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" MANCHESTER, N.H. \u2014 As a performance piece, the speech itself was very well-received. It was well-crafted and delivered with something approaching actual gusto. It was also shamelessly maudlin, mendacious in the extreme, and otherwise completely of a piece with the entire campaign that has been waged by the man who delivered it in triumph last night. Willard Romney declined to speak in any of the five states in which he won primaries last night. Instead, he came back to New Hampshire to declare, in so many words, Game Over, and he did so in a manner befitting the manner in which he has run for president for going on eight years now. He has found entirely new worlds in which he can pander. The general theme, echoing through everything right down to the sign fastened to the podium, was &amp;quot;A Better America Begins Tonight.&amp;quot; (Apparently, &amp;quot;Obama Isn&amp;#039;t Working,&amp;quot; a not-particularly well-coded jab at the president, has been abandoned for the nonce.) The Romneys have decided to ride the car elevator down among the common folk again, whose interests he&amp;#039;s always kept at heart. Why, as Ann Romney herself said by way of introduction, and to the roaring cheers of a crowd whiter and older than you&amp;#039;ll see at the Masters, she and Willard were just ordinary folks, sitting around one of their several living rooms, when they decided that the country was going all to hell and only Willard could ride to the rescue. So he stopped doing his figurin&amp;#039; on the coal shovel by the light of a dimming fire and rode off to save the country. Or something. &amp;quot;A little more than a year ago, Mitt and I sat in our kitchen,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll admit, I was a little hesitant. Four years ago, we&amp;#039;d gone through a tough primary, and I told him that I didn&amp;#039;t want to go through this again. Mitt reminded me that I said that after every pregnancy. I have five sons, as you know. &amp;quot;But I knew that this country was in real trouble and needed real leadership. And I said to him, &amp;#039;Can you do it?&amp;#039; He said yes, and that&amp;#039;s all I needed to know. I told him, &amp;#039;If you can fix it, we need to do this.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Let us pause for a moment and consider the sheer audacity of this creation myth. All the available evidence indicates that Romney started running for president in 2007 and never really stopped. Long before &amp;quot;a little over a year ago,&amp;quot; Romney had already published No Apologies, his campaign book for 2012, and he&amp;#039;d already rewritten portions of it in the paperback edition so as to make it more palatable to the audiences to whom he&amp;#039;d be appealing in 2012. (Specifically, he took out a line about health-care, essentially distancing himself from his one achievement as governor of Massachusetts.) By the time Ann and Mitt pondered the sad state of our nation in one of their several living rooms, Restore Our Future, Romney&amp;#039;s super-PAC, which was established by aides from his 2008 run, and whose biggest donor was John Paulson, a hedge-fund predator who got rich on the country&amp;#039;s economic catastrophe by betting against the housing industry, was already a year old. Just a couple of folks, worried about the nation&amp;#039;s future, deciding to sacrifice themselves nobly for the cause. Ambition is so declasse, you see. But the heart of the evening came from the candidate himself, who has decided at last, now that he has the nomination, and now that he has learned to speak fluent wingnut, and now that he has trod the wild places to which his party has taken itself, to come back to us all as a tribune of the people, a friend of the working man. He has met people less fortunate than he has been, and their cause is his own: For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job ... for grandparents who can&amp;#039;t afford the gas to visit their grandchildren ... for the mom and dad who never thought they&amp;#039;d be on food stamps ... for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month \u2014 to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I&amp;#039;ve met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight. I mean, honestly, where do you go with something like this? Over the course of the campaign, Romney has signed on with policies that will make the lives of every single one of these apocryphal people immeasurably worse. What will be the fate of that &amp;quot;mom and dad&amp;quot; on food stamps if his good buddy Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s budget passes? What will happen to the personal finances of those &amp;quot;grandparents&amp;quot; if the Affordable Health Care plan is repealed and Medicare drifts into voucher hell? How many jobs will that &amp;quot;single mom&amp;quot; \u2014 who is, after all, the woman about whom Romney regularly brags about chucking off government assistance so she&amp;#039;d have to &amp;quot;learn the dignity of work&amp;quot; by taking those two jobs in the first place \u2014 have to take to pay for her children&amp;#039;s health-care?  Let&amp;#039;s take, for example, the workers at Ampad, whose plight came to mind when Romney got some chuckles and applause out of what he used to do for a living: I&amp;#039;d say that you might have heard that I was successful in business. And that rumor is true. But you might not have heard that I became successful by helping start a business that grew from 10 people to hundreds of people. You might not have heard that our business helped start other businesses, like Staples and Sports Authority and a new steel mill and a learning center called Bright Horizons. And I&amp;#039;d tell you that not every business made it and there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson. Yes, he started a business with only &amp;quot;10 people,&amp;quot; and the full backing of one of the country&amp;#039;s most prominent financial consulting firms. Some people, it seems, have sturdier bootstraps than other people do. Anyway, Ampad was one of those businesses that failed to &amp;quot;make it.&amp;quot; Ampad went broke. In 1995, 185 workers got laid off. Many of them probably had to take a second job, thereby not seeing their kids as much as they used to. Some may have ended up on food stamps. Bain Capital, Romney&amp;#039;s firm, made $100 million on the deal. This, apparently, was one of the &amp;quot;bad days&amp;quot; that nonetheless contained a lesson. I&amp;#039;m loathe to imagine what it might have been. The naked lack of shame about the whole speech was the only real story of the night. The notion of Willard Romney, Champion of the Proletariat, is so utterly preposterous that it fairly cried out for coverage. But as I said, the speech was well-crafted and delivered with something approaching actual gusto, so that, apparently, was enough for now. He&amp;#039;s getting better at being shameless. Believe that. In retrospect, it&amp;#039;s hard to believe anyone ever took seriously the notion that Romney was not inevitable. He is, after all, the Inevitable Man. His whole life has been inevitable. It was inevitable that he would go to Harvard and that he would be rich. (Last night, the best he could do for an up-from-the-land tale, if you didn&amp;#039;t count the underdog saga of Bain Capital, was talking about how his father once sold paint out of the trunk of a car. Yes, and Jack Kennedy&amp;#039;s grandfather once made barrels and ran a saloon. What precisely is your point?) It was inevitable that he would one day run for office. His campaign for governor of Massachusetts was inevitable as soon as he shoved the incumbent incompetent, Jane Swift, out of the way, which happened about 30 seconds after he moved back into the state. The last campaign was inevitable and, because it failed, this campaign was inevitable, no matter what he and Ann talked about in one of their several living rooms a little more than a year ago. If he&amp;#039;s good at one thing, Willard Romney is good at being inevitable. Which is the primary peril for the president going forward. This is now a sleek, edgeless machine and, at its heart, is a sleek, edgeless, but altogether genuine, carnivore. At odd moments, Romney sounds very much like Richard Nixon without the latter&amp;#039;s merry carnival of lifetime neuroses. (Romney, in fact, unlike his father, is very much the kind of Republican Nixon once wanted to be \u2014 vicious and wealthy.) For example, at one point in last night&amp;#039;s speech, after he&amp;#039;d assured all those moms and pops on food stamps that he was on their side, he told them of their dark future if the president is re-elected: With Obamacare fully installed, government will come to control half the economy, and we will have effectively ceased to be a free-enterprise society. This president is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He&amp;#039;s asking us to accept that Washington knows best \u2014 and can provide all. We will have effectively ceased to be a free-enterprise society. That passage is pure Nixon, when it is not pure Glenn Beck. (We&amp;#039;re back to &amp;quot;czars&amp;quot; again?) Massachusetts did not &amp;quot;cease to be a free-enterprise society&amp;quot; when he passed his health-care plan there. (He can look at my insurance bill if he&amp;#039;s still unclear about that.) But because he has rolled so powerfully to the nomination, he can say pretty much anything at this point because the power of his campaign now far outweighs the truth of his words. There once again is a rising sense of inevitability about him, and he is most comfortable with that. There is nothing light or casual about what he&amp;#039;s doing. He sees a property worth buying, and he&amp;#039;s in it for the kill. I wandered out of the ballroom and ran into Leah Walczko in the hallway outside. She was wearing a Ron Paul T-shirt, and she was there with some friends who were down the hall in the hotel bar. &amp;quot;He didn&amp;#039;t take any questions, right?&amp;quot; Leah asked me. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think he ever takes any questions.&amp;quot; She was one of the only people in the hall apparently immune to Romney&amp;#039;s inevitability. &amp;quot;Ron Paul gave a speech in Philadelphia and drew 4,500 people in the rain the other day,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;California and Texas are half the delegates, and they haven&amp;#039;t even gone yet.&amp;quot; It is Crazy Uncle Liberty (!) alone who represents whatever genuine spontaneity is left in this dismal campaign, so Leah and I went down to the bar and sat with her friends for a while. Titia O&amp;#039;Keefe and Lisa Gravel were sitting at a corner table and holding up handmade signs on which the number 1,144 had a line drawn through it, indicating that Romney had yet to amass the required number of delegates to be nominated in Tampa this summer. &amp;quot;I, for one, would love a brokered convention,&amp;quot; Gravel said, before getting engaged with a guy in the booth whose evening&amp;#039;s mellow the Paul people had harshed by being there. The guy called Ron Paul a &amp;quot;Communist,&amp;quot; and I began to wonder whether or not the entire Republican party needed to be rounded up and taken somewhere to be taught Political Philosophy 101. Ron Paul a Communist? Lisa Gravel objected. I have discovered something about the Ron Paul campaign, and it holds true for everyone from the candidate himself right down to the last volunteer standing in the rain. There is an absolutely rock-solid five-minute limit on their making sense. You listen to the spiel for five minutes and, just as you find yourself nodding along, you hit the 5:01 mark, and the thing goes completely off the rails. This happened last night when Titia accused Romney of instituting &amp;quot;socialized medicine&amp;quot; in Massachusetts. (And again I say, would you like to see the check I just wrote?) Then Leah informed me that FDR had packed the Supreme Court because he knew Social Security was unconstitutional. Of course, the court-packing bill failed, which is why we still have only nine justices, and it was all about other New Deal legislation, anyway. (Social Security had been up and running for a couple of years before Roosevelt concocted his scheme in 1937.) But give them this: They are remarkably resistant to inevitability, and I don&amp;#039;t envy them the moment later on when Ron Paul sells them out for a good speaking slot because he wants his dim son to be a player for the next 20 years. They are all that&amp;#039;s left of actual politics on the Republican side. Keep hope, I guess, alive. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13814/mitt-romney-big-night-8359848/>