave better positions to conservatives than liberals.

In 2008, he said Ronald Reagan was a more transformational president than Bill Clinton.

Yet he is beset by cruel irony, viewed as a famously partisan figure. It’s mostly stereotype and myth.