The ever-quipping Eugene McCarthy once noted that a "light rinse" would have sufficed for George Romney's career-puncturing, 1967 "brainwashing." The latter's self-characterization was no doubt a gravely ill-advised pratfall of the tongue, and years later it doubtless still serves as a warning to the speaker's son: Don't ever, ever be spontaneous.
Which makes Mitt's now heavy lift of a $10,000 bet rather bewildering. And it was a slip, right? Surely no paid adviser actually counseled the former governor to wager with such a casualness -- live, on stage, and over nothing but a brief passage (or not) in an unread book -- roughly one-fifth of an average Iowa family's annual income. Poor form for a multimillionaire pol, to say the least.
Yet I hope that that -- a momentary lapse of populist judgment -- isn't what dooms Mitt Romney's political career.
To watch it collapse because of his inability, or unwillingness, to venture beyond the cowardly, witlessly unrelenting Republican orthodoxy of lower taxes, less regulation, then even lower taxes and even less regulation, would be enchanting. But to watch Mitt go down because of some ephemeral, Father Georgelike stupidity would be a downright cheat.