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" Romney&amp;#039;s campaign has intensely tried to make him appear not to be a fake, but at least it&amp;#039;s been a professional one. CLIVE, IOWA \u2014 Competitive Edge is a huge warehouse along the main commercial drag here. Inside, it is something of a classic big-box mausoleum with huge shelving units lining wide aisles. The company makes promotional gewgaws for various corporate outings and entertainment conglomerates. There are acres and acres inside the place chock-full of items that are obsolete 10 minutes after the event is over, or 15 minutes after you pull out of the parking lot. There is a vast field of plastic gumball machines bearing the logo of the American Lung Association. There are pens for a hot-sauce company in North Carolina, and T-shirts for the Iowa Day Wellness Challenge and for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. There are thousands of odd-looking, collapsible water bottles destined for sale at the Memphis Zoo and at The Hermitage, the Tennessee home of President Andrew Jackson. And this is where they brought Willard Romney last night, into a giant shipping facility for crap that is either handed out gratis at the company picnic, or sold at a ridiculous mark-up at the gift shop. (And, it was later learned, a company that sells mostly crap that is made by cheap-labor working jobs that were outsourced to China, a country that Willard insists he will blackjack nobly on behalf of American workers.) (In any event, I thought those collapsible water bottles might be something of an advance problem for the Romney campaign. I think they were living quite dangerously bringing their particular candidate into a vast building containing piles of things that looked very much like douchebags.) Willard came a&amp;#039;bouncing in to the now-familiar strains of the Kid Rock anthem that he assumes makes him look as though he is a genu-wine American shit-kicker. He introduced his handsome sons, and he told a marginal skeevy story about he was scoping out his future wife when he was in fourth grade and she was in the second. (This story has become more elaborate, and increasingly weird, in the telling over the past couple of months.) And he launched into his stump speech in a jittery, rather shattered manner, like a man who has been working too hard to win a contest in which he never expected to have to compete. Say what you will about him \u2014 and I have said plenty, and intend to say much, much more \u2014 but Romney is running the only campaign here that remotely resembles an actual presidential campaign. There is an honest-to-god motorcade, with buses. The official signs are distributed to the people at the rallies well in advance of the candidate&amp;#039;s appearance. It is slick and efficient and it hits all its marks right on time. All the rest of the candidates seem to be running something like... outings.  And the candidate himself is rising to the level of his organization. Ever since he determined that The Help should select him to be their leader, Willard has been a fake. It&amp;#039;s what did him in back in 2008. Even his fellow Republicans got furious at what an obvious phony the man is. This campaign has been nothing if not an intense effort to make him appear not to be so transparently a fake. In this, the Romney campaign has been helped immeasurably by the fact that the rest of the field has spent the year giving authenticity a bad name. The harder they all work to become the &amp;quot;true conservative&amp;quot; in the race, the more ridiculous they look, and the less likely people are to notice that Willard is spending all his time, and bozillions of his own and somebody else&amp;#039;s \u2014 dollars, to remodel himself as the conservative he tried so hard not to be in Massachusetts. And that is not even to mention the lovely way he skates through his recitation now in every speech of some obscure lyrics from &amp;quot;America the Beautiful&amp;quot; while his big-money backers are drowning poor Newt Gingrich in advertising sewage. He&amp;#039;s becoming quite the effective charlatan, Willard is. He&amp;#039;s more than halfway there. His stump speech is honed to a fine edge. He makes what sounds like a plausible case to be concerned with the plight of the disintegrating middle class. &amp;quot;You know what that eight-percent unemployment means?&amp;quot; he asked last night. &amp;quot;It means depression. It means trouble in marriage. Being out of work is tough.&amp;quot; (Okay, ask it: How the hell would you know? If I want to know how tough it is to be out of work, I&amp;#039;ll ask the people from that company in Indiana that Bain Capital threw out of their jobs.) In the middle of his presentation, Willard was interrupted by a gaggle of Occupy protesters hollering, &amp;quot;Stop the war!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Romney is the one percent!&amp;quot; Somebody else in the crowd yelled back, &amp;quot;Get a job!&amp;quot; and there was a big cheer. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t it great to live in a country where we can all dissent,&amp;quot; Willard crowed. &amp;quot;I hope when President Obama comes back here, we can make our voices heard, too.&amp;quot; Outside, Lesley Davis, an unemployed carpenter from Marshalltown, dressed nattily in a bowler hat, pajama bottoms, and a red-flannel bathrobe, talked about getting busted earlier yesterday morning, and why he showed up in Clive last night. &amp;quot;I think the Republicans and the Democrats have to work together for the betterment of the middle class,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;and to propose some seriously stringent regulations so that we don&amp;#039;t have banks that are too big to fail.&amp;quot; Back in the big warehouse, Willard was winding into the conclusion of his stump speech, the part where he talks about his campaign as a struggle for the soul of America, and this from a guy who, only 20 minutes earlier, was chaffing Barack Obama for the latter&amp;#039;s allegedly messianic campaign in 2008. He does his bit with the &amp;quot;Oh, beautiful for patriot&amp;#039;s dream&amp;quot; lyric from what he calls &amp;quot;that national hymn,&amp;quot; and the cloying artificiality of the sentiment fairly clogged the air. And you realized that, after a long march, Willard Romney had found his sweet spot \u2014 in a sprawling warehouse of foreign-made flotsam marked with corporate logos, and comfortable as a man in velvet slippers deep in the heart of a empire of ephemera. --CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM IOWA, AND STAY TUNED ALL NIGHT LONG &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12243/mitt-romney-iowa-caucus-day-6631814/>