My feelings exactly:
We are now in for six months of Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, and with the polls showing the race to be very close, you could argue that it is going to be really exciting. Except for the fact that it’s Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama.
--Gail Collins
It's becoming evident that it is easier to amass a quarter-billion dollars of personal wealth than we thought. In one manifestation or another, Mitt Romney has been running for the White House for about two decades now, and throughout those 20 years he has essentially worked part-time as a plant-closing, LBO-ing, company-slicing, pluto-corporacrat of Montgomery Burns charm. He is a man of numbers--coldly calculated and ruthlessly applied--whose impersonal disposition has yielded him the Sultan of Brunei's riches. All along, Romney really wanted to be president of the United States, but he wanted to be a fabulously well-off president of the United States, so first he got himself a CEO and governor as a father, and then his tickets to Harvard grad schools punched. The rest, as they say, was history. Pretty easy, huh?
Yet throughout all that time and all that training and planning and plotting for the one high office he really desired, Mitt Romney never learned, for instance, how to remember to mention at a news conference that he supports lower interest rates on student loans. How could he forget to comment on the hottest topic of the day? Because the meat of the topic means nothing to him--the White House is just another acquisition; he's so far removed from the everyday worries and quotidian scramble of life, it doesn't take much for Mitt to see that the problems of a few million students don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Someday we'll understand that. For now, here's to Mitt glaring at us, kid.